Fortune Magazine: Second Act
The Student/Philanthropist: Sabrina Kay

       Ever wonder what it would be like to sell your business to a much larger company and then stay on as a fat-cat executive? Be warned: If Sabrina Kay's experience is any guide, you won't like it. In January 2003 she sold her fashion-design school, California Design College, to Pittsburgh's Education Management for an amount that was enough to set her up nicely for life. Part of what made the deal appealing to Kay was that EDMC would give her the chance, she thought, to develop new educational ventures. She spent a year working for EDMC, with the title CEO of Special Projects. It was not a good year. "Working in a billion-dollar corporation, there are a lot of politics and bureaucracy. When systems matter more than individual input, we entrepreneurs get flattened," she says. "I spent the last six months there twiddling my thumbs. So we parted ways."

Kay came to the U.S. with her parents as a 19-year-old who "didn't speak enough English to order lunch at McDonald's." She wanted to be a fashionista, and figured out how to apply CAD/CAM to designing at a time when few American designers even used computers. Her school started in 1991 with six students in her bedroom, and grew into the biggest nationally accredited school of its kind in the country, with a student body of about 800.

The business didn't leave time for Kay's own education. She's now a full-time student in the University of Southern California's executive MBA program. "It's challenging, because everyone else here has had far more business training," she says. "My background was really in the arts, and I just picked up the business stuff on the fly, so I have to work hard to keep up. But I love the intellectual stimulation."

At the same time, Kay has launched the Sabrina Kay Charitable Foundation, which has two main projects: building a homeless shelter, with educational programs, for women and children, and developing mentoring and internship programs for young people who want to enter fashion. "Right now Los Angeles has beds in shelters for 800 men but none for women. We have to fix that," she says. "And the mentoring programs are great. It's fun for me to help kids see their potential."

Will she start another company someday? Seems likely: Kay has already set up a venture capital firm called Fashion Umbrella that funds fledgling apparel companies. Still, she's in no rush to get back in the CEO seat. "The life I have now gives me a chance to be a normal human being. My company was a passionate love affair for 14 years, but I never had a social life. It would be nice to get married and have a family. That's something I just never got around to."

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