Cone dystrophy

Apparently nothing could stop Victoria R. Bondoc from starting--and succeeding at--a business.

Bondoc was 26 when, in 1986, using $1,500 in personal savings, she founded Gemini Industries, Inc. Today her company, a full-service information systems and facilities management firm based in Burlington, Mass., employs 110 people and operates out of six offices in Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, and the Philippines. Nearly 95 percent of the company's work is in the form of government contracts, many with branches of the military. Revenues for 1994 are expected to reach $5 million.

Bondoc, the daughter of Philippine immigrants, is legally blind. When she reads, the page nearly touches her face. But she has never let her lifelong vision impairment--called cone dystrophy--deter her. When she went job hunting after earning degrees in mathematics and computer science from MIT and Boston University, respectively, she didn't mention her disability to potential employers. She worked for two major consulting firms; both assigned her to military projects.

Put off by the bureaucracy inherent in huge companies and frustrated by the difficulty of commuting several hours a day by public transportation--her poor eyesight makes driving impossible--Bondoc decided to start her own company.

Through the network of contacts she had established at the consulting firms, she won her first contract--setting up a computer system to help the Navy evaluate proposals it received from different types of companies. "It was a very small job," Bondoc says. But she impressed her client by offering to set up an office near its site in Maine for six months to provide the necessary support. "A bigger company probably wouldn't have been willing to do that," she says.

At first, Bondoc's potential military customers were reluctant to contract with a firm headed by a young woman who had never been in the military. "What they would typically do," she recalls, "is say, 'Why don't you team up with this big company, in whom we have a lot of confidence?' So they would give us a small part of a larger job." As Gemini developed a success record, customers gave it a bigger slice of the pie.

Bondoc met her biggest challenge in 1991 when a major contract was awarded to a competing firm. She heard rumors that the client's senior staff preferred not to deal with a company headed by an outsider--a minority woman with a physical handicap and no military background. Morale at Gemini plummeted. Several key staff members left to join other firms. Annual revenues fell 33 percent in 1992.

Bondoc confronted the crisis by meeting intensively with her management team and with customers to pinpoint what led Gemini both to its successes and to its present difficulties. The key to Gemini's eventual revitalization, she found, was to capitalize on--not minimize--the qualities that set her apart. "Ultimately," she says, "the value of what our organization brings to customers stems from the fact that I never was an insider." To recast Gemini's image, Bondoc began to market her company as the "expert beginner."

"The strength of the 'expert beginner' is that we're not predisposed to the traditional ways of solving problems. We come into the situation with a fresh perspective," says Bondoc.

The company has since won contracts with the Department of Transportation, the Air Force, Unisys Corp., Digital Equipment Corp., and even a promoter staging performances by Prince.

Earlier in 1994, Gemini was named a state honoree in the Blue Chip Enterprise Initiative. The program, sponsored by Nation's Business, the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Co., and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, recognizes businesses that have overcome adversity.

Gemini emphasizes its ability to design technology to meet a customer's distinct needs. That's what it did at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, where the staff was responsible for building major command-and-control systems. There, Bondoc says, Gemini developed a program "to keep track of their ongoing tasks--who was developing software, who was reviewing data, whether tasks were being accomplished on time, and so forth."

In a world characterized by rapidly developing technology, Bondoc believes the success of an organization will be determined by its attitude toward change. Gemini, she says, helps its clients "attempt to maximize their ability to initiate change, adapt to change, use change to their advantage, and work within the continuing chaos that characterizes the world."

COPYRIGHT 1995 U.S. Chamber of Commerce
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