Ross a legal voice for R.I. small-business owners

SIMPLE FORMULA: Miriam A. Ross has a simple formula for success: Work hard at what you love and stay focused. She’s pictured with Kevin P. Braga, of counsel for Ross’ law firm. / PBN PHOTO/NATALJA KENT
SIMPLE FORMULA: Miriam A. Ross has a simple formula for success: Work hard at what you love and stay focused. She’s pictured with Kevin P. Braga, of counsel for Ross’ law firm. / PBN PHOTO/NATALJA KENT

Miriam A. Ross may have the secret to being a successful business owner – and balancing that with other professional, as well as personal, obligations and interests – and the answer isn’t all that surprising.
It takes passion, direction, and lots of hard work, she says.
“I’m up early and I’m up late,” said Ross, who has run her own law firm, Law Offices of Miriam A. Ross Esq., in Providence for the last eight years. “To be successful in anything, you need to be doing something that you love and [from which] you derive benefit, from both a financial and psychological perspective. [When you’re doing that], it all sort of falls in place.”
Of course, as hard work would imply, getting to that point isn’t quite that easy.
Ross wrapped up her philosophy on how to do it all while reflecting on the path her life and career have taken, from growing up in 1960s Ohio – where, she said, she was given needed encouragement to forge her own future – to becoming one of very few women-owned law firms in Rhode Island.
She recently was named the U.S. Small Business Administration’s New England Women in Business Champion of the Year, an honor she said she was humbled to receive.
Though she is, in her own words, “quite measured” in what she openly shares, she did admit that there have been expected bumps along the road to success.
“I have encountered, as I think most professional women have, resistance in the marketplace for a competent woman,” she said. “I think women, because we do so much, we tend to discount our own value and so I think there are general obstacles we are still working to overcome.”
After obtaining a bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ross earned her law degree at Cleveland State University, College of Law.
She began her career practicing corporate law, working first in the automotive industry in Ohio and then moving to what ultimately became Textron, Inc., in Michigan, until that position required her to relocate to the Providence area. She worked after that for GTECH Corp., a gaming-technology company in Providence, as counsel managing the global compliance program.
Those first 25 years of her professional life were inspired by identifying a career that would allow her, she said, to “use my greatest strengths as an individual” and to find a place for her personal interest in business and corporate issues that she developed while studying in Latin America during high school and studying Spanish as an undergraduate student.
“I got a real taste and strong interest in global issues and the international arena,” she said. “It was like, oh, here is the best of all words, I can go work for a corporation that has an international footprint,” she said.
Making the switch to entrepreneurship and to a focus on the Providence area’s small-business market, rather than corporate America, she said, also was born out of her passion for business – this time a passion to run her own.
The decision was driven, too, by wanting to help small businesses – which as a group she views as a major economic mover in the state – gain access to counsel they might not have otherwise.
“[That may be] for no other reason than entrepreneurs don’t necessarily go into business with huge funding. I fill a niche,” said Ross. “The target is to provide and grow the business in that segment that need legal services and can’t [handle] the overhead of a full-time lawyer. That’s what this firm can provide.”
Part of her aim is to be the champion the SBA designated her as being. She called the award “humbling.”
She’s made it a mission to be a visible voice of not only the small-business owner but also the female business owner. She’s one of six chairs, and the only female chair, of the Rhode Island Small Business Economic Summit sponsored by the SBA and the Rhode Island Small Business Development Corporation, where she is an advisory-board member.
She also is a member of the Small Business Association of New England’s Rhode Island chapter and is on the continuing-education and business-organization committees of the Rhode Island Bar Association.
“I go to [events for] networking and places to champion small-business issues, and inevitably I’m one of a few lawyers in the room. Invariably, I’m the only woman lawyer,” said Ross. “I think that says a lot about my commitment to the entrepreneur and the small-business community in providing and giving them a voice at the table, in whatever table that might be.”
With just one other counsel in-house, and intermittent clerical assistance, it’s often Ross who answers the office phone. For all practical matters, it’s a one-woman law office and her responsibilities don’t stop there. Ross also teaches at Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol.
She lost her 2010 bid as an independent candidate for the Rhode Island Senate in the third district to the Democratic incumbent Rhoda Perry, running on a platform of creating economic change through the promotion of small businesses as well as government collaborations with the arts community and colleges.
She said another run is a “distinct possibility.”
In the meantime, she’s focused on growing her law practice and keeping a handle on the challenges of learning when to say yes or no to business or personal opportunities.
To keep everything in balance, she said, it all comes back to family – her inspiration to practice those early-to-rise, late-to-bed days.
“I really drew on my upbringing and there probably were no better role models than my parents,” she said. •

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