A Chance To Get Into The Room

Enlightened designs software programs, hosts Web sites and creates management systems for such clients as the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs, as well as Fannie Mae and AOL. This year, Enlightened projects revenue of about $4 million. By the end of next year, Enlightened hopes to reach $8 million in sales and double its workforce, to 120.

The company has attracted notice. In 2003, Entrepreneur magazine named Enlightened one of the country's "best and brightest" companies. A year later, Inc. magazine ranked it among the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the country -- No. 264 -- based on its 550 percent revenue growth from 1999 to 2003. Enlightened also has one of the best credit rating and financial strength scores of small companies nationwide, according to Dun & Bradstreet, an independent financial analysis firm.

With such success, why so much fretting about image?

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High Expectations

To Ford, perceptions are powerful.

Take what happened when former Enlightened accountant Frank Wentink was hired last year. His friends told him that working for a black firm would not be so hard. Set-aside programs, they said, would make his workload easier. But Wentink, who is white, soon found that he was working through the weekends and pulling all-nighters and that Ford and his senior managers were always in the office "working their tails off," he said.

Such false assumptions drive Ford, the firm's big thinker who is responsible for long-range planning. A muscular 5-foot-11 and 205 pounds, Ford thunders into a room like a politician, laughing, shaking hands, demanding eye contact. With employees, he is often like a jovial, joke-cracking big brother. But when problems surface or deadlines approach, employees say, the big brother turns into a stern, no-excuses businessman.

Ford doubts that executives at BearingPoint Inc. or Perot Systems Corp., much larger competitors, have his kind of anxiety. They never have to worry about race being a factor in winning major contracts, he says.

Some of Ford's worries about image can be traced to a 2003 meeting between Enlightened's partners and a black procurement officer for a federal agency whose contract the company had just won. [Ford declined to identify the woman or her employer because the agency remains a client.]

The procurement officer told Ford that she had noticed the startled reaction of her colleagues, most of whom were white, when Enlightened's all-black team had entered the conference room to pitch its proposal. She said Enlightened needed to "lighten up" -- hire some white staff members -- to succeed in this town. According to federal personnel statistics, nearly 70 percent of federal contracting officers are white.

Ford was offended, but he did not let it show. He told the procurement officer that he understood she was trying to be helpful. But her comments suggested that no one would take a black-owned firm seriously. And he didn't want to believe that. But her advice began to eat away at him. He started looking to hire white men, white women, anyone who would signal that his company was diverse -- and thereby more desirable to clients.

He kept thinking back to his early years in the business world, after he had attended night classes at GWU to get his master's degree in information systems, landed a job with MCI Inc.'s internal consulting division, did well and ran into what he thinks was a racial ceiling. His bosses said he simply needed more patience. They also suggested something else.