1 of 2
Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
2 of 2
Image of Susan Wilson Solovic
Susan Wilson Solovic’s résumé sounds like the wish list of a third-grade girl who thinks there’s nothing she can’t be when she grows up: Miss America finalist, classical pianist, television anchor. Fortune 100 executive. Lawyer. Published author. Astronaut.
Just kidding about “astronaut”—but the rest is no fairy tale. It just reads like one.
As Miss Missouri 1979, Solovic competed in the Miss America pageant, finishing as third runner-up. After a stint as a weathergirl while attending the University of Missouri–Columbia, she worked as a TV news anchor and reporter for NBC, CBS and PBS affiliates.
Solovic left the airwaves to become vice president and director of corporate marketing for the former ITT Commercial Finance and, while working there, completed her law degree with night classes at Saint Louis University School of Law. She graduated with honors and passed the state bar exam on her first try.
Wait. There’s more.
Her accolades and enthusiasm led to many requests for public speaking, so she formed her own company, SusanSays, in 1999. In 2003, she moved on, creating SBTV.com, a free online network streaming news programs and educational information for small-business owners. Her first book, The Girls’ Guide to Power and Success, was published in 2001 and was quickly followed by a second, Reinvent Your Career.
Though her life turned out to be glamorous by any standard, Solovic, 48, credits plain old hard work and a fierce determination born in childhood.
Born in Fredericktown, Mo., Susan Wilson began working at the age of 5 in her parents’ funeral home.
“They had these ashtray things that had the sand in the top, and my job was to get the cigarette butts out and put them in the trash,” she explains.
She wasn’t Cinderella, though: As an only child, Susan had the complete attention of her doting older parents. Once or twice a week, her mother, Lucille Wilson, drove her to the “big city” of Farmington for ballet and piano lessons.
Lucille had set the example, starting her first business after World War II and receiving her pilot’s license in 1944. She was convinced that her daughter, born into a far less constrained world, would make something incredible of herself. But there was little Lucille could do when, in the seventh grade, Susan’s low test scores prompted the school principal to place her in special education.
“The year before, I had not done very well,” Solovic explains. “They put me in a class of mentally challenged students and told my mother the most I could ever hope for was vocational training.”
Two long years later, a counselor, after watching Susan win award after award in piano competitions, decided that her placement was a big mistake and that she belonged in a mainstream curriculum.
“It’s so distressing to me, the way our society labels people,” Solovic says. “As a child, once an authority figure says you are mentally challenged, you are mentally challenged. Now, if someone tells me I can’t do something, that’s exactly when I’m going to prove I can.”
As Solovic’s self-esteem returned, she began honing her entrepreneurial skills. At 15, she taught baton twirling to an eager gaggle of little girls at $1 a lesson, cash only. It wasn’t long before she was raking in as much as $75 every Saturday morning. Two years later, she opened a dance studio and taught ballet, tap and jazz one evening a week and on Saturday afternoons.
Today, Solovic’s apparently charmed life includes the constant, carefully concealed pain of a degenerative back problem that the Mayo Clinic pronounced inoperable. Unless Solovic exercises regularly, her condition could ultimately rob her of the ability to walk. So, with the goal of running a 10K race, Solovic has worked up to walking almost 8 miles at a stretch. “I have learned to live with pain on a daily basis,” she says. “I am determined not to allow my health to control me.”
That’s typical of how Solovic handles a bad situation: “I ask, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ and then I go home and throw a pity party—have myself a good cry, eat too much ice cream. I get up the next day and say, ‘Well, that’s over with. Now what?’”
She’s even gritted her teeth over her beauty-pageant titles. “For many years, I wouldn’t even talk about that,” she admits. “Once again, it goes back to the label. As soon as somebody sees you in that capacity, you’re a spacey beauty queen. People say, ‘She’s attractive; she couldn’t have a brain in her head.’ I oftentimes in my career felt I had to prove myself to be a little bit better.”
She has no regrets, though, about her decision to parade down that famous runway. There she was ... an ambitious young woman who needed money for college. Miss America “was a road map out of a small town,” she explains. The world has changed—but it’s still a sexist society, she points out in The Girls’ Guide. “Pretty Good for a Girl” is the subtitle of the first chapter, which examines the ways working women discount their own value—and subsequently are seen as less valuable by others.
“Don’t apologize!” is one of Solovic’s favorite commandments. “I still catch myself doing it,” she admits. “My husband will kid me: If I say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he’ll say, ‘You’re forgiven.’ It makes me realize: ‘Oh, I didn’t do anything.’”
Two more of her business tips for women: “Say what you mean” and “Don’t take things personally.” She also gives fashion tips: “Create a signature style, stay current, invest in quality and” (though she comes close to contradicting this one) “dress appropriately.”
“I have a tendency to dress a little more flamboyantly,” she concedes. “I wear bright colors and fun things and crazy earrings. That’s just who I am.”
Her attractiveness initially alienated the man who would become her husband. “I said, ‘Oh Jesus, here we go—another good-looking babe who’s probably not very bright,’” recalls George Solovic, who met his future wife when they were both working at ITT. “But it didn’t take very long to figure out she was very bright. She has a photographic memory; she doesn’t forget a thing.”
