Celeste Volz Ford
President and CEO, Stellar Solutions, Inc.

Born 1956 in Washington, DC.

Celeste Volz Ford is president and CEO of Stellar Solutions, Inc., located in Palo Alto, California. Stellar Solutions is a professional systems engineering company that Ms. Ford established in 1995 to provide engineering products and services for critical government and commercial aerospace-related programs.

As “the Mom who is a rocket scientist,” Ms. Ford traveled unchartered territory by establishing an aerospace company to serve national and international clients through operations in California, Colorado, Washington, DC, and more recently overseas through Stellar Solutions Aerospace Ltd., the company’s UK-based international arm.

Ms. Ford’s corporate benefits strategy is an award-winning program that combines employee-choice with charitable donations on behalf of employees through the Stellar Solutions Foundation. Stellar Ventures, an investment incubator for employees’ entrepreneurial ideas, rounds out the Stellar family of enterprises, all contributing to a “dream job” for the firm, its founder, and its employees.

Celeste Ford and Stellar Solutions together exemplify the concept that women can build different companies to achieve different goals.

Elizabeth Ghaffari: Why did you choose the education that you did?

Celeste Volz Ford: I went to a high school, Cherry Creek, in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, which was known for being very good in math and science. Anyone who went to that high school excelled in those subjects. I embraced it, because the expectation in those days was that girls were not inclined to have an interest in math or science. I remember being told that if I was good at math and science, I should be an engineer. I’d never been exposed to engineering. Both my parents had law degrees, and my father was an FBI agent. The more I asked engineers about what they did, the less I understood.

Then I began looking at college brochures, and aerospace engineering caught my eye. I thought, this is perfect—something new and different. I wanted to pursue something I hadn’t learned before—something fun and interesting. I didn’t want to take the same old classes in college that I’d taken in high school. Aerospace engineering sounded perfect. My choice was much more practical than inspirational.

I went to Notre Dame because it was a great undergraduate institution—in engineering, the undergraduate courses were taught by full professors, not just grad-student instructors.

Ghaffari: What was your first job after graduation?

Ford: My graduating class in aerospace engineering had seven students—six men and me. Throughout the 1970s, companies had been laying off engineers. By the end of the decade, they hadn’t hired at a pace to offset retirements. I interviewed with everyone who came to campus. All seven of us were wined and dined, coast-to-coast, because there was a critical need for engineers at that point in time.

My first job was with Communications Satellite Corporation [COMSAT] in Palo Alto, California, where they were monitoring an international telecommunications satellite built by Ford Aerospace. Usually, you would need a senior person in this position because it’s a systems engineering job which draws on a lot of experience. But a company vice-president back East had seen my résumé and told the people on the West Coast to give me a try. It was a bit of an experiment on their part, but it worked out great for all of us.

COMSAT was hired by INTELSAT to ensure that the satellite, INTELSAT 5, would work as designed. My area was guidance and control. I followed the satellite all around the globe. Testing was done in Germany, integration in California, launch in Florida, and mission control in Washington, DC. Hardware was built and assembled at the home base in Palo Alto. The satellite was either being tested, launched, or flown in other locations, so you followed the box as it moved along in the process. There were a lot of business trips.

Ghaffari: Did you need to get advanced training or education?

Ford: After building and launching a couple of INTELSAT satellites, I decided I wanted to see what else was out there. Defense sounded like it would be the next logical step in my career. What drew me to the defense sector and Aerospace Corporation was that it was high tech. The new, cutting-edge technologies were being developed in the defense sector behind the black curtain. Aerospace Corporation supported the Air Force in its satellite programs. I worked in the field office in Northern California—the Onizuka Air Force Satellite Test Center, the operations center, known as the Blue Cube.

While I was with COMSAT, I earned my master’s degree at Stanford. In some of my interviews, especially at Aerospace Corporation, a master’s degree was a pre-requisite for employment. I had always really wanted to go to Stanford and had always been interested in Stanford as a place for a master’s degree.

