Through Pixo, alumna reforming consulting industry

9/27/2016 Mike Koon, College of Engineering

  Lori Gold Patterson (B.S., 1990, Mechanical Science and Engineering) is proving that a humane IT consulting firm can solidly compete in the cut throat IT consulting world while still delivering quality results.   The President and CEO of Pixo, Patterson began the company in 1998.

Written by Mike Koon, College of Engineering

 
Lori Gold Patterson (B.S., 1990, Mechanical Science and Engineering) is proving that a humane IT consulting firm can solidly compete in the cut throat IT consulting world while still delivering quality results.
 
The President and CEO of Pixo, Patterson began the company in 1998. Originally formed as On the Job Consulting (OJC), it began as a social experiment. Patterson’s brother Sigfried was also searching for a new career path after years as a programmer in New York’s financial industry.
 
“At that time, demand for computer programmers was higher than supply,” Patterson said.
 
The brother-sister duo decided to team up. Sigfried would teach computer-programming classes such as Perl and JAVA as part of a non-profit called Computer Learning Mentoring Center (CLAM). Lori would then hire the brightest students from CLAM to join their new consulting firm.
 
“CLAM attracted brilliant people from ages 15 to 68 who were in many cases under employable,” Patterson said.
 
As Patterson has invested in people, Pixo has grown from five employees to 33 today and has expanded its office space on Goose Alley in downtown Urbana.
 
“We had a mission when we started this social experiment to prove to ourselves that we could operate differently in a highly competitive field (technology consulting) that had a horrible reputation of massively overworking its employees, over promising and under delivering. We wanted to prove you could be competitive in that industry, by not leaning on the backs of individuals. That it could be a highly humane work place and still provide excellent service to our clients and, in fact, it could become the development house of choice.”
 
Patterson believes in taking care of people on the inside by turning profits into employee benefits. For instance, Pixo has instituted Foundation Fridays, when from 1-5 pm, no one does any billable client work. Instead they work together on innovation and fulfilling ideas they wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to explore. The office closes for two full weeks each year, one in early August and another between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
 
“When you’re in high production companies and take a vacation, you oftentimes have to expend as much energy to get caught up when you return as you have gained by being away,” Patterson reasoned. “As a result, it is very hard to get a rest. We tell our clients about our closures well in advance and schedule our project plans based on the fact that we will be closed. That means that the entire company goes quiet and everyone gets to truly rest. Even though it’s an expensive proposition, the return on investment through rejuvenation is mega.”
 
Pixo’s projects run the gamut from the Internet of Things (IoT) to hardware and software integrations, business work flow systems that power the back office of large companies, and enterprise level websites and web systems. Patterson indicates that as much as 25 percent of its clients now are local, partially due to the growth of Research Park.
 
“We don’t do a lot of marketing, nor do we have an elevator speech,” Patterson said. “The vast majority of work walks in the door. We’re known in the scientific community, both in Silicon Valley and here, and have a reputation of understanding how to take the complex and bring the human to it.”
 
In 2011, Patterson earned the Athena Award, given annually by the Champaign County Chamber of Commerce to someone who has helped women reach their potential.
 
A quarter century since Patterson graduated, although still in the minority, women are starting to develop a critical mass in engineering. This fall, for instance, 25 percent of the freshmen students at the University of Illinois’ College of Engineering are female. Patterson is excited to see more women “in the trenches” of engineering fields in addition to traditional management roles.
 
“What I’m seeing more and more, which I really love, is geeky women being geeky women staying in the meat of engineering. Hopefully, that can continue so that long term we can have far more influence in the direction of science in our world.”
 
“Try Another Way”
 
Patterson has held true to her convictions, much the same way her father did in revolutionizing the roles of the severely mentally challenged in America, helping move those individuals from institutions to the work force.
 
Marc Gold’s influence too began as a social experiment. A jazz musician from East L.A., he began teaching music to special education students while also working in his father’s bicycle shop. As his passion for the severely mentally challenged grew, he realized that those individuals could and should be productive members of society.
 
He was so passionate about it that he decided to get his master’s degree in special education and set off on the long journey with his family to the University of Illinois in a 1947 Mercury Coupe to work on his doctoral degree and further his influence. Lori was just 11 months old at the time.
 
Pixo incorporates "Foundation Fridays" each week, where the team is encouraged to explore ideas and collaborate.
His master’s thesis was the precipice to his life’s work. As part of that, he took apart a bicycle brake and in 15 minutes could teach special needs individuals to reassemble it by simply saying “Try Another Way” when they came to a roadblock.
 
