Excerpt from the article: At the Top of Their Game by Laurie Wink.
Women executives excel at juggling career and family responsibilities.
Karen Barnett, the CEO, president and owner of Valley Screen Process Co. in Mishawaka, also feels strongly about mentoring. “It's really all about women helping other women,” Barnett says. “We have an obligation to do that.”
She started working in high school for her family's vinyl graphics screen printing company, started by her father, Jerry Bauer, in South Bend in 1967. The company's largest customers were owners of recreational vehicles, and Valley Screen expanded along with the exploding RV industry.
Barnett married in 1983 and received a business degree from Indiana University South Bend in 1984. She took over customer sales and service for Valley Screen. At the time, she recalls, women were divided into those who stayed home to raise children and those who had careers. She was doing both and found it critically important to have women role models who were doing the same.
Barnett raised two boys and was able to arrange her work schedule around her kids' activities. Both sons now work for the family business, as does her brother Kevin Bauer. Following her father's death in 2007, Barnett bought the business at the beginning of the recession and shouldered responsibility for a company that depended almost exclusively on the RV industry during a time when people stopped making discretionary purchases.
“We ended up laying off about half of the employees,” Barnett says. “We really tried to keep as many employees as we could because we knew, if we were going to make it, we had to keep the staff intact. We had rotating layoffs and we all worked together to get through it.”
Today, Valley Screen has 60 employees. In addition to producing vinyl graphics for the RV and marine industries, the company is capitalizing on the growing market for removable vehicle wraps, a popular business promotion tool that Barnett calls “rolling billboards.” She also diversified the business by creating two new divisions. Olee Creative supplies architectural graphics, such as wall murals, custom artwork, window etchings and signage. Olee Kids is a smaller division focusing on kids' decor. The unique brand name is a tribute to Barnett's father, who was known for his jokes about fictional Norwegians Olee and Sven.
Barnett's business turnaround story is inspiring to budding women entrepreneurs. She shares lessons learned as an instructor and mentor for the Women's Entrepreneurship Initiative (WEI), a program she helped start at Saint Mary's College in 2010. WEI offers education, business training and professional mentoring to women who want to launch their own businesses.
“They (women) like to hear my story,” Barnett says. “I talk about how the recession impacted the business. I've been in the trenches and had some hard times but have come out on the other side.”
Barnett encourages women entrepreneurs to stretch beyond their comfort zones. “Do something for the first time that you're really uncomfortable doing,” she says. “The next time you do it, your comfort zone will be bigger. You'll become comfortable being uncomfortable.”
