The Next Level: Entrepreneurs
Border Security a High-Tech Challenge for Lurita Doan
By Lango Deen
Apr 7, 2006, 12:27

More than thirteen years ago, Lurita Doan took $25 down to her local Kinko's, ran off some stationery and business cards for herself, and started up a company providing services for security and surveillance technologies. By 2003, some of New Technology Management, Inc.'s largest customers included the U.S. Military and federal agencies such as Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, U.S. Customs Service, and the Treasury Department.

USBE&IT spoke with Doan, founder, president, and CEO of NTMI, recently about owning and running a high-tech business providing installation and integration of border surveillance systems at all land border ports of entry in the United States.

USBE: You were a Vassar graduate with two degrees in Renaissance literature when you switched from college teaching to high-tech in 1984. Why did you make the switch?
Lurita Doan: When I made the change from teaching Renaissance literature to technology, it was because I looked around a table at a faculty meeting and everybody there was in their 40s. I was in my 20s at the time, and everyone was tenured. And I thought, "Someone's going to have to die before I get promoted. They look really young!" And that's when I realized I wanted more. I wanted to be in charge. I wanted upward mobility... to make more money...to  control my own destiny. Entrepreneurs think that they have an idea worth presenting...and I was no different.

USBE: You've been quoted as saying the borders are where all the action is occurring now. Tell us more about that?
LD:The one thing I've always maintained is that...there are a lot of good news stories happening at the borders.... A lot of different types of technologies being deployed, things like nonintrusive inspection devices,  remote video surveillance cameras, digital records being taken of every pedestrian, every piece of vehicular traffic that comes across the border.... There's recognition software, there's the biometric and fingerprinting technology happening at the airports...and I believe that this will continue to flourish as we go on.

USBE: NTMI has been described as the leader in advanced border technology? How did you get there?
LD:We got there because we're always producing new types of technologies. We've been working in this sector since 1996.... When we started in this field there were...very few companies participating.... It wasn't seen as something being very high on the radar. After 9/11, everyone's focus totally changed. But we had, as a business, always made it our modus operandi that we are innovators in the field....

USBE: You've been said to bootstrap NTMI. Is that a good business credo?
LD:I don't know where bootstrapping got such a bad reputation, because it's in the fine American tradition of entrepreneurship in my mind. Up until the late '80s and early '90s, there was never a business in America that ever began with anything other than bootstrapping. It's just a fancy word which means you live within your budget. Whatever you've got is what you've got.

USBE: What advice would you give to women starting their own businesses?
LD:There's no better person to start a business than a woman. Women are innate, maybe genetically inclined, to multitasking. And we have that ability to keep competing agendas and to prioritize because we've lived our whole lives managing our families to the demands of work and to the demands of our personal lives.... You have to know how to have that delayed gratification to keep a business going. You have to have enormous amounts of endurance and the ability to work long hours and, more importantly, you have to have that willingness to try new things.