(MONEY Magazine) – All of them looked like long shots in the beginning -- prime candidates to join the 52% of small businesses that fail in their first four years. Pat Whitaker, recently divorced, was setting up her own interior design firm partly so she could adjust her hours to accommodate her two children's schedules. Jim Horowitz was taking over a small rural airport where business was so slow that 12 previous operators had bailed out in 15 years. Bill Parker was trying to establish a bicycle repair business with little equipment, no shop and practically no cash. Claudia Post was launching a same-day courier service in a city that already had seven of them. And Sean Nguyen, a Vietnamese refugee with limited English and little formal education, was starting a business testing high-tech printed circuit boards and assembling computer paraphernalia in his basement. Yet each of these unlikely prospects has succeeded -- some spectacularly -- by offering customers superior service. Whether meeting impossible deadlines, doing meticulous work or just keeping in close touch with clients, they've all delivered a level of care and attention that wasn't available elsewhere. "There are no real secrets," says Whitaker. "It's the stuff everybody tells you about -- calling customers back, going out of your way to make sure they're satisfied, helping them to save money. People talk about these things, but not many do them consistently. We did." And so too, in various ways, did the other four owners profiled on the following pages. That's what they have in common -- along with the satisfied customers whose repeat business helps to keep them growing.

DESIGNING WOMAN Don't call Pat Whitaker an interior decorator. True, she named her St. Louis firm Interior Space Inc., and decorating is a field often associated with women. But Whitaker's field -- the design of massive corporate offices -- is not heavily populated with businesses run by women. In fact, the word decorating doesn't even appear in her company's brochures. Instead, ISI calls itself "an architectural firm specializing in the planning and design of the corporate work environment." And indeed, laying out 300,000 square feet of office space is a long way from picking curtains and wallpaper -- about as far as ISI's $2.6 million 1992 revenues are from those of the typical decorating firm. Whitaker, 48, set up her own business in 1977 -- she now employs 50 people -- after working a year for a department store's interior design department. As a divorced mother of a four- and a nine-year-old, she wanted more flexible hours and the opportunity to set her own direction. Shunning work in private homes, she spent two years remodeling medical offices. But her business really took off when she was hired in 1979 to do a 200,000-square-foot office building. "I saw pretty quickly that there was a lot more money in larger jobs," she says, "but I knew they weren't going to come to me. So I decided to go to them." She joined the trade association for corporate facilities managers and got to know the people in St. Louis responsible for remodeling large workplaces. "Big companies have design work going on all the time," she says. "If they know us, then when a project comes up, they tell us." In 1981, Whitaker connected with executives at Southwestern Bell as the company prepared for its independence from soon-to-be-broken-up AT&T. Over the next seven years, the burgeoning Baby Bell handed her 251 projects at various buildings -- a level of repeat business that doesn't come just from habit. Whitaker's firm delivers. "We try to provide truly outstanding service," she says. "We want to make the facilities manager who hired us look good." For example, ISI's lighting design for Union Electric saved the utility $75,000 on fixtures. Advice to Missouri Blue Cross/Blue Shield kept the insurer from remodeling a building it would soon outgrow, and another timely nudge saved the company $300,000 by getting a furniture order in ahead of a price increase. Giving customers such superior service takes imagination and expertise, and to provide that, Whitaker recruits top people and keeps them happy. "Paying good salaries is essential, of course," she says, "but recognition is important too. When one of our projects gets written up in the paper, we make sure the people quoted are really the people in charge of the project, not just me." In addition, ISI provides health and dental insurance, a 401(k) savings plan and -- in deference to Whitaker's own experience -- part-time work schedules for parents. Lately, ISI has begun branching out. The firm is designing the restaurant, bar, luxury boxes, offices and locker rooms for the 664,000-square-foot Kiel Center arena that will open in St. Louis late next year. The job didn't come through ISI's usual channels, though. The client was a local nonprofit group, Civic Progress. Says Whitaker candidly: "One of the main reasons we got the contract is that we're a woman-owned business. Now that's an angle we haven't really exploited. We'll have to work on it."

