No more clowning around
Less than two years ago, Shafeena Rahman traded in her clown’s nose for a banker’s suit. At the time, she was helping her husband market his new company, Clown Around Town, and she frequently attended events at local chambers and associations.
The couple considered networking a critical strategy for success on Cape Cod, where relationships and trust mean so much in a community-based economy.
After one Sandwich Chamber of Commerce reception, Rahman received an invitation to visit David Curtis, CEO of The Community Bank.
“He asked me, ‘Have you ever thought of working in a different industry?’” Rahman said. “‘As opposed to what?’ I responded, ‘The professional clown industry?’”
While Rahman had no banking experience, Curtis saw in her a business owner who had started a new company and understood what it took to grow, manage and survive. “He believed that when talking to business owners, I would understand what they were going through. We had come to The Community Bank ourselves for a small business loan for Clown Around Town.”
Rahman was up against stiff competition, including one person with 30 years banking experience. What got her the job was Curtis’ vision, she said.
“David does not come from a banking background, but instead a marketing and consulting one,” Rahman noted. “He is looking to develop The Community Bank as business resource center and a connector in the business community. In focusing on people like me, he is looking for personality and instinct, sales experience and business ownership that can bring a different vision to the job.”
Rahman emphasized that her colleagues at the bank have been avid and exceptional teachers. “I expect to make mistakes, but not the same one twice.”
Married with children
Rahman, 32, could very well have become a New York City policewoman instead of a banker. That was her dream growing up in a very poor section of Queens, one of five children of immigrant Indian parents living primarily on a token-booth operator’s salary.
Growing up, “I found myself the liaison between cultures,” she recalled. “We lived in a rough section. I remember walking with my mother to the corner store for a gallon of milk. ‘What are those little bottles?’ she asked. ‘Crack vials, mom,’ I said. ‘You see that bodega? Don’t shop there. It’s dangerous.’”
“Reflecting back, it’s amazing to me how the burden fell on us kids.”
Upon graduating from high school, Rahman took the city police exam, scored highly and awaited an eventual call. Meanwhile, however, she met and fell in love with a striving actor, Doug Goff, who was 11 years older and about to defer his dreams of Broadway for the security of a financial career back in his native Ohio.
Rahman decided to follow him.
The call from the police academy eventually came, but by then, life had taken a different course. Rahman was married, pregnant and living in Cleveland. Over the next nine years, she would give birth to three children and move seven times for Doug’s career.
“I truly wanted to stay home and be a good mother,” she explained. “I had grown up as a latchkey child. In kindergarten, I walked myself a mile and a half to and from school. When, I got home in the afternoon, neither parent was home until six or seven. They could not afford day care or staying home. It was just life.
“I decided that if I was having children, I wanted them to avoid ever having those feelings of loneliness I had as a kid.”
Eventually, Goff found himself working for Gateway, the computer manufacturer, just as the company was establishing retail stores across the country. He had an opportunity to manage a location and the family decided on Hyannis.
While neither knew the Cape well, they had fond memories of it and dreamed of raising their family by the ocean in a very safe community. “The move was wonderful – quaint, beautiful, the water, the lakes, the feeling of community. We had sheltered wholesomeness for our children, two acres in Mashpee for them to run around,” Rahman said.
Then, suddenly, Goff was out of a job. Virtually overnight, Gateway reversed course and closed its stores. After a short stint experimenting with merchant banking, Goff decided at age 40 it was now or never. He had a dream – and a business plan – for a unique company that would combine marketing, corporate training and media production.
Clown Around Town was born. Rahman would become its marketing director while Goff focused on building the business.
“The whole reason to start Clown Around Town was a lifestyle choice. Doug was out of a job. I was a stay-at-home mom. We had considered moving south for a larger home and less costs, but we absolutely loved the Cape and could not imagine leaving,” said Rahman. “We vowed to find a way.”
“Doug had been in corporate America so long, and he was not happy. He wanted to go back to his roots in theater and start a production company. The initial niche was children’s parties, but the vision was far greater – producing corporate events, growing programs for arts education.”
The invitation by Curtis to join The Community Bank came at just the right time for Rahman. “I honestly have to say I don’t recommend working with your spouse,” she laughed. “We were two big personalities, and we tended to compete rather than work as a team.
“Also, I found myself searching for my own purpose, one that was not attached only to my husband and children,” she said. “What are you meant to do here as you develop into the person you are supposed to be?”
On a more practical front, she and her husband were confronting a reality shared by thousands of Cape Cod families – the need for affordable health insurance and finding a company that provided that along with 401(k) plans and other benefits.
Women as an emerging market
At The Community Bank, Rahman has joined a growing group of women executives hired by Curtis to help develop the bank’s new commitment to business development centers in Falmouth and Hyannis.
Among the bank’s goals: Recognize the growing number of women business owners and managers on Cape Cod, and offer business training and consultation to support loans and handicap success.
To that end, Rahman has created the Women’s Business Exchange, a continuing workshop series to address the challenge of being a woman business owner on Cape Cod.
“Women make most of the financial decisions in their households. They own 51 percent of all new businesses in the country, and that percentage probably holds true here,” she said. “Certainly, if you don’t build relationships with this community, you will lose out as a bank in a very competitive environment.”
Rahman believes that women have a harder time asking for help to learn. She wants her program to create an environment where that will be easier “I am constantly meeting new women who can be speakers, resources and even mentors. We particularly want to identify successful women who live here, own their own businesses and are comfortable being role models.”
“At some point, my job performance will have to be measured quantifiably,” she said. “Nothing happens quickly. Future clients need to see you in the community, to get to know you and trust you.
“It’s not about the hard sell. When you help your community, it will come back to you in a business sense. People will be loyal.”
Inevitably, two questions will be paramount, Rahman believes. “Have we built a satisfying relationship with a client? Has that client gotten to the next level with our help?”
Originally published in the March/April 2007 issue of Cape Business.
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