Maryland’s newest industry “Gaming” calls out for risk takers.
Every once in a while there are certain people that just stand out from the rest of “their” crowd. This happens in every social circle, financial, ethnic, religious, and gender group. This is a story about one such person who just happens to represent the female gender and has for the past 18 years been in business for herself.
Barbara Contino is this unusual person and as you read on you will come to agree. Barbara found herself as a divorced mother of two and out of a long term marriage for which she spent most of her time volunteering her talents and energies to helping others.
Barbara worked and recruited volunteers for the Baltimore Jaycees, Public Relation Director for Santa Claus Anonymous and many other activities where ever an organization needed sweat equity volunteers. She played a big part in the Maryland Special Olympics when it first came to Baltimore.
Trying to get back into the job market, Barbara would take advantage of every opportunity she believed she would excel in to the point she worked three separate part time jobs until she had a clear idea what was her calling. She soon realized that sales was going to be her best shot. Her first full time job since her early marriage was with Trucker’s Inn in Jessup, Maryland as their sales manager. Thereafter she was asked to work out of the Travel Plaza in Deswell, Virginia. She was responsible for nine profit centers there. Opportunity came once again and she became the acting General Manager for the largest truck stop on the east coast. This was soon taking more time and energy way from her family she knew it was time to move on.
She was introduced to the idea that she could own her own payphones and began marketing her payphone services to local businesses. This is when she founded her business now called Maryland Toll Call Co. She took on selling long distance services for MCI Corp. while building her own small payphone business. As her payphone business kept growing, one location at the time, she soon realized that she needed to put her phones where the people were. Weekends and after MCI’s business hours she began marketing to all the bars, taverns, and nightspots in Fells Point and Camden communities and soon had the majority of payphones in those areas. She is now on a roll. She is now working her business full time.
In 1994 she got good information from her financial adviser that she should try to qualify as a Woman Owned Business with the state of Maryland which opened the door for her to be the minority partner with M.C. Dean, Inc to provide for more than 120 payphones in the Baltimore Convention Center for which she still has them as a customer today. Soon after she partnered with Verizon Corp. to provide payphone services for the state owned agencies, courts, and hospitals.
One day she read an article on privately owned cash ATM machines and when opportunity presented itself, she claimed to one of her customers, who had an interest in getting one for his business, Barbara piped up and said…”Oh yes I am in that business” and that was the beginning of an entirely new field of business for Barbara. Today Barbara owns and operated her ATM and payphone machines between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.
Business is doing well when she was approached to pioneer another field of business, wireless high speed Internet through out Baltimore City. So in 2001 she, along with
her partners, created the first successful wireless Internet loop around Baltimore City bouncing off of four major towers. The business was going well but the economy wasn’t so she had to make an expensive decision to sell off the business assets.
Today Barbara is pioneering into another field of business; namely she is the only woman owned business to date that has earned her North American Standard Industry codes to work in the gaming industry. One of the major slot manufactures has chosen her company to represent them by doing their service work on their machines that will be located in one or all of the approved casino locations.
Barbara’s motto is very simple, take that chance and get the business and once you get it and it is not profitable, you can always say …”no thank you” and gracefully bow out. But if you always stay on the outside of an opportunity, you never will know what successes you have missed”.
Missed opportunities are those that we only have ourselves to blame. To be successful in business one has to take a big breath and take that chance. It was once said by President Roosevelt that…”It is far better to dare mighty things and to have failed than always live in the maze of mediocrity.”
