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By Thomas K. Arnold
Christopher A. Crane first made local headlines in 1999, when he was awarded the Ernst & Young/ USA Today Entrepreneur of the Year Award for his remarkable revitalization of Comps InfoSystems. Crane acquired the struggling real estate information publishing firm in 1992. He cut costs, beefed up the sales force and expanded into new markets. Within five months, Comps was turning a profit. For the next seven years it grew at an annual rate of 20-30 percent.Crane and his partners sold Comps in February 2000 for $135 million. Now he’s applying his entrepreneurial savvy to helping others. He’s the CEO of Opportunity International, a nonprofit that provides small-business empowerment loans to the working poor in 25 developing countries.
“When I heard about Opportunity, it just sounded so compelling,” he says. “We loan someone a couple hundred dollars, they start a business, they pay you back, and then you loan it out to someone else. To me, it shows that American capitalism, when combined with passion, really does work.”
Last year, Opportunity handed out nearly $68 million in loans to more than 300,000 clients. Most were women. The average loan: $200. “If you were to put a face on poverty,” Crane says, “it would be a woman’s face.”
Opportunity has provided seed money to the operator of a fruit and vegetable stand in Ghana, a shoemaker in Zimbabwe and a seamstress in the Philippines. “This woman was literally living in a dump, sorting through the trash to find fabric to make throw rugs,” says Crane. “We gave her a loan so she could buy a sewing machine. The last we heard was that she moved out of the dump, bought a little house and now employs 10 other people.”
Crane, 51, is a Harvard MBA who graduated summa cum laude from Boston College with a degree in finance. He also studied economics, art and music for two years at the University of Vienna in Austria. He came to San Diego in 1988 to become group president and a board member of Nitches Inc., a clothing company with $150 million in annual sales.
Does Crane miss the big-bucks corporate life? Not really. “The fulfillment is so neat,” he says. “You get a chance to help people totally transform themselves.”
http://www.opportunity.org
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