title https://www.pacbiztimes.com Proudly serving Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:43:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 Blois Construction co-founder, political activist Jean Blois dies at 96 https://www.pacbiztimes.com/2024/03/25/blois-construction-co-founder-political-activist-jean-blois-dies-at-96/ Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:39:36 +0000 https://www.pacbiztimes.com/?p=92655 Jean Williamson Blois, one of the leading women in business and politics on the South Coast, died March 22 at age 96. Blois was a co-founder of the political movement that led to the successful effort to incorporate the City of Goleta. She served on its first city council and was instrumental in guiding Goleta Read More →

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Jean Williamson Blois, one of the leading women in business and politics on the South Coast, died March 22 at age 96.

Community West Bank President and CEO Marty Plourd, left, and longtime board member and Goleta resident Jean Blois, in 2019. (file photo)

Blois was a co-founder of the political movement that led to the successful effort to incorporate the City of Goleta. She served on its first city council and was instrumental in guiding Goleta in its earliest days.

In business, she and her late husband Bob founded Blois Construction, a firm that today is one of the largest regional companies with expertise in water and flood control projects. It also has provided countless hours of donated services CSU Channel Islands.

Blois, who graduated from UC Berkeley, was a founding member of the Community West Bancshares board, a relatively rare example of a woman serving in that capacity. Although she retired in 2021, she continued on the bank’s roster as an emeritus member.  

She was known for being an advocate for small business and for speaking her mind, something her two sons Jim and Steve reminded the Business Times of on several occasions. She had a keen eye for detail and never lost her sense of humor.

According to her son Jim, before her death, she left a file called “Jean Blois – Rest In Peace” with instructions to the family on how to handle her affairs.

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Jeannine’s owner recounts 35 years of breakdowns and breakthroughs https://www.pacbiztimes.com/2022/10/13/jeannines-owner-recounts-35-years-of-breakdowns-and-breakthroughs/ Thu, 13 Oct 2022 20:42:43 +0000 https://www.pacbiztimes.com/?p=74605 After Alison Hardey graduated from Stanford University in the 1980s, and decided her dream of becoming a professional tennis player was going to remain a dream, she moved back home to Santa Barbara and went to work for her father’s real estate firm. She felt a bit unmoored, she says today. One thing that kept Read More →

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Jeannine’s Restaurant & Bakery opened last year on the Santa Barbara waterfront. (Tony Biasotti photo)

After Alison Hardey graduated from Stanford University in the 1980s, and decided her dream of becoming a professional tennis player was going to remain a dream, she moved back home to Santa Barbara and went to work for her father’s real estate firm.

She felt a bit unmoored, she says today. One thing that kept her grounded was her daily trip to a little bakery in downtown Santa Barbara owned by a woman named Jeannine.

“I fell in love with the whole concept: the coffee, the pink aprons,” Hardey said. “Sometimes I would splurge and have a latte, and back then most people didn’t know what a latte was. … After I would do my little Jeannine’s moment I would feel like all was right in the world. I felt like I fit in.”

Hardey was so taken that she convinced her parents to buy the bakery. Now, 35 years later, she owns and operates four locations of Jeannine’s Restaurant and Bakery, in Goleta, Santa Barbara and Montecito.

Hardey told her entrepreneur’s story to an Oct. 13 breakfast meeting of the Santa Barbara Executive Roundtable, held at the University Club downtown.

In the beginning, her employees didn’t always respect her. Which wasn’t shocking — she was in her 20s, had never run a business and had no experience in the industry. The bakers would unplug the ovens, Hardey said, or fiddle with the water softener so that the coffee came out tasting like “hot, flavored salt water.”

Things changed after Hardey started coming in at 3 a.m. to help, and to make the bakers their first cup of coffee.

Alison Hardey speaks at the Santa Barbara Executive Roundtable on Oct. 13. (Tony Biasotti photo)

“It taught me to participate, to engage, and to act, so that your words carry weight,” she said.

From there, Jeannine’s began to grow and expand, but it wasn’t always a smooth road. Hardey said her parents sold two homes to keep the business afloat. Over the years, the family opened nine Jeannine’s locations and closed five of them.

The most recent closure was early last year. The Jeannine’s in downtown Santa Barbara, in the La Arcada center, had been open 15 years and has been the best performing business in the group.

But it couldn’t survive the COVID-19 pandemic, so Hardey and her management team, which includes her brother Gordy, decided to shut it down.

Almost immediately, Gordy Hardey found a new location on Santa Barbara’s waterfront, across the street from Stearns Wharf.

