But Louis Giroux, the 80-year-old owner of Giroux Glass Co. and the buildings in which it was headquartered, told her it was a package deal all or nothing.

So Murrell, who had already bought and renovated several architecturally significant structures in the USC area, found herself the owner of not only a commercial Victorian-era village at 24th Street and Hoover Boulevard, but the head of a glass contracting company that was founded in 1946.

Even without knowledge of the glass business at the time, Murrell has managed to boost revenues from $1.2 million when she took over in 1991 to $17.9 million last year.

Of course, she had a couple of disasters to thank for part of that success.

Listening to employees

“When I took over I thought, ‘If I don’t do something with the glass company I could lose more money than with my real estate deal.’ So I said to the 10 people who were working there, ‘I need your help,'” she recalled.

The employees came up with several ways to better the business, such as improving the phone system, creating a customer evaluation sheet, setting up an 800 number, doing direct-mail advertising and bidding for bigger projects.

“Because construction was down (in the early 1990s), I was able to attract some fine, qualified people from other glass businesses that were in a declining market,” Murrell said.

Just as she was implementing her new plans, two major events took place that changed the course of her business. First came the 1992 riots, which left a path of destruction in and around the central city.

In the middle of the night, Murrell received a call from a Los Angeles Times building manager, who said rioters had broken all the windows on the first floor of the mammoth facility on Spring Street. Immediately, Murrell assembled her staff to repair the windows.

Then she got a call that the windows, display cases and mirrors at the Bullocks Wilshire department store in the Mid-Wilshire district had been broken by looters. Again, Murrell pulled together her team, which quickly replaced broken glass and repaired the damage.

She was taking advantage of her newfound reputation as an efficient and reliable contractor when the January 1994 Northridge earthquake put her company at the forefront of rebuilding scores of structures in the San Fernando Valley and beyond.

“That provided a plateau for us to show that we could service the needs of those who needed it,” Murrell said.

Entrepreneur’s boot camp

Murrell did one other thing that had a major impact on the business. In 1994, she enrolled in a program called FastTrac, a 12-week entrepreneurial boot camp run by USC’s Business Expansion Network. The program is geared primarily toward minority-owned and women-owned businesses to help them grow. Murrell excelled in the program.

“I call her an accidental entrepreneur,” said Nitin Bhatt, the executive director of the Business Expansion Network. “She got into something because her instinct told her there was some value that could be created. She was savvy enough early on to know that she needed to learn some management and planning skills. From 1993 to 1997, her sales growth was 337 percent.”

One of Murrell’s first major decisions was to tackle bigger commercial projects, rather than the smaller jobs previously handled by Giroux Glass.

“Louie Giroux didn’t take on a project that was outside of six months because he wanted to sell his company. We started taking on projects that took as long as two years,” she said.

Those projects included doing all the interior glass work for the new Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, the interior glass at the J. Paul Getty Center near Brentwood, the atrium at the Pacific Design Center, the glass inside Walt Disney Production Studios in Burbank, and the renovated United Airlines terminal at Los Angeles International Airport.

“They did a very good job and came through with everything we asked for,” said Vernon Pounds, the project architect for Staples Center. “It was a fairly complex building, and it had to be completed in 18 months.”

Currently, Giroux Glass has contracts with the St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and American Airlines at its LAX terminal.

A new division created three years ago is servicing customers in the high-end real estate market, including a 28,000-square-foot home being built in Orange County.

All this has prompted the National Glass Association to rank Giroux the No. 11 glass contracting company in the nation in terms of annual revenues.

Not bad for a woman whose intent was simply to spiff up a few buildings around USC.