A SMOOTH TAKEOFF When Jim Horowitz took over the Oxford County Regional Airport in rural Maine 41/2 years ago, he knew it would be tough getting the operation off the ground. The county-owned airport -- which included a refueling station, a repair shop and an on-again, off-again flight school -- had seen 11 new operators since its first one in 1974. None had made enough money to stick around for very long. But Horowitz, 42, who had worked at marinas much of his life and had managed a small Arizona resort, had recently learned to fly, and he wanted to give it a try. "The salvage value of the plane, tools and parts I bought along with the airport lease would have equaled the $27,000 I paid," he explains. "Besides, small airports are often run by guys who have built on their skills as pilots or mechanics, not as businessmen. I didn't have their skills, but I did know how to run a business." One of his first acts as owner of the company, which he renamed Oxford Aviation, was to telephone the owner of a plane that had been sitting in the hangar for a year waiting for repairs and repainting. Horowitz asked for two more months to finish the job. He then boned up on aircraft refinishing and hired an experienced painter. Before the first job was completed, another order came in, and then two more. Horowitz saw a niche. He knew that boat owners would often pay a premium for top-quality work. He figured the same would be true of plane owners looking for an alternative to barnyard paint shops competing solely on price. "I decided we were going to paint planes better than anyone else," he says. "Superior service, not low cost, would be our selling point." He instituted a painstaking 18-step refinishing process that included stripping off old paint with chemical solvents rather than taking the common shortcut of using abrasives. "Grit blasting can damage a plane's metal skin," Horowitz explains. With these refinements, Oxford was able to charge as much as $8,000 to repaint a single-engine plane -- 10% to 20% more than competitors. But its work was so good that by 1991, when the company got a favorable write-up in the magazine Light Plane Maintenance, Oxford was already working through a backlog of jobs obtained by word of mouth. Today, revenues have grown to $900,000, and Oxford's staff numbers 30 in a custom-designed 16,000-square-foot hangar that conforms to the most stringent , environmental and health regulations. Supplied-air respirators draw in clean outside air for workers' breathing apparatus. Wall sockets are protected against sparking -- at a cost of $600 apiece. And a $10,000 drain funnels used stripper into huge vats for reuse. Customers are impressed: "Their facility is probably one of the best in the world, if not the best," says Gordon Collins, president of Aerofab Inc., the maker of Lake amphibious planes. The Sanford, Maine manufacturer sends all its aircraft to Oxford for painting because, says Collins, "the company delivers superb quality while being very reliable at staying on schedule." Says Horowitz, who's now planning an addition that will cover 20,000 square feet: "We can't afford not to do a first-class job. Word travels fast. It would take only a few bad jobs to ruin our reputation. We'll work overtime to stay on schedule. We'll sacrifice profit now and then, but we'll never sacrifice service."

THE LONE REPAIRMAN Bill Parker has found a niche. His bicycle repair service is the only one of its kind in fitness-mad Portland, Ore.: It caters principally to owners of elite $1,500-plus racing machines and offers free pickup and delivery, 24-hour turnaround and service at your home or office. Trouble is, Parker's niche is so secure it has him in a bind. His two-year- old Mobile Bicycle Services already attracts more business than he can handle alone, yet he's not ready to expand. His initial capital spending ($5,000 for custom tools) is behind him. And with $10,000 in revenue in the first half of 1993, MBS is solidly in the black. But like many fledgling sole proprietors, Parker, a soon-to-be-divorced 44-year-old, feels his business income isn't steady enough for him to give up his day job -- or rather, his night job: driving 18-wheelers for Safeway from 4 p.m. to midnight for $36,000 a year. Besides, he needs to work only eight more years to earn an $1,800-a- month pension. One solution would be to hire some help, but Parker is leery. "I had an assistant come in several hours a week last summer, but he had developed bad habits from working in bike shops," says Parker. "I had to have him redo a couple of jobs because he didn't take care of little things like greasing the nuts and bolts and stretching the cables -- stuff you've got to do in custom bike work." Those little things are Parker's stock in trade. They're why people who care about their bikes keep coming back. "A bike shop can do most of the jobs Bill does," says Art Peterson, a steady customer and a former racer, "and they'll charge about the same price ((for example, $105 for a complete annual overhaul)). But their standards aren't as high as Bill's." Parker himself, as a customer, had similar gripes with bike shops, and that's what got him working on bikes in the first place. He began taking in friends' bikes -- "entry-level stuff, old-style 10-speeds" -- then gradually moved on to more intricate projects. From the start, he worked out of his van, driving it to local bike races where he did on-the-spot repairs for competitors. That exposure helped generate a steady flow of work that turned into a torrent last spring and summer. "Between Safeway and the business, I was working 18 hours a day," he says. "If I could do bikes full time, it wouldn't be a problem, but I don't want to walk away from all my employee benefits." Still, he's drawn to the idea of giving the bike business a real try. "I think about it all the time," he confesses. "There was so much work last summer, it made me wonder if maybe I shouldn't just go for it."

