Women’s empowerment, entrepreneurship and community service are themes throughout Kathy Odell’s career.
Her role as the next CEO of Women’s Economic Ventures will provide the chance to integrate those areas of focus, by helping women entrepreneurs contribute to economic vitality in communities along California’s Central Coast.
The accomplished business leader and entrepreneur will start as CEO in January, as the successor to longtime leader and founder Marsha Bailey, who is retiring next year after three decades leading WEV.
Noozhawk caught up with Odell recently at WEV’s Santa Barbara County Office at 333 S. Salinas St.
“This is such a tremendous organization,” Odell said of WEV. “Marsha (Bailey) has built an extraordinary service organization. For me, it’s coming in and doing more of what we have always done and then doing new things that today’s women entrepreneurs are asking us to do.”
The Stanford University alumna spoke of her 30-plus years of leadership experience in early-stage and high-growth businesses for the public and private sector.
With excitement for starting the new job, WEV’s CEO-elect plans to improve economic opportunity for women in the region, and provide next-generation services to meet the needs of entrepreneurial women.
“I have had a wonderful career because I have been able to do a lot of things that were rewarding,” Odell said.
“To be able to help people get started in business, it’s what I have always done,” she continued. “I have started businesses and I’m not the technical person — so when I have helped start a business, it’s because someone else had the idea and I brought the business skills to get it off the ground.”
Odell’s entrepreneurial career started in 1985 as co-founder of Medical Concepts Inc. and the business grew to become the world’s leading designer and manufacturer of video systems for minimally invasive surgery.
Karl Storz Endoscopy — a privately-owned German medical device company with worldwide distribution — acquired it in 1990.
After the acquisition, she was appointed as the managing director of Karl Storz Imaging for nine years and served as president of Karl Storz Veterinary Endoscopy America from 1992 to 1999.
She remained with the company until 2000 and resigned to pursue other ventures.
Odell became the founding CEO of Inogen in 2002, where she developed vision and strategies guiding the company from its creation to $13 million in revenues, and raised more than $50 million in capital. Inogen is a public company with a $2-billion market capitalization.
For 14 years, she served as a director of Pacific Capital Bancorp, a regional community bank with $6.5 billion in assets. She worked as Chair of the Compensation Committee and as a member of the Enterprise Risk and Governance committees.
Odell has lso been a mentor to young students on the road to entrepreneurship.
She supported the Technology Management Program at UC Santa Barbara and engaged in the college’s programs encouraging entrepreneurial and technology education.
Odell serves as a board member of the UCSB Economic Forecast Project, and serves on the board of WEV.
The organization offers training, consulting, and loans to help business entrepreneurs start, grow and thrive. WEV serves Santa Barbara and Ventura counties and its services are provided in English and Spanish. Services are targeted toward women, but the organization also helps men entrepreneurs with their businesses.
“Kathy Odell is an effective leader and visionary who’s been a key supporter and board member since 2010,” Melissa Livingston, WEV’s board chair, said in a statement. “We couldn’t have found a better person to carry on Marsha’s legacy and guide the organization as we create the next generation of WEV services.”
As the CEO of WEV, Odell has a goal of increasing the loan fund to provide more loans and larger loans, and perhaps other types of startup funding.
“I know how hard it is to get a business started,” Odell said. “I think that women, in particular, are creating more businesses than they ever did.”
She added, “Women are coming into their own, in terms of economic power.”
In a letter published on WEV’s website, Odell said the organization will be expanding services to improve access to leadership jobs for women working in local corporations, and starting entrepreneurial training programs to accompany Thrive and SET to Launch offerings.
WEV has provided consulting and business training to more than 14,000 women and men in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties since 1991, according to the organization. Its mission is “to create a more equitable and just society through the economic empowerment of women.”
WEV officials said it has loaned more than $5 million and helped more than 4,500 local businesses start or expand.
In addition, WEV-supported businesses generate more than $300 million in annual sales revenues and have created nearly 9,000 jobs.
— Noozhawk staff writer Brooke Holland can be reached at bholland@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