Ghaffari: This sounds like a great way to start a career.

Ford: I was very lucky to have a great first job. Comparing notes with colleagues, I realize that most engineers have a terrible first job. As a result, we lose a great deal of potential engineering talent. I had the good fortune of an engaging first job, where I got to see a satellite program from beginning to end, from design to build to launch. I was a part of the entire life cycle in a brief two-year time frame. It was a crash course. Very exciting and very fun work.

Ghaffari: Did you ever think of leaving aerospace?

Ford: No, I had great, fun jobs. In the satellite business, you can see the fruits of your labor, like fireworks on launch day. All the projects were fun, interesting, and different. That’s why I stayed in the industry.

Ghaffari: Did you take anything away from those experiences that shape how you run your own company?

Ford: I had seen some things at my earlier companies that really worked well, like getting people together and doing strategic planning—planning your future together—those were the good things that I copied. We just held our sixteenth annual business planning meeting at Stellar Solutions, which is our strategic planning session. It’s a great way of planning your future together.

There also were other things in engineering companies that just didn’t work, and the bigger the company, the worse it was. There was a lot of bureaucracy. Some things just didn’t make sense to me. Money was spent on things people didn’t care about. Reports just sat on shelves. Some people did the same thing over and over again. Or there was the syndrome where 20 percent of the people did 80 percent of the work. I just wanted none of that. That was another reason I started my own company.

Ghaffari: How did your first jobs frame the work you did later?

Ford: My early aerospace jobs provided me with the building blocks to understand what it takes to get a satellite launched. And it gave me exposure to all of the sectors where this happens: commercial, international, defense, and intelligence. The defense and intelligence work, at that time, also entailed working on the space shuttle, so I was very involved with NASA. Between those first two jobs, I was exposed to all the critical sectors associated with aerospace, in addition to all of the nuts and bolts of how to build and launch a satellite.

Ghaffari: How did you start your business? And how did it evolve and grow?

Ford: I was just thirty-nine years old, with three young kids, when I started Stellar Solutions. In the back of my mind, I always knew that I wanted to start my own business some day. After working at COMSAT and Aerospace Corporation, that desire became more focused. I was introduced to the founder of Scitor Corporation, Roger Meade, by an Air Force Colonel, Jim Church, who was a mentor of mine and my Air Force boss while I was working at the Aerospace Corporation. Jim was the client counterpart to my work and was in charge of the Northern California satellite operations. I told Jim that someday I wanted to start my own business, and he said, “Let me introduce you to someone who just started a business.” He introduced me to Roger.

Roger invited me to join Scitor by saying, “You could start your own business within my company.” I didn’t really know anything about business—just engineering. Scitor was more of a computer aerospace company, and they asked me to start a division that did launches, operations, and the building of satellites. I basically got to start a business within a business. At Scitor, I learned about contracts, how to close, how to sell—all of things I needed to learn about the non-engineering side of the business.

When Roger Meade and Gene Priestman started Scitor in 1979, they envisioned “a place where exceptional people could make a difference.” Scitor ended up being the third stepping stone for me and my career. All three jobs were important foundations for me to eventually start my own firm. I didn’t know it at the time. It just turned out that they were each very important stepping stones in my career.

Ghaffari: What did you think you could do differently on your own?

Ford: The main thing I wanted to do, because of my career experience, was to be operating in each of the different aerospace sectors. With that in mind, we chose the name Stellar Solutions to reflect the five points of the star: commercial, international, civil—NASA, defense—Air Force, Army, etc., and intelligence—NRO, NSA, etc. Our value proposition was that we could cross the boundaries. If you’re in the commercial world, like INTELSAT, you have no clue what’s going on in the Air Force. If you’re in the Air Force, you have no idea what’s happening inside NASA. We wanted to be the people who could bring something extra to the project because we crossed those boundaries. The same thing happened with the international work as well—we got big enough to do the same thing on a global scale.

Ghaffari: So you saw some unmet needs you could step in and fill?