STREET SMART Claudia Post's decision to start a same-day courier service in Philadelphia three years ago was a matter of expediency. She'd just been fired. And after six years at other courier outfits, the divorced mother of two boys, 10 and 15, felt ready to go out on her own. She credits her last boss with the inspiration. "When he fired me," she says, "I thought, 'If he can run a company like this, I know I can do it.'" And do it better. "I wanted to build the Ben & Jerry's of courier services," she says, "to be socially conscious and good to employees." Post, 46, believes achieving that goal has a lot to do with the success of Diamond Courier Service, which employs about 130 mostly part-time people and will gross about $3 million this year. "Claudia and all of us on her staff treat our couriers with respect," explains sales director Tony Briscella, "so the couriers are motivated to give better service." Diamond's 50 bike and foot messengers, for example, not only get the standard commission of 50% of each job's fee, but unlike most couriers, they're also guaranteed the federal minimum wage of $4.25 an hour when work is slow. There are other perks too. "They take care of us," says biker Felix Alvarado, citing cases of Gatorade laid out in hot weather and bonus pay -- an extra 10% of the fee -- couriers get when it rains. "Bikers can make about the + same money elsewhere," says operations manager Bill Trimbur, "but here they're treated better." Customers feel coddled too. "Diamond always calls to tell you where things stand," says Sally Hobin, facilities manager of the law firm Cohen Shapiro. "If couriers get held up in traffic, they let the attorneys know -- even after hours. That's very important." Adds Neil Weiner, vice president for the printer National Compugraphics: "Diamond's couriers get here fastest, and they deliver 95% on time. They're just more responsive than anybody else." Testimonials like these, passed via Philadelphia's business grapevine, have kept Diamond's phones busy with as many as 700 calls in a day, ordering jobs that average nearly $20 each. And Post has already begun expanding: In 1992 she established Diamond Legal (revenues: $160,000 annually), which handles court filings, document searches and the like for the Philadelphia lawyers her couriers already serve. This year, she bought the local franchise of the national airfreight company Adcom Express. "This is an incredible life," she says. "I'm excited every day. I tell my sons, 'I wish that in whatever you wind up doing, you're as happy as I am.'"

RAGS TO RICHES Horatio Alger himself might have called Sean Nguyen's story farfetched: Five years after arriving in Minneapolis a penniless, 17-year-old refugee, Sean sets up a company in his rented home's basement to help his father and brother earn money. Seven years later, in 1993, the firm and two spin-offs employ 175 people and generate $14 million in annual sales. Yet unlike Alger's fables, Sean's success story is true. It began in 1980, when he and his father and brother helped fellow refugees build a crude sailboat in the Vietnamese jungle and launch it toward Thailand. The Nguyens left behind Sean's mother, a younger brother and two sisters, fearing what might happen to them en route. Sure enough, pirates raided the boat seven times on its four-day voyage. All women among the 39 people aboard were raped, and everything of value was stolen, including the motor. Fortunately, winds blew the boat toward Thailand, but then came eight months in squalid refugee camps before the three could immigrate to Minneapolis, where a cousin who had escaped earlier arranged passage through a church organization. Living with 12 other refugees in a two-room apartment, Sean felt fortunate to land a minimum-wage job assembling printed circuit boards at a company called Multi-Tech Systems. An adept worker, he soon began taking boards home for his father, brother and friends to inspect and test overnight. "No matter how much we gave him," says Del Palacheck, Multi-Tech's production manager, "he brought it back in the morning complete." In 1986, Sean gave his enterprise a name -- Nguyen Electronics Inc. Revenues that year were $50,000. They quadrupled the next year, then doubled and nearly doubled again to $700,000 in 1989. NEI had by then moved to bigger quarters, and Sean's landlord -- Bob LaRoque, a Sisseton Whapton Sioux Indian -- offered him some advice: Quit your job at Multi-Tech and devote all your time to NEI. Sean not only took the advice but hired LaRoque to handle sales. In the fast-moving electronics business, service means speed. And Sean credits his workers, 90% of them Asian immigrants, for NEI's ability to turn work around quickly. "They want to work to send money back home," he says. "We pay steady wages (starting at $5.50 an hour, about average for board assembly work), with lots of overtime and full family health coverage. They are comfortable here." And perhaps for that reason, they work fast. "If our competitors need two weeks for a job," he says, "we can maybe do it in one -- sometimes even 24 hours." Customers' testimonials bear him out: "We need to turn on a dime in this business," says Bill Foster, vice president of operations at the computer maker Tricord Systems, "and NEI's ability to jump through hoops for us is unparalleled." Last year, with sales topping $4 million, NEI spawned a subsidiary, VidTech Microsystems, which makes graphic accelerator boards -- devices that speed up a computer's visual display. About 6,000 have been shipped to date, and VidTech is expected to contribute half its parent's gross receipts this year. A second subsidiary, Tertronics, named for its president, Sean's wife Terri, has begun programming memory chips and floppy disks. Terri emigrated from Vietnam too, fleeing by boat with her family and arriving in Minneapolis in 1980 when she was 15. Now she and Sean are trying to get used to a more comfortable life. They've recently moved with their two young children into a new six-bedroom house overlooking a golf course. Sean has taken up the game for relaxation, but his approach is what you might expect. "He tries hard," says Terri. "When he has free time for an hour, he practices." And the results? He's already shooting in the low 90s. Couriers can make about the same money elsewhere. But at Diamond, they're treated better, and they give clients better service as a result.