“I said, ‘Gordy, it’s the middle of COVID, we just closed a store, and you want us to open one?’ … Everybody’s shutting down, nobody’s opening anything,” Alison Hardey told the Executive Roundtable.

But she decided to take a chance, and now the waterfront Jeannine’s is the company’s most successful location.

It was an example, Hardey said, of how “a breakdown can honestly be a breakthrough.”

Jeannine’s has survived through hard times before the pandemic. Hardey said the darkest moment, “as business owners and as human beings,” was the mudslide in 2018 in Montecito that killed 23 people and destroyed scores of homes.

The only thing Hardey could think to do to help was to keep serving coffee and scones. So she snuck past the barricades and opened the doors of the Jeannine’s in Montecito, serving food and coffee prepared at her other restaurants and giving people a place to gather and grieve.

“Jeannine’s does not forget its North Star,” Hardley said. “Our North Star is that we’re going to be here tomorrow. We will find a way if we stick together.”

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In the region and the nation, women get a tiny share of venture capital dollars https://www.pacbiztimes.com/2022/09/30/in-the-region-and-the-nation-women-get-a-tiny-share-of-venture-capital-dollars/ Fri, 30 Sep 2022 15:53:59 +0000 https://www.pacbiztimes.com/?p=74462 When Haley Pavone, the founder of San Luis Obispo-based Pashion Footwear, pitches to investors, hoping to gain new capital to scale her already successful business, she usually has one obstacle: convincing men to see the same need in the market she sees. Pashion Footwear makes convertible heels — shoes with removable heels so they can Read More →

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Rita Mounir in the Santa Barbara offices of Allthenticate, the company she co-founded. Companies like hers, with both male and female founders, raised less than 15% of U.S. venture capital in 2021. Companies with only women founders raised 2.4% of the total. (Eric Isaacs photo)

When Haley Pavone, the founder of San Luis Obispo-based Pashion Footwear, pitches to investors, hoping to gain new capital to scale her already successful business, she usually has one obstacle: convincing men to see the same need in the market she sees.

Pashion Footwear makes convertible heels — shoes with removable heels so they can transform in an instant from high heels to flats.

“The number one question that I’m asked by prospective male investors is, ‘Why don’t women just stop wearing high heels?’” Pavone told the Business Times. “In my case, 50% of the world deals with high-heel pain, so clearly this is not a niche market … but they are written off as such.”

Pavone’s story is just one example of how difficult it can be for women-founded startups to raise venture capital.

Venture capital funding hit a record in the United States in 2021 at nearly $57 billion. But companies founded solely by women, like Pashion, received only 2.4% of that total, according to the research company PitchBook.

Over the past 14 years, women-founded companies have never received more than 3% of the total venture capital.

“I’ve seen big posts from men in venture capital who talk about needing to be a part of the change. Well, women founders don’t need that anger online, we need the funding,” Pavone said. “If you’re worked up about it, just start funding us. That’s the solution, not writing a four-paragraph post on LinkedIn about it.”

Another problem is the lack of women venture capitalists on the other side of the table. Pavone said that on the rare occasions that she speaks to women VCs, the meetings are much smoother, because she can focus on the numbers instead of explaining why comfortable heels matter to women.

“I think it’s very, very difficult to get a lot of passion and conviction about a problem that’s being solved if you don’t experience yourself,” Pavone said. “It just creates this natural gap of opportunity where the people that have the money to be given are being presented with ideas that they don’t relate to. That doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable, but it’s easy for those funders to write those markets off as niche.”

According to Forbes, only about 12% of decision-makers at venture capital firms are women, and 65% of firms do not have a single female partner.

Santa Barbara does have a female-founded venture capital firm: Alante Capital, which was founded in 2016.

Karla Mora, left, and Leslie Harwell are the managing partners of Alante Capital, a Santa Barbara-based venture capital firm. Nine of the 12 companies in its portfolio have female founders and 60% of the investors in its first fund are women. (courtesy photo)

“We’re a rare venture and it’s slowly starting to change, but we are a tiny fraction of the total VC industry for sure,” said Karla Mora, the founder and co-managing partner at Alante. “If you have more diversity on the decision-makers of capital allocation, so the people who are allocating that capital are more diverse, they’re going to attract a more diverse and inclusive portfolio.”

Alante has invested in 12 companies, 75% of which have female founders. There are women or people of color as founders of 92% of the companies, and all of them have women or people of color in the C-Suite level.

