MORGANTOWN -- Performance Results Corp. founder and President Kathy J. Clinton brings a sports mentality to management, with great success.

The daughter of Northern Panhandle natives Tom and Ruth Meikle, Kathy Meikle lived the first few months of her life in New Jersey while her father was in the U.S. Coast Guard.

The family moved often—she laughed that she probably attended 18 schools as a child—but Clinton finally landed in Morgantown when she was in high school.

She took a job in 1978 with government contractor EG&G in Morgantown and, in 1979, she married Bruce Clinton.

It seemed her life had become stable. And stable it was for many years.

But in 2000, after 22 years at EG&G, Clinton felt it was time to strike out on her own.

"I'd built a lot of very strong relationships. It was something that everyone knew: If you wanted something done, you would give it to me, and it would get done," she said. "I was extremely confident in my own abilities; I knew government contracting, all of the laws, the rules and the regulations, and I was determined to do this."

With the support of her husband and EG&G President Randall Wotring, Clinton hired two people and launched her own enterprise.

Performance Results Corp.

As a support service contractor, PRC fulfills a broad range of government needs, anything from planning conferences and developing multimedia presentations to consulting in highly specialized technical subjects.

Most of PRC's work, Clinton said, is with the U.S. Department of Energy, Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but PRC also serves as a subcontractor role to companies such as Lockheed Martin, Battelle, URS and Booz Allen Hamilton.

The company is federally certified as a small, disadvantaged, 8(a) woman-owned business.

Although Clinton has grown PRC to 180 employees in 13 states in just nine years and expects it to top $15 million in revenue this year, she strives to keep the nimbleness of a small company. Eighty of her employees live in or near Morgantown.

"Large businesses go through a lot of red tape, a lot of layers and layers of people to get answers from, to get to the bottom of things," she said. "I like to have my opinion heard, and I like to hear the opinion of others."

At PRC, everyone is second in command, she said.

"It's one phone call to me, one e-mail to me," she explained. "You get a quick answer."

She doesn't plan to grow the business indefinitely.

"I still want to be able to know every employee in the company by name," she said. "I think about 250, no more than 300 is more than enough."

Sports and Success

Clinton attributes the company's success to "R&R"—relationships and reputation.

But some of her success undoubtedly comes from a sports mentality.

Clinton takes what she has learned as a student athlete, a sports fan and the daughter, wife and sister of college and high school coaches and applies it to her team at PRC.

"It's almost one and the same at times," she said, comparing coaching to management.

"People need to understand the rules. There can only be one quarterback on the team, and he has a role and he has to stay within his role. Everyone has a role here, and if we all do our role as best we can we will succeed."

A team approach also has helped her in hiring, according to PRC Executive Vice President M. Brent Armstrong.

"Ms. Clinton learned early on in her life as the team captain when selecting members for her team in the ball fields of West Virginia that she needed to select the best talent in order to win the game," Armstrong wrote in his nomination of Clinton.

"It was never important that Ms. Clinton was the best player on the team—it was more important to her that the entire team excelled and for everyone to win. That trait has followed Ms. Clinton throughout her entire professional career."

When asked her proudest accomplishment, she speaks of those team members, her employees.

"A lot of my employees have been able to buy houses, to buy automobiles, to have babies because now they have very secure jobs," she said. "I'm very proud of that."

In the Community

Clinton engages her company and her employees in a long list of charitable community activities. Among them, PRC has served as a Partner in Education with the Monongalia County Middle School Alternative Learning Center since 2001, participates in United Way and sponsors the Mountaineer Balloon Festival.

And, recently, both Clinton and PRC have been recognized for their accomplishments.

In April, Clinton was named by The Dominion Post as one of the 100 most influential people and events in the Morgantown area.

In August, PRC received an award from the Department of Energy as its Woman-Owned Small Business of the Year for 2008 in recognition of the company's "creative and unique solutions to DOE requirements and for providing extraordinary customer service."

And, in December, Clinton will be awarded the Minority Small Business Person of the Year by the West Virginia District of the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Clinton and her husband recently celebrated their 30th anniversary. Their son, Kurtis Clinton, works at PRC, and their granddaughter, Sophia, is 5 years old.