Ford: I started with a clean slate. I knew the aerospace industry, so I went around and met with people who had critical needs that I thought I could solve. Our first contract was for three months. My first client was a company that was doing commercial imaging from space, up until then strictly a government operation. Because I’d been in the space business, I knew what it took to get the satellites out the door. That was identifying the customer’s critical need. That’s what we still do every year when we do our strategic planning and every day as we work.

That initial contract was followed by the next contract and the next one, slowly building the business around people with whom I had had mutual positive personal experiences. When we added more people, we made sure their skills were tailored to the programs and needs of the customers that were coming on board.

Ghaffari: Did you know from the start that Stellar would be a success?

Ford: I laugh because I started the company thinking, failure is not an option—I’ve been in this business, I know what’s needed, I know how to do it. It just never occurred to me that I would not be successful.

Years later, I went to a mini-MBA course at Stanford where I saw statistics about the high failure rate of new businesses, and I thought, it’s a good thing I didn’t know that before I started—I might not have done it.

I really felt I knew what was important. Some of the people who start businesses don’t understand the concept of knowing what your customer wants, and how essential that is to the core of your business. I hosted a group of MBA students from Stanford who wanted to meet an entrepreneur. They asked, “What did you do about the medical plan or the marketing plan? What was the most important thing in your success?”

I told them, “There’s only one thing: a customer. Does someone want what you have? If the answer is yes, then you have a successful business.” The minute I found someone who said they would hire me to do X, I had a business. It had nothing to do with the medical plan or the infrastructure or the technology I would use. Once you have identified your first customer, you have accomplished the most critical step in starting a business.

Ghaffari: What were some early key decisions?

Ford: I think a key part of our success came right at the beginning when we came up with the concept that our strategic plan, which ends up being our tactical plan, actually flows down to each and every individual’s bonus plan. Everyone at Stellar Solutions is aligned around the importance of satisfying the customer’s critical needs and, at the same time, working at their dream job.

We get everybody together for the strategic planning session every year. Every single employee is in charge of his/her own future and their customer’s future, doing the right thing and giving input into that. Your bonus plan is paid around the goals. Those goals are aligned to your customer’s critical needs. We survey our customers, we survey our employees. We ask if you are serving customer critical needs. We ask if you are in your dream job or working towards it. It gets reinforced in everything we do. We believe we all are focused on the important stuff.

Another key factor was that I never wanted to lose the small-company feel, even as we got bigger. There are one hundred thirty-three total employees working full time for the company, plus another sixty “Stellar Advisors” who work part-time for the company. They may be retired or parents who want or need to work part-time. It’s pretty much evenly split among California, Colorado, and the DC area. We grow only if it makes sense based on our strategic planning process, which addresses the right size and right scope of our support to current customers and innovation—new projects, new people.

Positive results lead to growth and a larger company. We have monthly “touches” with employees and customers—we always maintain that small-company feel with face-to-face meetings between our leaders and employees and customers every month, at a minimum.

Ghaffari: I understand Stellar’s benefit strategy is considered one of the most innovative in the business.

Ford: I am always talking about our benefits package. Medical plan costs have gone through the roof. Having flexible benefit plans is very important to be responsive to the unique needs of each employee’s family and to support all of our employees in the best possible way. Every employee has medical, disability, life insurance, maternity/paternity leave, tuition reimbursement, and retirement contributions. Employees are able to utilize up to a total of six weeks of vacation, holiday, sick, or personal days off as they choose, consistent with customer needs and requirements. They also are encouraged to spend a week each year to attend training or conferences.

Stellar’s total compensation program is best-in-class—it’s flexible. We maximize compensation and minimize taxes. When job candidates bring our offers to their financial planning consultants, we receive positive feedback, such as, “This is unique and flexible” and “Where can I get a job like this?” Stellar puts 25 percent of base salary into a tax-deferred benefits package. Employees can use it for things like medical cost reimbursements on a pre-tax basis, or for other items on a taxable basis. The key is that they get to choose—our benefits are flexible and not “one size fits all.” The way we do benefits at Stellar is stellar.