At the beginning, Mora said, a lot of people didn’t take her firm seriously.

“I wasn’t like blatantly aware of the gender disparity, and I really wanted to not believe that it was the case, but after doing it for years, I started to kind of identify a lot of different situations that make it a little more challenging,” she said.

Companies that are founded by both men and women tend to receive a bit more funding. According to PitchBook, 14.8% of U.S. venture capital in 2021 went to companies with at least one woman on the founding team. That number had fallen recently — in 2017, companies with at least one woman founder got 15.9% of total venture funding.

Rita Mounir is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Allthenticate, a software startup based in Santa Barbara. She’s raised money both alongside and apart from her fellow co-founder Chad Spensky, and in most cases, has found success. Allthenticate closed a $3.1 million seed round in May.

But, she said, she knows that female entrepreneurs often just get one opportunity to start a successful company, while men get many chances. And the failure of a woman-founded company can be held against other women, Mounir said, pointing to Theranos, the Silicon Valley blood testing startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes, who was convicted of fraud in January.

“Women can’t raise money in Silicon Valley after Theranos because she messed it up for all women, but it’s sad because there have been a bunch of men who have also done similar things, but that doesn’t ruin venture capital for all men. There are always chances for them,” Mounir said.

She pointed to the example of Adam Nuemann, who lost billions of his investors’ dollars with the cowork startup WeWork and has now raised hundreds of millions from prominent venture capitalists for his next venture.

Mounir said she thinks having more women as limited partners, or investors in venture capital funds, would help.

Mora said the same thing, and added that 60% of individual investors into Alante’s first $10 million fund are women.

“It’s good when VCs give money to women-founded companies, but it would also be great if that money is going back to women LPs, because then it creates this cycle,” Mounir said.

Ali Bauerlein is no stranger to raising capital. She was a co-founder and former CFO at Inogen, a Goleta-based medical device company she helped start in 2001.

She remembers hearing insensitive comments, and was even mistaken for a waitress during a business meeting because she was a young woman, despite the fact that she was leading the meeting.

“I remember I was faced with a lot of skepticism and scrutiny that my male counterparts likely didn’t experience, and that’s unfortunate, but I tried to rise up in those times and prove my worth and prove my abilities, and then it’s up to them to decide if they want to invest or not,” Bauerlein said.

Bauerlein said she sees more women entrepreneurs now, something that excites her. She left Inogen in 2021, and venture capital doesn’t appear to be in her future, though she said she has done some angel investing.

But she does hope to continue helping women entrepreneurs form relationships with each other, because a reliable and powerful network can help them overcome some of these obstacles.

“If there’s not a lot of women entrepreneurs and women founders, it’s hard to find other women entrepreneurs and founders that you can rely on for help, and create that community, so it is a big challenge, but the more successful women there are, I think the more those networks will develop over time,” Bauerlein said. “I know many women founders feel really strongly about helping that next generation of women that are trying to follow the path that and truly start something new and exciting.”

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Dubroff: Iris Duplantier Rideau’s story is both timeless and as timely as ever https://www.pacbiztimes.com/2022/08/21/dubroff-iris-duplantier-rideaus-story-is-both-timeless-and-as-timely-as-ever/ Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:57:19 +0000 https://www.pacbiztimes.com/?p=73849 The summer of 2022 has been about breakthrough stories from revered Black leaders. We learned new details about the norm-shattering role played by Nichelle Nichols, aka Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura, after she died on July 30. We relived the social justice advocacy of Boston Celtics superstar Bill Russell, who died the next day at 88. Read More →

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The summer of 2022 has been about breakthrough stories from revered Black leaders.

We learned new details about the norm-shattering role played by Nichelle Nichols, aka Star Trek’s Lt. Uhura, after she died on July 30.

We relived the social justice advocacy of Boston Celtics superstar Bill Russell, who died the next day at 88.

On the Central Coast, we have our own breakthrough leader who is telling her story this year. And she’s getting some timely recognition for her role in the wine industry.

In her new memoir, “From White to Black: One Life Between Two Worlds,” Iris Duplantier Rideau tells how a New Orleans native overcame setbacks, became a groundbreaking businesswoman in Los Angeles and founded the first winery in the United States owned by a Black woman.

Henry Dubroff
Henry Dubroff
From the Editor

Duplantier Rideau will find herself in the national spotlight in the coming months, when she is featured in a PBS television series about wine industry legends. And while she doesn’t own Rideau Vineyard anymore, she has left an indelible mark on the Central Coast.

Her path was driven by ambition, unique opportunities, and a desire to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams.

