Patricia Green | 'Failure Was Not an Option'

Patricia Green knew at age 15 that she had a knack for styling hair. She braided her friends' locks into neat rows and glued in their weaves like a pro. At the same time Green was finishing Oxon Hill High School, she also completed cosmetology school.

Salon work paid good money, and Green continued to do hair through the 1980s. Styling straight silky dos, finger waves, soft curls and everything in between enabled her to study business management at the University of Maryland and later to pursue an MBA at Strayer University.

Upon graduation, she took jobs that used her degree, doing payroll and human resources training. But corporate work bored Green, she says, and she eventually took a pay cut to return to her first love. In 1997, she began teaching at a beauty school. Over the next six years she was promoted to registrar, then financial aid coordinator and later education director. She also kept a few clients on the side -- women who told Green they didn't trust anyone else to do their hair.

With her MBA and hands-on experience, Green thought she could operate her own beauty school. In early 2003, she found a location in Alexandria, where she saw little competition.

She purchased teaching materials and used her savings and credit cards to buy hair dryers, shampoo bowls and curlers. Green had a name for the school, Spectrum Beauty Academy, but she didn't have enough money to get the doors open.

"I realized that I needed a lot more capital," Green recalled. "I was willing to do whatever at the time. Failure was not an option."

Deep in debt, trying to escape credit cards' high interest rates, she began looking for loans online. That's where she found the Ethiopian Community Development Council's Enterprise Development Group microloan program. She qualified for a five-year, $25,000 loan, which she used to purchase office equipment, stylist stations and supplies for applying facials -- and to pay off her credit card debt. The EDG loan's interest rate was 9 percent, several points lower than Green's credit cards.

The loan application process was simple, she said. They pulled her credit report, discussed her plans for the beauty school and required her to put up some of the equipment she purchased as collateral. And after Spectrum opened for business in 2003, EDG stayed involved, Green said. Staffers told her about an accounting workshop, where she learned more about how to manage the school's books.

Annual enrollment at the beauty academy has reached about 100, and Green employs eight part- and full-time instructors.

"It was a lifelong dream finally realized," she said on recent morning while passing through the beauty academy's lilac and lime-green hallways. Through one door an instructor was visible, explaining the hair dye color scale. "The number one is the darkest color. It signifies the intensity," she told a half-dozen students in smocks.

Green closed the classroom door and said she is thinking of opening a second location.

Until last year, she said, she continued to style a few of her old clients' hair. It was hard to let go, but Green has referred them to her former students.