Another key element is the Stellar Solutions Foundation, which we established in 1998. As soon as we were cash flow positive, I knew I wanted to create a foundation. Even though I’d like to believe that our employees get up every day and think about nothing but Stellar Solutions and our customers, I knew that people have a lot of other things on their minds. I wanted to support that.

We funded the Foundation from the beginning by donating 10 percent of the profits of Stellar Solutions. We’ve adjusted it every year in order to provide a charitable donation of at least $1,000 per employee, but we also make additional discretionary donations in response to special needs, like a hurricane or a walk for the spouse with cancer. Special donations are made on a case-by-case basis.

Ghaffari: Do you think these help you retain good employees?

Ford: Yes. Employees are free to donate to any qualified charitable organization. There is one person who administers the Foundation, writing the checks, making sure the employee gets the credit for their contribution, and our CFO approves the donation to be sure the charity is IRS-qualified. The Foundation was established early on so that we could give back to the community and support other aspects of our employees’ lives and interests. I wanted to be a part of the communities in which we worked, and be a good corporate citizen wherever we worked. When I did this in 1998, it was unusual, but today we’re seeing more companies do the same thing.

Ghaffari: What was your motivation in creating Stellar Ventures?

Ford: Stellar Ventures was launched in 2000 as a venture investment enterprise and incubator to foster early-stage technology development and market applications. David Wensley was CEO and Kevin E. Ford was CFO. We founded Stellar Ventures during the big dot-com boom. Our company had stellar engineers that competitor start-ups wanted to hire, with stock options and promises of becoming rich and famous.

Again, because we wanted to stay small, stock options were not in our model. We didn’t want to borrow a lot of money and get big. We decided to do something so our employees could have that equity-sharing experience, but not have to leave our company to get it. We co-invested in some ventures and funded others, so our engineers could feel they were involved in emerging businesses through this fund of funds. Of course, the bust came after the boom. It wasn’t like everyone got rich and retired. But Stellar Ventures is something that differentiated Stellar—you see what needs to be done, so you do the right thing.

That’s also how we founded QuakeFinder—our humanitarian R&D division involved in research for early warning of earthquakes. QuakeFinder is headed by Tom Bleier, one of our Stellar Solutions engineers who was working on an intelligence sector project at the time, but told us that his “dream job” was this earthquake research. He developed a sensor and demonstrated it at his children’s high school. As time went on, it looked more promising. Tom became the lead and took over the project. Early on, we built up a quake signaling network throughout California, and now we have sensors deployed in Peru, Taiwan, Chile, Greece, and Turkey.

Finally, Stellar Solutions Aerospace Ltd. [SSAL], founded in 2004, is our sister company in London that serves non-US customers with non-US employees and consultants. Our two companies sub-contract to each other, as needed, across the boundaries. SSAL has about a dozen engineers that come and go on projects as needed.

Ghaffari: Does SSAL conduct business mostly in Europe?

Ford: The work of SSAL includes any non-US location: Latin America, Asia, pretty much the world over. Our first big contract was a NASA/DOE project, working for the people who were providing the sensors used to discover the origins of dark matter in the universe. They were all located in Pisa, Italy, where Galileo studied. They know a thing or two about astrophysics. It required us to have people on site in Italy to help get that project out the door.

In the early days, we did the international work from within our domestic commercial group. Then, after getting on airplanes, talking to customers in Europe and other locations, we realized that it’s not the same—we were not seeing customers frequently enough. After a while, we realized that we did not understand their critical needs. The clients wanted what we had to offer, but they also wanted local talent and local responsiveness. The vice president of our commercial group, Melissa Farrell, went overseas, full time, to head the international company. She spent five years building SSAL and just recently came back to run our commercial group again. We found a UK citizen to succeed her as head of our London office. Rainer Koll is CEO of SSAL and is based in the UK. He’s a perfect fit for that position—he also brings contacts and interesting work in the aircraft field, in addition to the aerospace field.