As a child in New Orleans in the 1940s, both she and her Creole grandmother could pass for white, providing a unique window into life under Jim Crow laws. Heading west by train to California as a young child to visit her father, she was treated like American royalty — a dining car with white linens, fine sleeping arrangements and attended by porters who were invariably Black.

Back in Louisiana, she witnessed prejudice and the narrowing of expectations. Like Russell, who grew up in Monroe, Louisiana before his family moved to Oakland, she never forgot the hatred. She, like the future NBA star, became part of the Great Migration, as 6 million Black citizens left the south, seeking opportunity.

But life in California was not easy. She had a turbulent relationship with her father. She married young, had a daughter, experienced domestic violence, and found the path to a career blocked.
She did find help along the way. A Jewish family that owned an insurance agency offered her a job and taught her the how to appraise properties and assess risk. In the same way that a small Catholic college, the University of San Francisco, offered Russell a scholarship to play basketball, she got to reach the first rung on the ladder toward success.

Just as Martin Luther King Jr. convinced Nichols not to leave Star Trek after one season, it was Tom Bradley, the first Black mayor of Los Angeles, who encouraged Duplantier Rideau to expand her horizons and figure out how to help neighborhoods devastated by riots get property coverage.

Duplantier Rideau’s talents were not those that get you a bio on IMDB or your number retired by the NBA. But her attention to accounting detail and her ability to focus on the bottom line, combined with Louisiana street smarts, made her one of the most successful Black businesswomen in Los Angeles. She brought insurance and financial services to deeply underserved communities.

After selling her agency, a retirement of sorts beckoned, and Duplantier Rideau, like many Angelenos, found her happy place in the Santa Ynez Valley. But she could not resist the lure of a run-down old adobe that would become the winery that brought together her love of entertaining and her passion for all things Louisiana.

“From White to Black” is a not merely a personal memoir. It is the story of the Black experience in America from the 1940s to now, told in a confident voice through the eyes of a woman who never lost sight of her dream.

In addition to the book and upcoming PBS segment, Duplantier Rideau was interviewed by Veronica Kusmuk of the Business Times for the latest episode of Charting Her Course, our monthly podcast on women entrepreneurs. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can learn more about “From White to Black” at irisrideau.com.

• Henry Dubroff is the owner and editor of the Pacific Coast Business Times. He can be reached at hdubroff@pacbiztimes.com.

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Gender pay gap has faded away among region’s younger workers https://www.pacbiztimes.com/2022/05/26/gender-pay-gap-has-faded-away-among-regions-younger-workers/ Thu, 26 May 2022 16:36:14 +0000 https://www.pacbiztimes.com/?p=72261 Historically, women in America have earned lower average wages than men. But according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, the wage gap among people under 30 has significantly narrowed in some areas, including the entire tri-county region. Recent Pew analysis of the 2019 American Community Survey, an annual Census Bureau program and Read More →

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Janna Mori is the student program advisor at Santa Barbara City College’s Career Center, where she helps students obtain internships and jobs. (Brooke Holland photo)

Historically, women in America have earned lower average wages than men. But according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, the wage gap among people under 30 has significantly narrowed in some areas, including the entire tri-county region.

Recent Pew analysis of the 2019 American Community Survey, an annual Census Bureau program and the largest household survey in the United States, revealed there are 22 metropoiltan areas in which women between the ages of 16-29 who work full time earn just as much or more than men of the same age, out of 249 areas studied.

Those include the metro areas of Santa Barbara, Oxnard-Ventura and San Luis Obispo, each one of which covers its entire county. In each area, women and men aged 16-29 earned about the same average salaries, roughly $32,000 per year. The study was based on census data from 2015 to 2019.

The report studied full-time, year-round workers, defined as people who “worked at least 50 weeks in the year prior to the interview date and usually worked at least 35 hours per week.”

The statistics and forward movement are encouraging, said Janna Mori, the student program advisor at Santa Barbara City College’s Career Center.

“I thought back to all the women that have gone before us and brought us to this day, and how encouraging it was,” Mori said. “It’s a fight. It’s been a fight for a long time.”

Mori works with young adults finding their career and making career decisions while attending SBCC. Equity is a “huge conversation on campus,” Mori said, adding that fair wages and equal employment fall under that umbrella as well.

Pew Research’s analysis found that among workers under 30, women made 93% of men’s wages nationwide. However, that wage gap varied depending on geographical area — in western metro areas, for example, women under 30 earned 95% of men’s pay, while in the Midwest, women earned 90%.

