Kathy Benson was looking for work with more flexibility than her boss would give her. It was 1988, and she and her husband had just moved to Herndon, Va. They had a new baby and a new house, and she had to work.

Benson met her friend, Sue Lynd, at a McDonald’s and the two drew up a business plan on a napkin. That partnership evolved into Office Remedies Inc., known today as ORI, which is responsible for the monthly jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the single most vital national economic news.

A 1979 graduate of Altoona Area High School, Kathleen Trexler Benson is president and CEO of ORI. In the 27 years since she co-founded it, the company has grown into a profitable market research firm with 460 employees, seven offices and annual revenue that approaches $23 million.

Benson’s success was portended in her junior high school days when she made and sold wreaths and other handcrafted items in her Eldorado neighborhood in south Altoona.

“I was always trying to figure out a way to make money,” said Benson, who, at 53, now is making it in the six-figure range.

“She was very determined about everything she did,” said her mother, Madolyn Knopp, who now lives in Virginia, too.

Benson’s was a mostly positive, blue-collar raising: Her father worked at the Sylvania plant and her mother worked nights at a Sears credit office so she could be home with the kids during the day. The family ate meals together every night and got together with extended family on Sundays.

While at Roosevelt Junior High?School, she started dating the young man she later would marry, Shawn Benson. That relationship helped her get through her parents’ divorce when she was 14.

“It taught me that in difficult situations, you have to look for the positive and what you can learn from it,” Benson said. “This approach has worked well with business because there are always so many … unexpected things that just happen.”

At Altoona High, Benson was a cheerleader for her boyfriend’s football team, and she took mostly business courses. She babysat for years, and, at 16, she went to work for Kopp’s drug store. Her senior year, she participated in a co-op, attending school in the mornings and working in the afternoons for the now-defunct Maximum Machine Co.

“I need the challenges so I don’t get bored … The other thing is that I’m very competitive,” she said, explaining what drives her work ethic.

Her brother, Mike Trexler, suggested that was an understatement.

“Sports was a big thing in our family, and competitiveness was just part of it,” said the 1980 Altoona High graduate.

But Benson, he said, always was very nurturing and took on more responsibilities, especially cooking for her two younger brothers after the divorce.

As much as she always loved learning, she didn’t see college as an option. She went to work fulltime with Maximum.

“I wanted to go (to college) but I didn’t know how I could make that happen,” Benson said.

A year later, she quit her job, moved with a friend to the Washington, D.C., area and took a job with the federal government. She wanted to be closer to her boy-friend, who was on football scholarship at the University of Maryland, not far from the nation’s capital.

A year after that, in a traditional ceremony attended by 400 friends and family members, they married at St. Rose of Lima Catholic?Church in Altoona. They both were 20.

“Shawn had his stipend for his room and board, and we had this little apartment. I was working for the federal government making $7,000 a year. We thought we were fat and happy,” Benson said.

As a spouse of a player, she traveled to football games, including the Aloha Bowl. She contentedly sewed on the side, doing alterations and making pillows and draperies; she took classes at night.

Her husband started as a guard for the Terrapins his last two years after being redshirted his freshman year.

After he graduated, Shawn signed as a free agent with the Washington Redskins, and the couple moved to Virginia. But a week into training camp, Shawn reinjured his foot. He decided not to pursue professional football, and they decided to stay in Herndon after falling in love with the area. He was accepted into the sales program at Xerox. She found a job at an engineering consulting firm closer to home.

“I don’t know if things would have turned out differently if Shawn had not been injured,” she said. “Would there be an ORI?”

What if she had gone to college and earned her degree?

“She is very, very intelligent,” said her husband. “Had she gone to college, who knows what she would have done. … Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, those people didn’t finish college. She’s not them. But, hey, not bad.”

After buying the house, Benson got pregnant. After Travis, their son, was born, she eventually returned to work. She loved her job, but it didn’t allow her the healthy family-work balance she wanted. She phoned her friend and set up that fateful meeting at McDonald’s in Bethesda, Md.

Benson called on her fast typing skills learned at Altoona High, and the partners decided to start a word processing company. They soon realized that wasn’t a good plan, so Benson went back to the library in search of a new idea and she found one: data entry.

“Our moms got us our first little projects,” she remembers. “We started to get work.”

But there was a problem with time.

“I couldn’t stay up all night and do all this data entry,” Benson said.

They started bringing in other women who, like them, wanted that family-work balance and wanted to work from home.

