Her clients warrant close examination.

• Position: Metrolina Outreach Mammography Inc's Jean Griswold

"You can't do this business and expect to get rich off it," says Jean Griswold, who owns Metrolina Outreach Mammography Inc. Started in 1991, the Charlotte-based business is one of the nation's two mobile cancer-screening clinics not affiliated with a hospital or medical clinic. The other is in Houston.

Griswold and her staff of 12 make the rounds at some of the state's furniture plants, textile mills and rural-government offices, screening about 6,000 women a year. At companies such as Parkdale Mills Inc. and Ithaca Industries Inc. in Gastonia, women line up several times a year to step inside Metrolina Outreach's van for the $12 to $13 mammograms, cheaper than the $35 typically charged at hospitals.

Griswold, 51, tries to persuade companies to pick up the tab. She pitches it as a way for them to save money by reducing their insurance costs and the expense of late-detection treatment, disability benefits and hiring and training replacements.

But the road to profitability has been rocky. Griswold's initial business plan called for the company to break even in two years. After three, she was down $350,000. That's because the business often comped tests when women couldn't afford them. A $100,000 infusion in 1994 by NationsBanc Small Business Investment Corp., a NationsBank Corp. subsidiary, kept Metrolina Outreach operating.

The next year, after her accountant's stem warning - "stop giving away stuff you have to pay for" she set up a companion nonprofit company, Mobile Health Outreach, funded by such groups as Cigna Health Care of North Carolina Inc. and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Run by Metrolina Outreach...