Kathy Sridhar Has a Doctorate and Her Own Company. But She Knows Life Offers More Than Just That

BY BRAD GRAVES - Staff Writer

Kathy Sridhar has a doctorate, her own company, a personal to-do list as long as the SPAWAR phone directory and a renewed sense of balance. Her small defense contracting business, INDUS Technology, Inc., had $4.1 million in revenue last year and is on track for $8 million in 2002. She is president of the National Defense Industrial Association's San Diego chapter, and enthusiastically speaks of the region's potential to become a test-bed for homeland security technologies.

But seated in her Old Town office on a sunny Friday, Sridhar steers the talk away from career paths and business
administration. While life was once "work, work, work, work," she said the past three years have made it clear that "life is not just about business." "In 1999 I had breast cancer and all the things associated with it: surgery and chemotherapy and radiation and the whole thing," she said. "When you're faced with something like that, and not knowing what's going to happen to you in the future, it makes you wake up every day and think about, 'What do I want to do today? What is really worthwhile spending my time on?'

Family Focus

"While business is a large part of it - and we're all very achievement oriented - I've become much more focused on
my family, my friends," she said. She takes time out to organize casual dinners once every two months. They are evenings where 15 friends gather to eat, play games and have fun. "I never did that before," she said. "But you know, we're only here for a short time and we have to enjoy that time." Work has not suffered as a result, she reports. "My business is doing every bit as well, if not better" than it was three years ago before she started having the dinners.

Sridhar seems to have an aptitude for balance. On the work side of the equation, she is president and CEO of INDUS.
She started the company in 1991 while teaching engineer-ing at San Diego State. In the late '90s she shifted her company's emphasis from commercial mechanical design to a range of government ser-vices.

Revenues shot up. INDUS' performance between 1998 and 2000 put it on the San Diego Business Journal's Fast-Growing
Private Companies list for 2002, where it ranked seventh. Her 50 employees are contract labor for the government, providing not only engineering know-how but also program management and financial services. Sridhar, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, now finds herself heading a company where one-third of the business is in financial services. "You've got to be a quick study in this business," she said, adding she has some talented staff to bring her up to speed on such issues. INDUS' major clients are just across Interstate at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) and a short distance down Point Loma, at the SPAWAR Systems Center. SPAWAR acquires and develops communications technology for the Navy.

INDUS has been a contractor to Titan Wireless and has been a subcontractor to Booz-Allen & Hamilton, Science Applications International Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp., Anteon Corp. and Arinc Inc. Sridhar credits the company's chief operating officer, Jim Lasswell, for Indus' trajectory. 'His knowledge of the government services market has been instrumental in our success," she said. Lasswell has turned out to be a key ally for Sridhar in her personal life, too.

Newlywed

"Just Married" says an oversized license plate on Sridhar's office door, with small lettering underneath that says "State of Bliss." The two, who have known each other nine years, tied the knot in October. Sridhar, 50, is a Poway resident. As the daughter of a Navy master chief yeoman, she spent her childhood moving. She was born in Hanover, NH and graduated from high school in Newfoundland. She pursued degrees in mechanical engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, then at West Virginia University in Morgantown, where she received her doctorate. She calls teaching her first love. Longtime friend Marcia D'Amore of Glendora recalled Sridhar holding down simultaneous teaching jobs at UCLA and Loyola Marymount Unviersity (Sridhar was department chair at the latter).

INDUS was a side business while she was teaching at San Diego State in the early 1990's. She helped San Diego-based Supercomputing Solutions with an initial public offering in the late 1980's. The '90's also saw her hold management positions with Mosaic Multisoft Corp. and Engineering Systems International in San Diego. D'Amore recalls Sridhar wanting to start her own business and her enthusiasm in saying, "I finally did it." Both D'Amore and local businessman Mike Woiwode noted Sridhar's talent for doing many things simultaneously. "She packs three people's worth of activities into every minute of every day," said Woiwode, an Arinc Inc. executive and past president of the NIDIA chapter. "She is very committed to a lot of things and they all get done."

The National Defense Industrial Association works to bring together government and private business. Sridhar became president of the trade group's San Diego chapter in January.

"Right now we're very SPAWAR-focused," she said, "and my goal is to broaden that focus." Sridhar said she hoped to reach out to other Navy and Marine bases and commands, to state and local governments, and to industries like shipbuilding. She echoed the suggestion of Carl Siel, SPAWAR's top homeland security specialist, to make San Diego into a test bed for homeland security technologies. The area is a natural, they argue, with its mix of federal agencies, university brainpower, high-tech electronics and biotech companies, and things that interest terrorists, like bridges, nuclear facilities and a busy international border.

Homeland Defense Test Bed

San Diego could be a prime spot to test everything from communication technology to luggage "sniffers," Sridhar said.
Sridhar is also a member of the San Diego Rotary Club. In off hours, she enjoys singing in barbershop quartets. Hobbies are great for the immune system, she noted in a 2001 speech called "Wife, Mother, Businesswoman: How I Balance These, Fight Breast Cancer and Remain Sane." Her advice to working parents is to "ask for help and be creative about doing deals" related to laundry, vacuuming, meal preparation, grocery shopping and the like. She also puts a priority on being a mother to her two children and a stepmother to Lasswell's two children. "My business is wonderful and I love every minute of it, but being a mom is probably the most important thing that I do," she said. "And I try to do that well."

Snapshot

Title: President, National Defense Industrial Association San Diego chapter; President and CEO, INDUS Technology, Inc.
Education: Bachelor's and master's degrees, engineering science and mechanics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Va.; doctorate, mechanical engineering and mechanics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, W.V.
Age: 50
Birthplace: Hanover, NH
Residence: Poway
Family: Husband, Jim Lasswell; two children, Sunil and Nikhil; two grown stepchildren, Jennifer Lasswell and Jim Lasswell Jr.
Hobbies: Choral singing