One-on-One with Marie Longserre

It was a good thing, too, because a smorgasbord of opportunity was not going to be hurling itself at her in the 200-person town of Thompsons, Texas – the dead end of Farm Road 762.

“Dogs laid in the middle of the road, and when a car came by, they got up and moved and then they went and laid back down again,” Longserre says of the East Texas ranch town where she grew up.

	THE BASICS: Born Marie Longserre in Houston but grew up in Thompsons, Texas; dual bachelor of science degree from the University of Texas in Austin; has an American Eskimo dog named Katy. POSITION: President and CEO of the Santa Fe Business Incubator, a not-for-profit economic development organization; chair of the National Business Incubation Association; former chair of the New Mexico Business Incubation Certification Advisory Committee to the state’s Economic Development Department; treasurer of the New Mexico Small Business Investment Corp. for the past two years and a board member for five; named Entrepreneurial Advocate of the Year in 2005 by WESST Corp; received the Governor’s Award for Outstanding Women in 2001; among multiple other leadership positions and recognitions. WHAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW: “I did something the summer before last that I’ve always wanted to do: I flew in a glider. I did that in Durango, Colo.”

“It was almost a throwback to an earlier century. There were people who still rode mules down to the store and signed their name with an X. There were people who didn’t have any heating in their homes, people who didn’t have water in their homes. It was not terribly unusual. We were a little bit better off than that in terms of having indoor plumbing and all that good stuff.”

While she enjoyed as much freedom there as dandelion fluff floating in the wind and created adventures among thousands of acres of lakes and swamps and fields and trees and treehouses, her most favorite, perfect, love-of-her-life palace of childhood fantasy was a single building in town – the library.

“The thing that most informed my childhood was reading. I read everything and I read voraciously. Mother would take us into town and I’d get a book for every day, go back and trade them in and get another set. … From the time I was little, we got books in the mail, we got books in town, we got books at school, we had books on the shelves. They were everywhere. I didn’t travel much until late in life, but I always felt like I knew a lot of what was going on because I’d read about it.”

Her careers, at least in the beginning, were pretty predictable – high school English teacher (in Needville, Texas), then work at a publishing company. It not only sold art magazines but also published fine art prints and lithographs. Because of that job, Longserre found herself traveling the West, representing the company, the art and the publications. She developed connections in Santa Fe, and when the opportunity came up in the early 1980s, she moved there to run an art gallery on the plaza.

For the next 14 years, she opened and managed galleries, until one day …

“I was looking in the newspaper in the job listings and read one that said, ‘We are looking for a director for a new business incubator.’ … So I’m just reading this list (of qualifications for leading the Santa Fe Business Incubator) and check, check, check, check, check. I have no idea what this thing is, but it’s me, and I meet all the criteria, so I better go figure out what it is.

“So I went to the library.”

Q: What did you learn there?

A: The only thing I could find on business incubation was in Minority CEO magazine. It had an article on business incubators. It had the whole history going back to 1959, how they got started in Batavia, New York. I thought it was the greatest idea in the world, and I had done enough start-up businesses where people had just said, ‘Here, start a business, I’ll be back.’ … I applied for the job, and they had a huge number of applications. … I think I got the job based on enthusiasm. … At that time, this (30,000-square-foot building on Airport Road) was a field of weeds. And one week after I was hired, … they broke ground. … We opened in December 1997, with one client right before Christmas. (Since then, the incubator has fostered and assisted more than 80 start-up companies, which have created more than 800 direct new jobs.)

Q: What was your very first job?

A: The general store that my great-grandfather owned, you know, had horse collars on the walls and an old original Coca-Cola icebox and an original meat chopping block, and that was my first job – stocking Cokes and soup cans and sweeping out and so forth. … I have worked since I was 7 years old. I’ve never been without a job of some sort since I was a kid, whether it was part-time or waiting tables or whatever it was.

Q: Were you interested in art? Is that why you took the job with the publishing company?

A: My family, that’s what we did on the weekends. We’d go to art shows, and my dad and my mom got really interested, and they were buying things for the house, and we all had our posters that we’d get signed by whoever the artist was. Those were the things we started doing about the time I was in late high school.

Q: Did you have artistic talent? Were you a painter or anything?

A: No, I hate painting. I still hate painting. I don’t want anything to do with painting. I won’t paint a room. I won’t paint a mailbox. I get it all over me. But I sewed when I was a child. I made clothes, I created stuff, I made quilts. … Interestingly enough, I thought that’s why I was attracted to running galleries. It wasn’t till I was actually doing it that I realized I really liked business.

Q: How did you figure that out?

A: I mean, I was so naive. I did not know what a cash flow statement was, but I’m sitting there running a gallery after a year, thinking about the fact that all the tourists come at certain times, and that’s when we get all their money. And they’re not here at other times and then we don’t have much. So I actually made charts and graphs on our revenue and the months and how we would spread it out, and I did cash flow projections and revenue projections and graphs and charts completely and totally in a vacuum, not knowing that there was such a thing or that anybody had a name for it. … Is there a form for this? Because I’m just doing it on a piece of paper with a ruler. … I’m just kind of fearless to start something and figure it out.

Q: You were an entrepreneur in the sense that you opened galleries that were the ideas of other people. Were you ever an entrepreneur in your own right?

A: I’ve been very, very, very, very lucky. I’ve always opened businesses with other people’s money, some of them with their direction and input and some of them with almost no input whatsoever. … I did what I typically do. I would get every book I could and read it, and I would phone anyone up and see what they did. I think what not to do is just as important as what to do, so I’m always interested in the failures as well as the successes.

Q: Is there anything at this point you really want to do that you have not had a chance to do yet?

A: Every once in a while, I wish I had a lot of time, and I’d go and get an MBA. … I actually think that one day it might be fun to teach again, but I would want to teach business. … But honestly, I have lived my life in a way that I’ve done the things I want to do. The things I have passion about, by and large, I’ve been able to do.