Lois LeMenager started working in the incentive industry to support her husband, but since then she has played more than a supporting role: The firm she co-founded has been recognized as one of America's Top 500 Woman-Owned Businesses by Working Woman magazine.

LeMenager's late husband spent 14 years with Maritz Travel before opening his own incentive house, Marketing Innovators (MI), in 1978. LeMenager acted as an unpaid secretary, formally joining as vice president of operations two years later, when MI became the exclusive distributor of J.C. Penney Company gift certificates in the corporate market.

"When you are married and the husband has a career, the wife has to be one hundred percent behind him," says LeMenager, who entertained clients and went on business trips with her husband. In 1982, following his sudden death, she found herself the boss.

"A competitor offered to buy the business, saying 'You're not going to make it on your own,'" LeMenager recalls. "That made me even more determined to succeed."

It was not easy. "We did lose business because I was a woman," she says. "We had a lot of agricultural clients who, when I took over, said, 'We're not going to do business with you; we think you're not going to succeed.'" Despite those setbacks, LeMenager built MI "from a small business into a large one."

MI's relationship with J.C. Penney not only gives the firm 25 years experience in the now-booming incentive gift card market, it—along with the firm's corporate travel business—forced the firm to create an IT department long before anyone had heard of Web-based incentive programs. "We try to get Fortune 100 and 500 clients, but we don't turn down small clients," LeMenager says. "We are more flexible than the big companies."

Fast Fact: An award-winning entrepreneur, Lois LeMenager is a longtime supporter of two organizations that focus on nurturing self-sufficiency in young people: the Girl Scouts and Junior Achievement. This page is protected by Copyright laws. Do Not Copy