Ghaffari: Do you ever want to quit and do something else? What keeps you going?

Ford: Having high impact, stellar customers, and stellar employees keeps me going. I have never wanted to quit. The only thing that keeps me up at night revolves around doing a better job for our customers and our employees.

Ghaffari: Have you ever thought about pursuing external investment or taking the company public?

Ford: We self-funded Stellar Solutions from the beginning. That was hard. You do it in stair-steps, so it’s not quite as difficult as a product-based company where you have to buy a lot of equipment on the front end. But, it’s still difficult because there’s always a time lag between paying people and getting paid by the client. But, we grew in a logical fashion—a contract here, a person there.

Today, our business is more government than commercial. Our defense and intelligence work represents more than half of the company just because there are more dollars for those projects. The company has grown 10 percent annually—a rate that continues today. Some years are higher. It’s been slow, steady growth over time. The two visions—solving critical needs and crossing boundaries—have worked very well in hard times.

When commercial and telecom work gets cut, we turn to the defense sector. When defense gets cut, we turn to commercial work. There’s a built-in diversity. Since we are, by definition, focused on critical needs, the work we do is important. It’s not as if our work can easily be cut in the first place. We don’t just write documents that nobody reads—that just sit on shelves or could easily be cut from contracts. We leave that work for others. That might be revenue, but it’s revenue we don’t want.

Ghaffari: Is there anything else uniquely different about your business that contributes to your impressive annual growth?

Ford: We do not have any dedicated marketing or sales function in the company. I never wanted to be that way. I never wanted to grow that way. We want to grow around critical needs identified by our technical engineers working closely with our customers.

Ghaffari: How do you accomplish that?

Ford: Our engineers in the field are constantly on the lookout to identify new critical needs. We have an inclusive strategic planning process—every year, each and every employee identifies his/her client’s critical needs, as well as the cool, neat new programs that they think we should be working on. Those identified critical needs and new projects are discussed and included as sector goals and targets on an annual basis. There’s a leader for each sector, and they basically facilitate the strategic conversation, as well as tactical goals to lead the team in a collaborative direction toward the desired results. The leads are responsible for the business development of their sector. They also directly work on contracts on a part-time basis. They are both good leaders and good engineers.

Ghaffari: How did you work through or around the inevitable challenges you faced?

Ford: We get through every challenge by removing the obstacles one step at a time and never losing track of the finish line and where we want to be when we are done. For me, I think that’s the most important role a leader can perform. Never give up on anything that is truly important. Be persistent and passionate in solving problems. Act with a sense of urgency.

Ghaffari: What job/boss had the biggest impact on you, and what did the experience teach you?

Ford: All three of my bosses had very important impacts on different aspects of my career. Each one was a mentor in his own way. To my mind, a mentor is anyone who is a role model of the behaviors that you think are important. Each one taught me something different.

At my first company, COMSAT, my very first boss was Kurt Eriksson, who was a technical expert in controls and testing of satellites. He was a great mentor who taught me to be a good engineer. In the second job, Aerospace Corporation, my mentor was Air Force Colonel Jim Church, the client representative who taught me how to remove obstacles and get things done. My third mentor, at Scitor, was the founder, Roger Meade, who taught me how to create a good company, what are the business skills to run a company, and why a special focus on employees is key. My early career was great. The job content was great. And each of my bosses and co-workers were mentors, in one way or another.

Ghaffari: How do you define your own position as a “leader?”

Ford: As my kids were growing up, I spoke at more schools than I can count. The word gets out and everyone wants to hear “the Mom who’s a rocket scientist” come talk at their school. I probably do less of that now that my kids have grown. But, I certainly did a lot of that in the early days. I encourage our employees to do that. In fact, a part of the bonus plan for employees is to do outreach like that. I speak at industry events, on panels, and at conferences. I think it’s important to participate in these activities because there are so few women entrepreneurs and engineers that are in a CEO-type role. I think getting out there, being seen and participating in these activities, is important. I still do a lot of that and try to be a good role model for the next generation of women.