Susan surprised her future husband by asking him out. A year later, they married. The relationship developed into a business partnership with the purchase of SBTV, owned with two other partners. The network has won awards for its live programming and on-demand news stories, with topics ranging from venture capital to legal issues.
Internet TV is the wave of the future, says Solovic, describing a world in which cable will be history and online viewers will call all the shots as to what they watch and when.
Solovic won’t be able to watch children grow into that future; divorcing in her late thirties and then marrying a man with grown children didn’t leave much chance for child-rearing, a situation that makes her a little sad. “But I like my lifestyle,” she says quickly, “and I like that I can travel.”
A recent experience with jury duty in a criminal case involving a 17-year-old boy reminded Solovic what being a parent would have entailed. “I cannot tell you how responsible I felt for this young man’s life,” she says. “I didn’t want to let someone who was guilty go free, but if he wasn’t guilty, this would impact the rest of his life. If I had children, I would be going crazy every day!”
Taking her obligations seriously is a true Solovic characteristic, says her best friend, Jane Ward, who met Solovic while working as an event planner for ITT. Solovic has difficulty saying no to anyone, Ward says, be it a family member, a friend or an organization looking for a speaker. Ward can’t imagine Solovic taking a day off just to relax.
“Even on weekends she’ll be, like, ‘Oh, I got up and I walked 6 miles, and then I got a manicure, and I’m here at the office for a few hours, and then I’m going home and cook some, and we’re going to see my dad and then we’re going to have some people over for dinner,’” Ward says, repeating a typical Saturday phone conversation. “That’s the most dreadful day I can think of!”
Another friend, attorney Lenny Vines, concurs. Vines was Solovic’s boss when she worked at his law firm; he says her smooth exterior masks the juggling act that is her life.
“One time she was hosting one of her many fundraisers at the home she decorated so beautifully. She was very calm and relaxed and impeccably dressed,” Vines says. “No one would have guessed she had spent the day presenting in front of a national client and, not wanting to waste a single minute, written a chapter in one of her books on the plane on the way home.”
“I have two speeds: ‘go fast’ and ‘stop,’” Solovic says, adding in self-defense that every once in a while she and her husband rent a movie or even take an afternoon nap. Twice a year, they retreat to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where Solovic manages to shed most, but not all, of her daily routines.
“I get up and go to the gym in the morning,” she admits, “but by noon I’m at the pool with a Bloody Mary. The biggest decision I make all day is where we are going for dinner.”
Back home, Solovic does get a big reprieve from many details that fill the to-do lists of most professional women. We’ve all heard the joke “Every woman needs a wife,” and Solovic’s semiretired husband, 15 years her senior, has plenty of time to devote himself to a marriage they describe as pretty nontraditional.
“He gets my clothes from the cleaners, he does the laundry, he goes to the grocery store for me,” Solovic says. “His attitude is: ‘I’ve had my day, I’ve done my thing; it’s your turn. You go, girl, you go out and do it.’”
Recently Solovic was appointed to the National Women’s Business Council, which advises the president, Congress and the Small Business Administration. The new role gives her a chance to brainstorm about issues that affect female business owners—and figure out ways to make sure that women get a bigger slice of the federal procurement pie.
Photos of a smiling Solovic with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, Sen. Elizabeth Dole and other prominent Republicans line one wall of the SBTV offices—although she is also pictured with some high-profile Democrats, including Sen. Ted Kennedy and former Vice President Walter Mondale. She’s reluctant to talk about party loyalty. She campaigned for two well-known Republicans, Gov. Matt Blunt and Sen. Jim Talent, even though the GOP, by her own assessment, isn’t exactly known for embracing women’s issues.
“I don’t feel comfortable talking about that in a public forum,” she says, but she goes on to make one point: “If you’re not economically independent, if you can’t run a business without being burdened by regulations and taxation from the government, you’re never going to be in a position to effect social change.”
Another issue that riles her is society’s double standard for women, men and families. “Women have choices: They can be working moms; they can choose career over family,” she says. “Men should have the right to choose: ‘I’m going to stay at home and be a parent while my wife works.’”
Her career path has led Solovic to mix not only with politicians and executives but also with members of the glitterati. Despite her unflappable exterior, at least one celebrity has managed to shake her composure. Last year, during a New York awards ceremony in which Solovic won the Oscar of the business world—the Stevie—for running the most innovative company employing fewer than 100 people, she spied Donald Trump, who was there to receive a lifetime-achievement award. She made a beeline for him, introduced herself and quickly explained why there should be an alliance between SBTV and Trump University, a website for business education. The encounter resulted in Solovic’s becoming only the fourth woman to belong to Trump U., whose president, Michael Sexton, told her that Trump said she had “a lot of chutzpah.”
“Inside I was going, ‘Oh my gosh—I really met Donald Trump!’” Solovic remembers, her Southern Missouri twang returning. “Inside, I really am just a little girl from Fredericktown, and sometimes I just want to pinch myself.”
It’s no fantasy, though, to imagine that SBTV is headed for the top. In 2005, the network’s revenues grew 362 percent, and the number of page views increased by 425 percent.
“Could we really make it to the big 10?” Solovic asks rhetorically. “Well, why not?”
And then what? The consummate professional chameleon, Solovic has no shortage of ideas for reinventing her career again. She dreams of attending culinary school, learning to speak French and Spanish, traveling, writing a novel and returning to her music. “I’m just getting warmed up,” she promises.
