National Grid, LIPA reach out to minority-owned business

Perfect your company's seven-second elevator pitch. Do your homework. And get certified.

At a conference Thursday in Hicksville, National Grid and the Long Island Power Authority offered such tips and other resources to hundreds of companies owned by women or minorities eager to do business with the utilities.

National Grid hires vendors for a variety of services and products, including information systems, construction, vehicles, gas and electrical equipment and office and industrial supplies.

London-based National Grid, which is under contract to manage the electricity network for LIPA's 1.1 million customers, has set a target of increasing its proportion of small and diverse suppliers to 25 percent by 2015, said Carla Hunter Ramsey, director of National Grid's supplier diversity program.

LIPA said its goal is to have 3 percent of its vendors be minority-owned businesses and 1.5 percent be women-owned.

Annemarie Leigh Austin, president of Hauppauge-based Powertech Controls Co. Inc., said she learned in a workshop she had "work to do" on crafting a succinct pitch about her company, a distributor of electrical controls.

The 20-year-old company, with 20 employees, has always been woman-owned, but Austin said she only recently completed the process of obtaining certification. She hoped it would be "a way of increasing our business overall."

Hempstead attorney Maxine Broderick said she wanted to find out how to seek work with the utilities in the areas of labor and employment law. The main take-away message by lunchtime? "You must be certified," she said.