Eileen Boris, a professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara and an expert on women’s labor, said that much of the historical wage gap comes from what’s known as “occupational segregation,” in which women were often placed in “feminized” jobs, such as administrative roles, which usually paid far less.

But as the rate at which women seek higher education — especially in the fields of technology and medicine — has increased over time, so too has their ability to compete for more specialized and higher-wage jobs.

Boris said that while the lessening wage gap in younger demographics is encouraging, the real wage disparity between women and men often comes later in their careers.

“Into their late twenties, women and men in their first jobs earn about the same,” Boris said. “But something happens later on. And that’s because we still put the burden of childrearing on those deemed ‘women.’”

Because women are more likely to be tasked with caring for children, Boris said, they’re often forced to take more time out of work than their male counterparts — and thus are more likely to be passed up for raises or promotions.

“The question is, what are we going to do to mitigate the growing wage gap as people have children?” Boris said.

Some students are building their professional pathways early at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo County. Students there take on internship training opportunities, because there’s learning embedded in those structures of work, said Shamarah Giannetto, the employment services coordinator at the college’s Career Connections office.

People who go from internships to permanent employment are usually able to negotiate a higher wage because “they have the professional experience and then they also have the paper experience,” such as the degree or the certification, Giannetto said.

With internships and work-based learning, “what we find is students are able to negotiate a higher rate because they have been working in an industry where they have the skill sets,” Giannetto said.

In general, women have received more education in recent years than men, said Chris Thornberg, a founding principal at Beacon Economics. It has been “a trend for a while in the U.S.,” he said.

“Just on the sheer basis of human capital accumulation, one would anticipate this is going to start occurring,” he said of the closing of the wage gap among younger workers. “Ergo, even controlling for choice of occupation, you’re going to see women’s earnings rise.”

In an email to the Business Times, Julia O’Hanlon, the communications associate working with Pew Research Center’s social and demographic trends experts, said the organization does not have data on which industries are contributing to the shrinking wage gap in many cities.

The Ventura Unified Education Association is the local union representing over 800 educators at public schools in Ventura, about 70% of them classroom teachers. There is a salary schedule, so teachers who do the same type of job get about the same pay, with bonuses for extras like advanced degrees.

That doesn’t leave room for gender-based wage differences. But it doesn’t mean the jobs are totally equitable. Teachers in the youngest grades tend to work longer hours, and those teachers are predominantly women, said Ventura Unified Education Association President Dan Nelson.

“They typically, in the past, have been asked to do more for the same pay,” Nelson said. “If you just look at the take-home salary, you are looking equitable. But when you look at the hours put in, it can get not equal.”

Elementary school and special education teachers “way overwork their hours,” which are officially 7 hours and 15 minutes a day under the district’s union contract, Nelson said.

The medical industry is one of the biggest employers in the Tri-Counties. According to a white paper released in 2020 by National Nurses United, the largest organization of registered nurses in America, more men have entered the profession in recent years, and at the same time, the wages of many nurses have risen through collective bargaining.

“However, within the nursing profession itself, the labor of female nurses continues to be undervalued relative to their male nurse counterparts,” the union report said. “With respect to wages, even though men make up less than 12% of registered nurses, a recent study examining the gender wage gap for registered nurses found that ‘male RNs (registered nurse) outearned female RNs across settings, specialties, and positions’ with male nurses making over $5,100 more than female nurses each year.”

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Thousand Oaks nonprofit makes a big impact with tiny loans https://www.pacbiztimes.com/2022/03/04/thousand-oaks-nonprofit-makes-a-big-impact-with-tiny-loans/ Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:14:36 +0000 https://www.pacbiztimes.com/?p=70968 This article is only available to Business Times subscribers Subscribers: LOG IN or REGISTER for complete digital access. Not a Subscriber? SUBSCRIBE for full access to our weekly newspaper, online edition and Book of Lists. Check the STATUS of your Subscription Account.

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Head of UCSB intellectual property office takes new leadership job on campus https://www.pacbiztimes.com/2022/03/02/head-of-ucsb-intellectual-property-office-takes-new-leadership-job-on-campus/ Wed, 02 Mar 2022 23:38:03 +0000 https://www.pacbiztimes.com/?p=70930 This article is only available to Business Times subscribers Subscribers: LOG IN or REGISTER for complete digital access. Not a Subscriber? SUBSCRIBE for full access to our weekly newspaper, online edition and Book of Lists. Check the STATUS of your Subscription Account.

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