(FORTUNE Magazine) – Terence R. McAuliffe For the last six years McAuliffe, 29, has been persuading businessmen to come to the aid of his party. He is finance director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where he has increased receipts tenfold. McAuliffe's specialty is soliciting entrepreneurs, and he speaks their language. At 14 he started an asphalt-sealing business he later sold for $150,000. While earning his 1984 law degree at Georgetown University, he co- founded a venture capital firm that raised about $100 million last year, and he became a securities broker with Walsh Greenwood, a New York firm. In his latest foray he is a founding director of a bank that will open soon in Washington. Nolanda Hill After beginning as a singer and a classical pianist, Hill, 41, broadened her repertoire and became a producer of sports programs. In the early 1970s she and a partner started a Dallas Spanish-language UHF TV station, which she sold to Metromedia in 1983 for $11 million. She used part of the proceeds to buy two other UHF stations, near Boston and in Washington, and has just received permission from the FCC to start one back in her home base of Dallas. With three stations in the top ten U.S. markets, Hill Broadcasting is about to sign a letter of intent to pick up one in Milwaukee. That should put Hill well on the way to her goal of five stations by the end of next year. Christopher Esposito Esposito, 42, has found fertile soil in greenhouses. The president and cofounder of Four Seasons Greenhouses of Farmingdale, New York, he sells his structures as energy-saving and airy additions to houses and restaurants. Helped by a $150,000 grant from the Department of Energy, Esposito developed such high-tech features as insulating shades that automatically descend with the sun. Lower oil prices have not dimmed his prospects. With the major fast- food and hotel chains among his clients, sales through 150 Four Seasons franchises passed $90 million last year; about $35 million went to the parent company. This year Esposito will open an office in West Germany to help the business take root in Europe. George S. Scharfe The Comstock Group was the original wiring contractor for the Empire State Building, but by 1980 electrical construction was no longer generating much cash. To get the current flowing, Scharfe, 36, was made vice president of business development; he has engineered incursions into telecommunications, factory automation, and transportation. His strategy has boosted revenues by 300% over the last five years to $460 million. Named president and chief operating officer in March, Scharfe will now try to get earnings back up after a break-even year caused by a few bad contracts. The third Scharfe to sit in the president's chair, he will be helped by the company's largest contract, a $164-million award to rebuild New York's Eighth Avenue subway line so the A train is once again the quickest way to Harlem. Silvano DiGenova Those who spent their childhoods pressing penny collections into the slots of blue cardboard binders will appreciate DiGenova, 24, as exemplar of a new breed of numismatist. Chairman of Tangible Investments of America, a Philadelphia-based outfit that buys and sells rare coins, DiGenova is a founding member of the Professional Coin Grading Service, a dealer network that will grade coins, seal them in plastic, and henceforth trade them sight unseen. He expects the new service to help him double last year's revenues of $20 million. DiGenova was able to launch his company five years ago even though the rising dollar sent the coin market into a nose dive. ''I just bought from the people who were pessimistic,'' he explains, ''and sold to the people who were optimistic.''