SPRING
2003
Leading
Ladies
Deborah
Rosado Shaw
The visionary
At
the umbrella manufacturing company where she worked, customer
service clerk Deborah Rosado Shaw watched as others were
groomed for advancement. No one recognized, she thought,
that she could be more than a clerk. It was time for the
little white lie.
Rosado
Shaw called work one day to say that she had fallen ill,
and would not come in. Then she went to the Museum of Natural
History in New York, where she conducted a presentation
before executives there, touting her employer’s totes
and umbrellas. She left with a $140,000 order, and placed
it front of the company president. Stunned, he promoted
her to salesperson.
“There
can be no waiting for success to happen to you, to come
to you,” says Rosado Shaw, founder and chief executive
of Umbrellas Plus, a New Jersey-based multi-million dollar
wholesaler and importer of fashion and sun accessories.
“Success is making a move, sometimes over and over
again—there's no sitting still. You have to stand up
and make yourself be counted. You have to speak up.”
Rosado Shaw, a single mother of three teenage sons, says
that “being stubborn” helped propel her from an
impoverished life in the South Bronx to an affluent one
in suburban New Jersey. As a child, her biggest challenge
every day was dodging danger in her neighborhood and school.
“I grew up in a place where there were shots fired
from rooftops, drug dealers in the streets,” Rosado
Shaw, 42, says. “My father put metal rods on the windows
so the drug dealers wouldn't come in at night when we slept.
At school, you would walk into the bathroom and find someone
who’d overdosed or been stabbed.”
Rosado
Shaw learned to cling to the slimmest strands of hope.
She drew inspiration from the aunt whose husband left her
with two children to support in Puerto Rico, and who worked
doggedly in U.S. mainland garment factories and overcame
the odds. She was motivated by both her grandmothers, strong
women who played major roles in raising and supporting their
families despite little education and English language skills.
“I took a little bit of each of the strong women in
my life to sketch a model for myself,” Rosado Shaw
says. “They came from Puerto Rico with nothing, and
they duked it out on their own. And I watched the Brady
Bunch, and I saw that they lived in a graffiti-free neighborhood.
I thought that somewhere, that had to exist for me, too.”
Rosado
Shaw first went into business for herself in California,
where she had moved after accepting a job offer from a man
who eventually became her father-in-law. Her first company
custom designed beach umbrellas and chairs, and sold them
to retailers. “I wanted control over where I spent
Deborah,” says Rosado Shaw, a woman with a full, alto
voice who speaks in absolutes. “I had kids, and I needed
a job where I could come in late sometimes, and leave early
other times to pick up my kids from day care. When I worked
for somebody else, that somebody else got to say where and
how I got invested.”
Though
her business was going well, her marriage was crumbling.
She moved to New Jersey in 1995, to be back in her native
Northeast, where she had a family support system. “When
I moved to New Jersey, everybody thought I was crazy, because
business had been going well,” she says. “But
you have to take risks, after you do your homework and look
at your options and resources.”
She
gained notoriety, garnering such distinctions as the Avon
Women of Enterprise Award and Hispanic Magazine's Entrepreneur
of the Year. Rosado Shaw put her life back together, and
found new challenges. She wrote Dream BIG! A Roadmap for
Facing Life’s Challenges and Creating the Life You
Deserve, which was published by Simon and Schuster in 2001.
She founded Dream Big Enterprises, a company that trains
entrepreneurs, and she has become a highly sought-after
motivational speaker. Rosado Shaw regards mentoring as fulfilling
as merchandising.
“What
gets me out of bed in the morning is the possibility of
other people discovering for themselves how powerful they
are,” she says. “We’re born with everything
we need to make it, but along the way, we become convinced
that we don't have much.” The need for motivation,
Rosado Shaw says, never stops—not even for multimillionaire
motivational speakers. A bulletin board covered with pictures
of her aunt, grandmothers, and Oprah Winfrey, among other
role models, hangs in her bathroom. She keeps a similar
bulletin board in her car.
“If
I’m feeling lazy or incapable, I look at their faces—they
don’t let me off the hook.”
