The long road to cross the street

Nation's Business,  April, 1986  by Del Marth

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The Long Road To Cross The Street

On the corner of Monticello and Market streets in downtown Norfolk, Va., a lanky kid hustles shoeshines. His best customers come from across the street--executives working in the sprawling four-story department store and its adjacent 16-story Maritime Towers office building. It is one of the city's more valuable blocks of real estate.

The scene is a 40-year-old memory of Herman Valentine. Sometimes it is very vivid to him when he looks down on the corner from his executive suite in the former department store building.

Today that shoeshine boy, Valentine, owns the old store. And the Towers. And a third building in the block. The entire block is headquarters for Systems Management American Corporation, one of the largest black-owned businesses in the United States.

Founder and sole owner of SMA, Valentine has created a firm that ruggedizes off-the-shelf computers for military use. Under U.S. Navy contracts, SMA rebuilds computers to withstand humidity, heat, dust, shock--all the things that occur aboard military vessels--and installs them in Navy ships.

"I didn't realize how difficult it was going to be," says Valentine, of his 16 years creating SMA. "I've put in long hours, borrowed often from banks, spent a lot of time on proposals for contracts that I didn't get."

Today, down on his former corner, Valentine finds no young had hustling shoeshines or, for that matter, getting a head start in any business endeavor. And it concerns him.

"I tell young blacks they don't have any of what I call recovery time--that is, they don't have time to go off back-packing in Europe for two years," he says. "The competition [for good jobs] is too fierce. They don't have time to walk around with those damn radios stuck in their ear."

Even Valentine worries about being short of time, though he is only 48. He has built SMA from a one-man answering service into a national firm with 550 employees. But his major goal--to bring SMA's annual sales to $500 million and thus make it the first black-owned business to be among the nation's top 500 industrial firms--still lies ahead.

"I want everything too fast," says Valentine, who has weaned himself off cigarettes and caffeine, for both longevity and energy purposes. "It's very frustrating. I feel I'm so far behind. It bothers me."

To compensate for his feeling that he is losing the race, he works not only long days, but weekends, too. By noon he already has been up and working more than six hours. Yet, leaning back comfortably on the office sofa, his muted gray pinstripe suit still unwrinkled, the casual loafers still unscuffed after frequent trips into other departments, Valentine appears as untouched as his modest-sized walnut desk near the far wall.

So that no one is misled, however, at least about the paperless surface of his desk, he points out: "I've read so many books about guys with empty desks that this is my new thing this year--keeping my desk clean."

Credit for such tidiness must go in part to his secretaries. More than one? "Oh, yes. And they're more than secretaries, really; they're my assistants. I have two shifts of them. I couldn't keep anybody here 10 or 12 hours every day, so I have one who comes in early when I do, and after she finishes her shift another comes in and works with me until 8 at night. I have to stagger them, or I would burn them out."

In earlier years Valentine himself experienced burnout.

For example, he dreamed of becoming a pro basketball player. Tall enough at 6 feet 6 inches to be a crowd-pleasing dunker, he was an outstanding high school player and a hot prospect for a college basketball scholarship--and a possible professional career beyond that. "But, as I said, I burn out fast, and I soon didn't want to play high school ball. I wanted a car instead."

Time that had gone into basketball now went into a part-time job so he could buy the car. "I really made some dumb choices then," Valentine says.

He finished high school, went into the Army, married and came back to Norfolk at age 23, scouring the town for odd jobs. "I decided I was going nowhere fast," he says, "so I started college."

Driven by a feeling of being behind, and wanting things quickly, he earned a bachelor's in business administration degree from Norfolk State University in three years and plunged into the bureaucratic maelstrom of Washington as a properties manager for the Agriculture Department. In two years he had learned the ins and outs of government, a lesson he was to put to good use.

Before he did, Valentine was enticed back to Norfolk by his alma mater. In 1966, at age 29, he accepted his college's offer to become its business manager.

"But I became very restless, very quickly, in Norfolk after Washington," he says.

Then Valentine made another dumb choice--at least in the view of some friends at the time.