Jennifer Schoenhofer usually attends the “Stevie Awards” with her daughter, who works with her at the company she founded nine years ago, Axis Teknologies. This year Schoenhofer and her daughter couldn’t make it to the awards, so they didn’t learn until the morning after the ceremony that she’d been named a gold winner of the Female Entrepreneur of the Year award.
Schoenhofer says that if she’d been at the awards, her acceptance speech would have referenced a Thanksgiving dinner she remembers from when she was six years old. She elicited peels of laughter by telling the extended family she wanted to become the first woman astronaut. “My grandma came out of the kitchen in her apron,” said Schoenhofer. “She grabbed my face between her hands and said ‘Dream big and don’t let being a girl stop you, and don’t listen to all these old men in the room.'”
Those words came back to Schoenhofer in the 1980’s, when she was working her way up at BellSouth while her children were small. “It still wasn’t really kosher for women to be out in the workforce, but my children always supported me,” she said. After working closely with vendor support at BellSouth, Schoenhofer decided that she could better serve the company “on the other side of the fence.”
Schoenhofer started Axis to sell infrastructure solutions to her former employer, operating out of her home at first. When she called her contact at BellSouth to ask for her first RFQ, he wasn’t sure he could take her new venture seriously. “You’re not operating out of the basement of your home, are you?” he asked. Actually it was the living room, so Schoenhofer “grabbed the cross around her neck,” and told him she was not, and he sent the request for a quote.
Axis won that contract and many more followed. Today 90% of the company’s business is with AT&T, so Schoenhofer was thrilled to learn about the carrier’s $14 billion dollar commitment to network infrastructure. “I’m really hoping that when they have a $14 billion spend they will take the diversity program and the mentoring program to the next level,” she said. “I believe that what will ignite the American economy is small to medium businesses hiring people and getting them to work.”
Schoenhofer employs almost 100 people at Axis, and is currently hiring PMP certified project managers,
DAS and in-building engineers and 4G/LTE engineers, among other positions. For employees who do not have to be on job sites, a weekly work-at-home day of their choice is standard practice at the company. “We also take off a half day every Friday the 13th,” said Schoenhofer.
Schoenhofer says her vision for the company has changed over the years. “I used to strive to be $100 million a year business,” she explained, “But now I want to stay at $20 – $50 million. I want to be not the biggest but the best. I don’t want to lose sight of the people.”