Ghaffari: How would you describe your decision-making style?

Ford: I am very inclusive in gathering input. But, when it’s time to make decisions with our leadership team, I am decisive—“benevolent dictator” leaps to mind. I make decisions. I don’t let things swirl and swirl. The decisions that we make are in the best interests of our employees and our customers. We have our strategic planning process and our situational awareness visits with customers and employees. We are always trying to be responsible and responsive. We work to get people what they need, when they need it—both customers and employees. That takes a lot of skill in removing obstacles.

Ghaffari: What were some of the key initial strategy decisions you made?

Ford: The initial strategic decisions I made have stood the test of time—to have a company that satisfies its customers’ critical needs and aligns that with the dream jobs of the employees, to have high impact and cross boundaries to facilitate innovative solutions. Looking back on it, I think the decision to be self-funded was an initial important decision as well. At the time I made that decision, I’m not sure I really considered anything else or even knew all the options available.

Ghaffari: Tell me about your long-term view of Stellar Solutions’ future.

Ford: It’s very important to us that Stellar Solutions is a sustainable business. In five to ten years, we want it to look and feel as it does now. Every employee will know about customer critical needs aligning with their dream job, and that is what is important. Every customer will continue to feel we are the one to call when they need someone to do the important work to satisfy critical needs for mission success.

We definitely are a “built-to-last” company, not a “built-to-flip” company. I mention this because so many companies are not that way. All they are focused on is how quickly they can flip the company and how much they can make, whether to sell out to another company or to an investment bank. We really want to leave a lasting legacy. We want this company to be here for our kids and their grandkids because it’s a great place to work and it’s personally and professionally rewarding. We want every employee to get up every morning and feel that they are doing something important—that they love what they do. And that they know they are making a difference in the world. We think our mission and vision will survive the test of time.

Ghaffari: Have you placed any special emphasis on hiring and developing women?

Ford: We have received a number of awards as top entrepreneurial company, best company to work for, and for excellence in a number of categories. We have not experienced a “leaky pipeline” at Stellar—where women leave a company just below leadership levels. Two of our sectors are run by women. The defense sector is run by Betsy Pimentel. The commercial sector is run by Melissa Farrell. The other sectors are run by men.

We role-model well—we’re pretty diverse in our leadership group. Our leaders are role models who prove that we have opportunities for all of our people. We have a mix of genders. I don’t have the specific number off the top of my head, but we have a higher percent of women compared to other companies in the aerospace and defense field. Maybe it’s because I am a woman leader. It’s still lopsided. We have maybe 25 percent [women team members], but that is probably higher than other engineering firms.

The “leaky pipeline” definitely is a factor elsewhere. It probably influenced me, because at every company where I worked or that I was associated with, I never saw a woman in a senior leadership position. So, I concluded it would be easier to head up my own business if I wanted to be the leader than it would be to overcome all the obstacles to reach that position in these other firms.

It’s not just a diversity problem. It’s also the “Bubba factor”—a leader is comfortable with the people that he/she has worked with before. That is more important than gender in determining who is chosen for a senior leadership position.

Traditionally, our industry has been dominated by white males, so leaders were selected from a homogeneous pool of candidates. The differentiator is about relationships—I choose people with whom I have had a positive working relationship. I have followed that axiom with our company. I will hire someone with whom I worked on a launch at two o’clock in the morning and who has proven themselves to be dependable and reliable—someone who really pulled through and that I could count on. That takes the diversity where it takes it.

In my day, there weren’t a lot of women majoring in engineering in college—and not enough women engineers in the workforce. But that’s changing, and it will eventually open doors for more women at the senior management level as well.

Ghaffari: What is your succession planning strategy?

Ford: For me personally, succession planning is very important. In the early years, I was the chief cook and bottle washer. I got the work and I did the work. Over time, we’ve built a strong leadership team in every sector. I think that’s important because I don’t want to be the kind of founder where the company goes away if the founder gets hit by a car. There are a lot of people who depend on this company now.

