Evelyn Echols PHOTO: OWEN EGAN

Queen of entrepreneurs

MARIA FRANCESCA LODICO | Here's how the sassy 84-year-old Evelyn Echols broke into the travel business: It's 1950. Joan Crawford has just married Alfred Steele, head of Pepsi-Cola. Their hearts are set on a honeymoon cruise, but the luxury ship of their dreams is fully booked. "Joan Crawford was The Star, The Prima Donna of Hollywood. Everybody was working on getting them on. NBC, Pepsi's people. Everybody," said Echols. Echols had just opened a travel agency in New York City. "I wanted Pepsi-Cola for a client and I made up my mind to get those two on that ship." When the reservation for a smaller room was cancelled, Echols persevered. "I wanted a suite." So she, ahem, "borrowed" the ocean liner's passenger list. "I called one of the people with a suite… and said to the gentleman, 'You are standing in the way of my whole career!' I offered to pay for his trip if he switched to the room." And that's how her "small, rinky-dink" business got the Pepsi-Cola worldwide account and quickly became New York City's largest commercial travel agency. Built on a reputation for accomplishing the impossible, the company rode the 1950s boom in globe-trotting created by the jetliner. Echols was one of North America's earliest female entrepreneurs. She sold her company after 11 years when her husband, a successful advertising executive, was transferred to Chicago. In Montreal several weeks ago for the International Women's Forum 1999 Global Conference, Echols also spoke to a group of McGill MBA students. Exemplifying the quintessential entrepreneur -- "we are the biggest egomaniacs, but creative, ingenious and we play it right to the end," she said -- Echols gave Angela Burlton's How to Start a Small Business class a top-ten list of ideas for entrepreneurial success. "Service is the name of the game," Echols said. "And, boy, we don't have it today. We live in an anorexic society where service has been commodified. You don't know who you're working for anymore. Nobody has the guts to make decisions. "If anybody complained, I offered a full refund. I never left anybody unhappy." In such a disenchanting corporate climate, the personal touch has become undervalued. "I don't give a damn about voicemail. How many people are at their desk, but let the voicemail pick up? Sometimes you get a client just because you're there." In fact, this great-grandmother just picked up a contract with the Chicago board of education to train high-school seniors for the tourism industry. Among her many other accolades, Echols was appointed to national commissions by two U.S. presidents and was that country's first woman to join the Rotary International. Echols has, however, known a few failures, including a men's designer clothing store in Venezuela. "I wasn't a planner. I always flew by the seat of my pants," she said. Fortunately, her instincts were mostly right. When friends suggested she start a travel school, she had no curriculum, no teachers, no space. But she went on to establish the first U.S. travel school in 1962 with 15 students. Today, the school has branches across the country and 12,000 graduates. "Entrepreneurship is the greatest way of life in the whole world," declared Echols.