November's Featured Manager: Roberta Clay

Clay's Advice: "Treat customers as you would want to be treated."

Roberta Clay offers bookkeeping, payroll, desktop publishing, marketing, office support, management consulting and meeting and event planning services. She’ll help clients find services she doesn’t provide.

Name and title: Roberta L. Clay owns Small Business Services, a business operations support company in Aberdeen.

Personal background: Clay grew up in North Carolina, relocating to Maryland to take a job at the Aberdeen Proving Ground where she worked for more than 32 years as a quality manager. A graduate of Hampton University and George Washington University, she continues to enhance her skills through classes, seminars and events at Harford Community College.

Professional background: Small Business Services began as a home based business in 1990. From 2000 to 2008 the company was in downtown Bel Air, but has moved to 16 North Philadelphia Boulevard in Aberdeen. Clay has served on the board of the Harford Leadership Academy and currently is on the boards of the Harford County Dept. of Social Services, the Small Business Development Center and Helping One Another. She is active in the Messiah Community Baptist Church in Abingdon and Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, a community service organization.

Keys to success: Clay said success has come from a “sincere and obvious desire to help other small business owners be successful. The motto of our company is ‘Our Goal is Your Success’ and this is what we believe and strive for in our daily relationships.”

Goals: “My goal is to hand over a viable business to my daughter, Nickal Biggs, the current managing director of Small Business Services,” said Clay.

Advice: Clay said her advice to entrepreneurs is to have a passion for what you do and treat customers as you would want to be treated.

What could be done to make business more successful: “As our business moves forward in the 21st century,” said Clay, “we continue to strive to be more tech savvy, while at the same time assuring that we continually read the pulse of those we serve.”