A matter of opinion.

• Author: Rand, Ted
• Position: FacFind Inc, market research - Company profile

A MATTER OF OPINION

As a cub reporter, she wanted to cover strip joints and gambling casinos. She ended up writing about engagements and casseroles. She dreamed of being a career diplomat. She was told that was impossible for a woman. She made a stab at advertising, but she didn't get past writing the instructions on breakfast-cereal boxes.

It wasn't until Pat Kyle was in her 40s that she began to break through the barriers she believes kept her from the top. "I discovered the business world was more open to women than any other field," she says.

And business needed what Kyle had to offer: market research. A decade ago, she founded FacFind Inc. - now one of the largest market-research companies in Charlotte, with customers as diverse as IBM and the Transylvania County Tourism Development Authority. Though she won't release specific numbers, Kyle says that 1989 sales were 142 percent ahead of 1988 numbers and that the company's profit margin for the year was 18 percent.

She increased her on-call staff of 100 telephone surveyors, data-entry people and other workers to 120, and she moved the company from her home to an office with facilities for focus groups: two rooms with one-way mirrors and video cameras that enable clients to watch consumers sample various products. But drumming up business for tourism boards and Christmas-tree farms - and filling her own pocket - has not been Pat Kyle's yardstick for success the past decade. Instead, say those who work closely with her, she is propelled by a vision of what a company structure should be.

"Some people call it New Age or transformational management," says Elaine Lyerly, president of the Lyerly Agency, a Charlotte advertising agency that uses FacFind. "It's balancing the dictatorial management style that was made traditional by male CEOs."

It is an approach, says FacFind Executive Vice President Martha Harbison, 37, that Kyle turned to out of bitter experience.

"When I went to graduate school [in the mid-'70s]," Harbison says, "women were being pushed into business. I didn't run into the frustrations Pat did, coming up against the good-old-boy network. Now that she's got her own company, she wants her employees to have input into how it's growing and which direction we're headed."

Kyle trusts her workers to an extent that would alarm some managers. Nearly all of FacFind's telephone-survey research and data entry is performed by independent contractors in their own homes for between $4.50 and...