Chair man adds color to the furniture industry.

• Position: Joe Santifer, owner of the Continuum furniture business

The idea for Joe Santifer's High Point-based furniture business arose out of complaints made to his former employer, Steelcase Inc., by its Fortune 500 customers who were unable to find legitimate minority-owned furniture companies.

But when officials from the Michigan-based office-furniture company asked Santifer, 46, to explore launching a minority-owned company, they didn't offer him a free ride: "Steelcase told me that it would mean resigning a secure job, that it would give me tremendous opportunity to contribute to social and economic structure, that I could accumulate a significant personal wealth and that it could also fail," he recalls.

The son of a laborer with a third-grade education who insisted his children go to college, Santifer started working at age 8 mowing neighbors' lawns for $1.25. He graduated from Adams State University in Colorado with a B.A. in business administration and worked for Shell Oil and Polaroid before joining Steelcase in 1980. He was Western distribution manager when he left a year ago to start...