Growing up she watched her father travel the country on a mission to convince the government to take the money it was investing in institutions for the mentally challenged and instead train them to fulfill relatively high-paying jobs. He helped develop contracts with large corporations for those individuals to build circuit boards.
 
As a trailblazer in his field, Marc spoke at conferences around the world. “He used ‘Lori Stories’ in his presentations from events in my childhood,” Patterson said. “I got to see myself through his eyes. This brought a self-awareness and confidence that has had a huge impact on my life.”
 
Sadly, Marc Gold died of cancer in 1982 in the middle of Lori’s senior year at Urbana High School, leaving a big void in her life, but his influence still impacts her belief of investing in people, which has led to some unorthodox management practices as President and CEO of Pixo.
 
Building Her Own Career Path
 
It was seven years between when Patterson graduated from high school until she received her degree in mechanical engineering from Illinois in 1990. Those years involved a lot of soul searching and determination.
 
In between two stints at Parkland College, Patterson decided to enroll at Northern Arizona University and studied political science and psychology. Still feeling emotional over the loss of her father, she was longing to study something that didn’t provoke emotion. She followed students into the engineering building one day and sat in on a class.
 
“I wanted to use my brain, but not my heart,” she recalled. “I used my heart far too much in other aspects of my life. As I saw students taking huge books into that building, I remember thinking there couldn’t be any emotions in those books. I sat in the back row and fell in love with the equations on the board.”
 
After finishing the semester at NAU, Patterson decided to pursue engineering and, having grown up in the throws of the University of Illinois, she understood the reputation of its College of Engineering, and decided to return to Urbana-Champaign to pursue the field. Needing 60 credit hours to transfer to the U of I in engineering, she finished those hours at Parkland en route to completing her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.
 
“It was not a good scene for women in engineering at that time,” Lori said.  “(The Society of Women Engineers) existed, but it was very small and its members came mainly from general engineering. I heard messages like ‘I know you want this, but engineering is probably not the right field for you.’ However, I had a strong conviction from the beginning that I was going to get through.”
 
Lori found affirmation from the National Society of Black Engineers, where her roommate was the president, and remembers support from Paul Parker, a long-time assistant dean and undergraduate advisor, and from Bob Cowie, a graduate student and now the owner of The Advent Corporation, a computer software enterprise in Urbana-Champaign.
 
Despite the support, Lori had reached a crisis, realizing she couldn’t afford tuition to complete school. To solve this problem, she was introduced to the Co-op program where she could work for a company for a short time and earn enough money to come back to finish her degree.
 
A pair of stints at John Deere in Dubuque, Iowa, as part of that program, was another game changer for Patterson.
 
“John Deere invested in us, giving us challenging and fantastic projects – in heat treating and gear manufacturing,” she recalled. “While I was there, they bought their first CNC lathe machine and I trained the operators on it. I came back to school knowing I wanted to be in manufacturing and wear steel toe shoes. It got me through the last semesters. I understood what I was studying and why I was studying it.”
 
Despite a generous offer for a full-time position at John Deere, Lori followed her high school sweetheart and now husband William Patterson, to Chicago, where he obtained his degree at Columbia College, to Normal, where he earned a master’s degree at Illinois State University, and eventually back to Urbana, where he completed a PhD at the U of I and is currently an adjunct lecturer in the Technology Entrepreneur Center.
 
Lori advanced her career along the way, first as a consultant with Andersen Consulting [Accenture], where she learned computer programming, then at Caterpillar, and finally at Solo Cup, where she became a special projects manager. At Solo Cup, she tackled high-end business process engineering, materials and manufacturing design, but found that being a mother of two small children did not mix with time away at corporate headquarters in Highland Park, Ill.
 
That led to the formation of Pixo.
 
The legacy lives on
 
Some 34 years after his death, Marc Gold’s legacy lives on through Marc Gold & Associates, which continues to “provide training and technical assistance to systems, agencies, and families interested in ensuring the complete community participation of people with significant disabilities.” Last month, Patterson hosted a retreat at Pixo for those individuals who continue to use his teaching method, many of whom worked under her father.
 
“My father was a charismatic and dynamic man who saw the human spirit as the most glorious thing and could tap into it at any moment,” Patterson said. “He didn’t get bogged down in conflicts. As such, there were so many lessons of optimism, and of human perseverance that he instilled in me. He brought humor and vision and really changed the lives for people around him.”
 
That kind of spirit lives on through his daughter, and drives the decisions that have made Pixo a game-changer in the consulting field. 
 
 
 
 

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This story was published September 27, 2016.