Mike Lencioni, our president and COO, really runs the tactical, day-to-day things that need to be done and has been with us since the end of our first year in business. He’s an example of how we build succession from the inside. He came on board to do engineering work, then took on project leadership, and eventually moved into a senior leadership role within the company.

For me personally, I’ve been able to transition from the tactical to the strategic. I am now providing more of a board-type role at Stellar. And I have taken on more board responsibilities at other companies and more of a senior government advisory role on panels and commissions. I do see myself doing more of those kinds of things.

Ghaffari: How do you manage senior managers and key partners?

Ford: We provide our senior leaders and employees a framework to manage our company with our inclusive strategic-planning process, and then we let them go out and make things happen.

I believe in letting people discover their own greatness. We don’t micromanage, but we do hire self-starters. As Wayne Gretzky is supposed to have said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

Ghaffari: What are your biggest achievements?

Ford: When you talk about leaving a lasting legacy, I think my biggest achievements are Stellar Solutions and my three kids. I could talk about my kids all day. My family has been the center of my universe, as much, if not more so, than Stellar Solutions.

My youngest, Hillary, is a junior at Princeton, a volleyball player, majoring in engineering with a business emphasis. My son, Nathan, earned an engineering degree and played football and baseball at Cornell University, and played professional baseball for one season with the Malvern Braves in Australia. He returned to the US and is working for the National Reconnaissance Office, which designs and builds the nation’s spy satellites. Miranda, my oldest, graduated in 2006 with a business degree concentration in finance from the University of Notre Dame. She was a soccer player on their national championship team and currently lives in Washington, DC. When they were here at home, we juggled sports and work. Now that they’ve graduated, we’re juggling getting on airplanes, so that we can see them in their new endeavors.

Ghaffari: How do you manage family expectations or commitments?

Ford: My three children were all born before I founded Stellar Solutions. They were born in 1984, 1987, and 1990. I was hired by Scitor when I was eight months pregnant with my first child. That was a pretty big risk on their part. If Roger Meade had been a traditionalist who thought that women would have babies and not come back to work, I might not have been given that opportunity. But Roger never brought it up, and I never did either. It wasn’t a problem. I was the first employee to have a baby that they had to deal with and vice versa. But it worked out fine.

Ghaffari: To what extent have you involved the family in your business?

Ford: My family has been intimately involved with the business from the beginning, either directly or indirectly, and are very supportive. My husband, who is an accountant, thought that it was not a good idea at the beginning to start a new business because we had just moved to a new house and had a big new mortgage. I was making a pretty good salary at Scitor. He thought that it was just not a good time, financially. Initially it was just a question of how we would make ends meet. Since then, he definitely has been an important part of the team. He feels good about Stellar, where we’ve been and where we’re going.

But, other than that, my family has all been tremendously supportive all the way. They all believe in the goals, share the vision, they all love the company and the people in it, and have been a big part of it throughout the years. It’s been very positive.

Ghaffari: Inevitably, women ask about how to “balance work and family commitments.” How do you see this issue and how would you describe your approach?

Ford: The issue of work-family challenges in a high-stress/high-travel environment might have played a part in my starting Stellar Solutions. For a person like me, if you get up and go to work in the morning, you want it to be for something really important and high impact. I think the more your career evolves, the more you understand where you can have that high impact. So, it was a natural thing for me to start Stellar Solutions around the theory that I wanted to surround myself with like-minded people who, when they get up in the morning, want to be doing something really important, satisfying a critical client need, but also be in their dream job. That has been the vision of Stellar Solutions from the beginning.

In a sense, that may be driven by your family. You don’t want to feel regret that you’re not spending time with them. If you have a job where you’re away all the time, or you don’t even like your job, or you don’t feel like you’re contributing—all that makes the work-family arrangement a non-starter on the home front as well as at work.

