Ana Fernandez-Parmet Grew a Family and Built a Technology Business

Everyone has a unique recipe for success, and for Ana Fernandez-Parmet, it’s always been about putting family first—whether it’s her own husband and children (and now grandchildren) or the women entrepreneurs she’s so deeply connected with through NAWBO.

This past January, the company that Ana and her husband, Mike, founded in 1991 turned 33 years old. Ana knows this well because Parmetech, Inc. is the same age as their first-born son. Being pregnant with him fueled their initial interest in becoming their own boss.

A Career and Life Change

Parmetech today is an industry-leading classroom and office technology solutions, products, software and services company for customers across a wide range of industries, but Ana started her career with a much different focus. She worked as a social worker—her area of study in college—with children from welfare environments in a rough part of Philadelphia.

“It was really hard work emotionally and ideally I wanted to be a psychologist but wasn’t ready for grad school,” Ana recalls. “Also, I saw the ugly side and was getting disillusioned not knowing where I was going. My husband said to me, ‘You’ve got to do something else.’”

Mike grabbed a phonebook and called a local export management company. When he reached the owner, he told him that Ana was a social worker looking for another job and that she spoke Spanish (she’s a first-generation Cuban, who was born in the U.S., graduated from high school in Columbia and then attended college in Pennsylvania).

The owner’s assistant happened to be out recovering from a car accident, so he said he could use Ana’s help. “I typed all my college papers and wasn’t very good at it,” she laughs, “but he said, ‘You’re smart and can spell and I need that.’” For three months, the owner wrote things down and Ana typed them up, and she was already earning more than in her previous career.

Once the assistant returned, Ana was offered a role in inside sales. The company represented U.S. manufacturers, exporting products to be used on oil rigs mostly in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. “I didn’t need to know about the products,” she says. “Bids would come in through the fax machine and I had to figure out pricing and send them back.”

Ana enjoyed supporting the sales team and working with international customers, however, when she became pregnant, it was new territory for her and the company owner to navigate. Ana didn’t want her son in daycare and didn’t have parents or in-laws who could step in to help. She asked about working from home a few days a week, but the owner was uncomfortable with it.

Meanwhile, Mike, who had been working as a computer programmer for a mortgage company, was laid off when Ana was 4-and-a-half months pregnant. He consulted with companies for a while, then after their son was born, they began thinking more seriously about business ownership, but had such different skill sets and career experiences.

But Mike had an idea: Back at the mortgage company, they had been using remanufactured toner cartridges that were removed from the print unit, taken to a plant to be refurbished and then returned. Mike and Ana decided to approach the man doing this to serve as his sales reps.

“We didn’t have any customers so made up a script and I’d call people out of the phonebook,” says Ana. “We had one product only for laser printers. We started in January 1991 and began to get people to say, ‘Okay.’ Before we knew it, we had our second child 19 months later.”

Ana remembers driving to the factory with her children to meet customers. For four years, it was just her and Mike and then they hired a technician and delivery person. They also joined forces with HP to sell their laser printers and other product lines. “We have five kids and our two oldest now work with us…the ones who came to the factory when they were little.”

As the business grew, Ana and Mike grew out of their condo with a basement converted into an office into a house. Since 2009, the business has been all under one roof—outside their home, but not far from the kids’ schools so they could continue to put their family first. “We grew a family and built a business,” she emphasizes.

An Expanded “Family”

For a long time, Ana and Mike were Parmetech’s only salespeople. When they were finally in the position to hire someone to help sell, Ana had breathing room to get out and network. She discovered NAWBO Philadelphia in 2018 when she attended a small networking event, but wasn’t inspired to join. That changed in 2000 when she returned for a larger event.

Ana was active on the NAWBO Philadelphia Board for 17 years. She was Alliance chair and co-chair, served on the Executive Committee as secretary and vice president, and was president elect from 2016-2018, president from 2018-2020 and immediate past president from 2020-2022. Then, Ana shared this NAWBO leadership knowledge with other chapter leaders as part of the President Assembly Steering Committee.

During these years, Ana was also part of a group of NAWBO women who trained at the Edward Lowe Foundation in Michigan on their Peerspectives Method for Mastermind facilitation. This resulted in her facilitating a Mastermind group for the NAWBO Institute’s Circle program for top-tier women business owners for three years.

Additionally, Ana was instrumental in launching NAWBO Philadelphia’s Semi-Circle program —inspired by the national Circle program to help women business owners grow their businesses to the million-dollar level. The program offers a mentor for the year, and Ana helped to secure mentors from her network.

A New Chapter

Parmetech now has 16 employees, including Ana and her son and daughter, plus program analysts and technicians. Ana serves as president and CEO while Mike is CFO. Their son is Parmetech’s Chief Operations Officer.

The company’s core business remains remanufactured cartridges, but they’ve expanded into areas like pay-per-click printing and print environment management. In recent years, they also partnered with ViewSonic and began dabbling in smartboard interactive panels for conference rooms and classrooms.

“This part of our business exploded,” explains Ana. “It took off to the point where if we didn’t have it during COVID, we would have had to lay off employees and eventually close our doors, but didn’t because our main clients are health/hospital systems that were considered essential businesses. We work a lot in higher education, too, which was a ghost town. Our printing went to zero overnight, so this part of our business was our saving grace.”

With printing now having made a comeback, Ana and her team are focused on leveraging their interactive technology to get a foot in the door of organizations that might have print needs, too. They’re also getting out there to attend events and network. “The whole networking thing is so challenging in a virtual world,” says this recipient of NAWBO’s 2023 Susan Hager Award for her legacy. “I was just so grateful to have the network at NAWBO that I did.”