Lori Patterson

Lori co-founded OJC Technologies in 1998. Since then, the staff size has grown from 5 to 16 people, and annual gross revenue has increased forty-fold. A Mechanical Engineering graduate from the University of Illinois, Lori brings the experience of working in corporate management to the entrepreneurial adventure of being the business mind behind a team of bright, bohemian artists and software engineers at OJC Technologies.

Following a long, hot trip from Los Angeles to Champaign, IL in a ’48 Mercury Coupe at age 11 months, Lori grew up with the University of Illinois in her backyard. Influenced greatly by her father, a psychology professor and entrepreneur, and her activist mother, Lori first pursued psychology and political science in college. Bored after one semester, she followed some students into their classroom in an unknown building to find out what they were learning.  It took her the entire class period to figure out what the mathematical summation sign on the board meant, but her brain felt great and she ran straight to her counselor and changed her major to “whatever they were doing in that classroom.” Thus, Lori became a mechanical engineer.

She spent the first 10 years of her career in corporate America working for Andersen Consulting in Chicago for 4 years as a systems consultant before she was hired away by Caterpillar to head up a 20 person product development team and then moved on to join Solo Cup for 5 years as a Project Manager. Lori has managed projects as large as $4.5M and has been responsible for up to 75 staff at once.

For the past 12 years Lori has been enmeshed in the entrepreneurial world, founding and growing three companies and providing business consulting to numerous startups and established organizations. She specializes in loosening the stuffy, grounding the chaotic and turning good ideas into profitable, sustainable entities. Recently, Lori received the Woman on the Rise award from the Illinois State Treasurer’s Office and she’s proud to be a 2009 Leadership Illinois graduate.