For businesswoman, creativity at heart of consulting

URBANA – The dean leaned back in his chair and looked at the student who had come to his office seeking advice on transferring into the University of Illinois' engineering school.

"Have you considered home economics?" he asked.

(This was the 1980s, not the 1950s.)

"His attitude to me was what I used ... when I was not sure how to get through, to challenge me, motivate me," said Lori Patterson, a self-described "liberal arts person with an engineering mind."

Patterson would not only go on to graduate from the UI with an engineering degree, but she landed and excelled in jobs at John Deere, Andersen Consulting, Caterpillar and Solo Cup.

She is now the president of OJC Technologies, an information technology and creative services company based in downtown Urbana that she and her brother, Sigfried Gold, established almost 12 years ago.

When she and her brother set out to form what would become OJC, she had in mind an organization made up of smart, creative consultants, people who were engaged in political or social projects outside work, people who loved their jobs, but also had time for their family, who could be the best consultants for their clients and who could keep the project within the budget.

The IT consulting industry at the time had a reputation of 80-hour-work weeks and often running over budget, Patterson said.

They recruited highly educated people who did not necessarily have backgrounds in computer programming or consulting. They taught them Perl, Java and they learned on the job, thus the company's original name, On the Job Consulting.

The slogan: engineering from the right brain.

So far, it's worked.

With a staff of about 16 employees, the company has had a range of clients, including local ones such as the University of Illinois and international ones such as the McGraw-Hill Companies.

In the last 2.5 to 3 years, the company has seen "strong growth," Patterson said.

Throughout its years of growth and several different locations in downtown Urbana the company's offices are now housed in the rear of the Cinema Gallery building off Main Street.

Recently OJC Technologies has been developing an iPhone application for the local arts group 40 North/88 West. And they launched the Gold Marc standard for accessibility compliance, named after Patterson's father, Marc Gold, a psychologist who worked to de-institutionalize people with disabilities.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Urbana, Patterson graduated from Urbana High School in 1983 and went on to attend Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

Everyone thought she would follow in the footsteps of her father, a UI psychology professor, she said. And in her first year of college she studied subjects such as politics and psychology. But it was exhausting in the sense that she became emotionally involved in the topics.

On the quad one day, she followed a group of students, attracted by their thick textbooks ("There can't be any emotion in those books," she thought), to a pre-engineering class.

She more than stuck around until the end of the class. She was totally engaged in the subject.

And that was what led her back to the UI, earning her engineering degree and working in corporate America.

In the early 1990s when her husband Will Patterson was considering graduate school, she told him she'd go anywhere with him, but Urbana? That was not where she wanted to go.

Back when she was in high school, "the goal was to get out of here," she said of Champaign-Urbana.

When she was growing up, there wasn't much access to arts and music locally, she recalled, but she was close enough to Chicago to know what she was missing, she explained.

And yet in 1994 they ended up back here.

In the last decade things have changed and Patterson's perspective also has changed. C-U is one of the best places in the world, she said.

Before starting OJC Technologies, Patterson was raising her children (she has three now: Maya, Jordan and Donovan) and working long hours commuting between Champaign-Urbana and Highland Park.

"I was really a workaholic," she said.

One day her 2-year-old, who thought Patterson would not leave home without her high heels, hid those shoes from her.

That was the beginning of the end of that lifestyle.

And it took some soul-searching, she said, to be able to transition into a different lifestyle.

For women of her generation, "it was not popular if you were a go-getter to be an at-home mom," she said.

Many women of her age, she said, were raised by women who told their daughters, "you can be anything," Patterson said.

"The message was heard differently ... 'you can be everything,'" Patterson said.

Working in industries in which there were few women, Patterson said sometimes that actually worked to her advantage (for example, women are great multi-taskers, she said), but there were other times, such as when she asked for a raise at a company when her duties expanded, in which she felt she would have been treated differently if she were a man.

Company executives questioned her judg-ment when she approached them and asked for a raise. Patterson persisted, and she got that raise.

In recent years, Patterson has been concerned about how boys are faring in schools; high school graduation rates for boys are lower than girls. And she helped found the now-closed Campus Academy, a school for middle-school-aged boys.

"She loves the community so much and she wants to make sure we are the best community we can be," said Susan Toalson, executive director of the Urbana Business Association.

Patterson was instrumental in starting the Urbana association, Toalson said. For several years Patterson served as president of its board.

"She has a combination of integrity, intelligence and energy. That's a trifecta, man," Toalson said.

Patterson is Toalson's "go-to girl" because Patterson can provide her with honest dialogue when she needs it, Toalson said.

"What I admire most about her is if I needed to hear the honest truth she is able to give it to me in a loving way," Toalson said.

She's a great mom, a great member of the community and a smart businesswoman – someone you'd like to dislike, but can't because "she's just so fabulous," Toalson said.

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• Obituaries

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