When I started my own business, I wanted a laser-sharp focus on the things that I thought were important. I wanted to put into place the kind of infrastructure for employees to have the benefit support that they needed, and most importantly, for our customers, to really solve the truly hard problems.

You could ask any of the over one hundred thirty employees that just gathered together for our sixteenth annual meeting last weekend, and they would all say the same thing—that our vision is the alignment between satisfying their dream job and solving our customers’ critical needs. That’s been true all along.

Ghaffari: How did you address negative reactions to your efforts, if any?

Ford: I didn’t really encounter a lot of negatives. I could always think back on those events that you wish hadn’t happened, but they did. I think you just move through them with integrity and simply get on with life. You are measured by your accomplishments and by the people you really care about. You just can’t bother with the naysayers. And you find that other people don’t care about the naysayers either.

Some of the negatives came about because I was entering a field with a lot of older men who had not worked with women before. It wasn’t things that were said or done so much as awkwardness. There was never any intent to be deliberately cruel. There is much less of that awkwardness today. And there is a greater awareness today of things that are appropriate to say or not say.

Ghaffari: What key advice would you give to other women?

Ford: Follow your passion. If you enjoy doing something, follow that passion. Remove all the obstacles and never give up. Persistence really does pay off.

Every year there are a whole new set of challenges. If you’re still pursuing those cool and interesting projects that you have a passion around, you have to just remove the obstacles that get in the way.

Ghaffari: What advice, especially, do you have for young women?

Ford: Engineering typically is not considered by women as a fun career option or thought of as a fun career. You don’t see any TV shows about “The Young Engineers.” There is a fun side to engineering—you just have to be diligent in finding a good fit with your skills and interests. Find out for yourself.

Ghaffari: Would you give any different advice to men?

Ford: Do what you love. Find your dream job. Do the important work. Persistence. One step at a time. That’s the same advice you’d give anyone. Not just women.

Ghaffari: What do you see as the area of greatest opportunity for young women professionals?

Ford: Today, opportunities for women are better than they were when I started out and certainly better than my mom’s generation. Where are there great opportunities for women? I can’t say it enough: engineering, engineering, engineering! Here is a field where there are lots of jobs, lots of important things to be done. It really is a family-friendly field. It is the type of field where you can have a family and work and make the two work together. At least for me in my career, people were very supportive of others attending parent-teacher conferences, not just for women, but for guys, too. If there was something that needed to be done on the home front, people expected you to take care of it.

Now, that also means that, when there was a launch or something important at work, they expected you to take care of that first. There was a very balanced approach that I found very different from my classmates who became accountants or lawyers, with billable-hours targets. For them, it was all about more hours and that was all. It was not a family-friendly environment if you really wanted to get ahead.

Ghaffari: Would you do anything differently if you were starting out today?

Ford: The only thing I would have done differently is to start Stellar Solutions sooner.

Ghaffari: Where do you see yourself in the next five to ten years? Any political or governmental or other leadership role for yourself in the future?

Ford: I’m enjoying doing the board work. It’s a chance to give back to other companies, but also get ideas from other companies, too. My boards are all very different, as you can see—a bank, a high-tech company, a nonprofit theater. They’re all unique. Each entity tries, in its own way, to have entrepreneurial spirit and success within the framework that it exists, whether entrepreneurial, regulatory, or nonprofit fundraising. I’m impressed by how similar all businesses really are at the end of day. You want to have happy employees who are doing really good work and moving the mission forward, and you want to be delighting the customer no matter what business you’re in.

Another example of something I’m involved with outside the company is the California Space Authority, which is an industry association that I think is doing a good job trying to cross the boundaries among disparate aerospace industry people who never interface with each other. We have universities, government—NASA, JPL, Edwards, Boeing, Lockheed—all these stovepipes of aerospace spread all around California that never talk to each other and if they did, you’d see how many dollars that represents, probably an amount that is greater than the GDP of many countries in the world. The Authority has a good mission, I think. I have participated on congressional commissions and panels in both the aerospace and emerging business arenas. I hope to be doing more of that in the future.