After making it big, an entrepreneur revs up new businesses

Bea Maurer's problems were once like anyone else's: covering the monthly mortgage, saving for retirement, paying for her children's college tuition. She ran Bea Maurer Inc., a company she founded in Fairfax that made collapsible shelters for the Defense Department.

The last four years have introduced a new set of problems, most of them centered on the $25 million that Maurer pocketed, after taxes, when she sold her company for $80 million in 2005. These days, she worries about the $10 million she has invested in certificates of deposit. Or about scheduling first-class flights to her Florida residences.

She readily agrees that these are much better problems to have. But there are also the endless requests from people seeking donations and incessant pitches from investment advisers. She received dozens of phone calls from people asking her to back their "can't miss" business ventures. Some asked for loans; a few were never paid back.

"It was awful. I reached a point where I had to be downright rude," Maurer said.

I am fascinated with what successful entrepreneurs do with their millions and how it changes their lives. And Maurer, 68, appears to be a talented entrepreneur whose success has earned her respect in the business community. I asked her to take me back to the moment when she went from salaried businesswoman to deca-millionaire.

"You just sit there and look and say, 'God, that's a lot of zeroes,' " she said, recalling the Friday afternoon in March 2005 when a New York investment group wired $80 million into an account she set up at a Virginia bank. More than a third of that sum was hers. "It's sort of like, 'Wow, I can do anything I want now.' "

One of the first things she did was divorce her husband, whom she still sees frequently and likes. She just didn't want to stay married.

Aside from fielding requests for money, the former Girl Scout leader and mother of two spent her first months as a millionaire going to work at the company she started back in 1985. She didn't know what else to do.

Maurer had started as a $3.10-an-hour seamstress at Appalachian Outfitters, a store in Oakton, and eventually bought the sewing end of the business for $14,000, borrowing $4,000 against her husband's life insurance. She saw a growing niche for backpacks, computer bags and duffel bags, and she eventually obtained patents for camouflaged military curtains and tents. After two decades of hard work, sometimes shlepping computer bags in the back of her Volkswagen Quantum station wagon, she sold the company. By then, Bea Maurer Inc. grossed more than $50 million a year and employed 120 people.

Six months after the sale, she decided to have fun.

"For the next two to three years, I became the self-defined global explorer for the company, introducing our company to other countries," she said. "I went to Turkey, Japan, Australia and South America -- always first class and mostly on my own nickel."

Maurer said the visits also delivered a new reward that comes with wealth: meeting interesting, smart people.