“They were probably overqualified, but they … were conscientious because they were thankful to have those opportunities,” Benson said.

As business picked up, Benson won a concession from her boss: She would work four days a week at her same pay and take off Wednesdays for her business.

“I would look at things in the newspaper and think, ‘Gee, they need some help with data entry,’ and then cold-call them,” she said.

After two years, Benson felt comfortable enough to quit her job, and she kept operating ORI out of the basement of her home. A year after that, she had a daughter, McCaul.

She remembers an early contract, with the UN World Bank, in which she decided to personally pick up surveys to save on courier costs. She nervously needled her big SUV through capital traffic and to a loading dock.

“There were 150 boxes of those surveys,” Benson said with a laugh. “It took me several trips. I took them home and filled my garage.”

When she and Lynd started running the data on floppy discs in their 20-megabyte computer, it took them all night.

“We were always bootstrapping,” Benson said.

The next year, they bought a new computer and hired a courier service.

After eight years in Benson’s basement, in 1996, they moved the business into offices three miles from her house.

The partners had agreed to grow the company very slowly, “yet, we took risks when we needed to take risks,” Benson said. “I didn’t really want to grow it that quickly when the kids were young. I wanted that harmony with kids and work.”

Her family ate dinner together nearly every night, and Benson never missed a sporting event.

“That meant I might have to work until 2 in the morning or get to the office by 5 in the morning,” she said. “But I did it because that was how I would prioritize my life. And I couldn’t have had a better partner than Shawn.”

Her client list grew.

Customers wanted help beyond simple data entry. Even ORI’s employees suggested ways to improve information they were entering, and clients started asking ORI to write the questions.

“Then they wanted to know what the survey meant, so we brought in a person with analytical ability,” Benson said. “The light bulb went off, and it was like, duh, we should do this.”

Later, a client wanted a full report, “so we started writing reports,” she said. “Then another light bulb would go off … “

By mid-2013, ORI had grown into a full-service research firm with 85 employees helping government agencies, private companies and nonprofit organizations, including The Nature Conservancy and the American Red Cross. By August of that year, ORI’s employment quintupled after landing the contract with the Labor Department.

“That was a game changer for us,” Benson said.

They had to negotiate larger lines of credit and open new offices. Locations now include Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta and Fort Walton Beach, Fla., in addition to Herndon.

Benson said she sometimes is surprised with ORI’s success.

“But when I look back at the hard work that Sue and I have done, and the sacrifices we made – some months we couldn’t take a paycheck – I’m not surprised,” she said.

ORI still is considered a small business because its revenues are less than $25 million. And Benson isn’t necessarily in a hurry to surpass that because of federal government guidelines.

But “we’re always looking for ways to keep growing because if you don’t, you’ll end up going out of business,” Benson said.

They have diversified – it is unusual for a market research company to serve government, private industry and nonprofits. But they still believe in flex time for employees – a “win-win” because the employee is happy and labor costs for the company are reduced.

Because of the number of offices, Benson’s schedule includes more travel. Her husband travels often, as well. After Xerox, Shawn has worked for several venture capital startups, including Sun Microsystems. Last week, he went to California on a new project.

But family remains important even though the demands are less with the children grown Travis, 28, is trying out on the pro golf circuit and McCaul, 24, graduated from Virginia Tech and now is in physical therapy graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Benson’s family eventually followed her to Virginia, including her youngest sibling, Mark Trexler, who died unexpectedly in 2007, and her father, Patrick Trexler, who died a year later with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). She and Shawn spend a lot of time with family and friends, cooking and entertaining at their Herndon home and their beach house at the Outer Banks.

“Their house is always fun and loving,” said Knopp. “Friends and family are there all the time, and, you know, they are a power couple. To think they met in junior high.”

They will celebrate their 34th anniversary this summer.

“It was your classic American story,” Shawn said. “She was a cheerleader. I was a football player. She caught my eye and we started dating … We had a lot in common and we still do.”

They have season tickets to Maryland basketball and football games, they both golf, and they like Jimmy Buffett, wine and intelligent conversation.

“We’re friends, too,” he said.

She said she doesn’t get back to Altoona as often as she would like – he returned a few weeks ago to pheasant hunt with his brothers. His parents, Bill and Joanne Benson, still live here, except when they winter in Florida.

One of her former teachers, Jean Lane, now retired from Altoona High, remembers Benson as a “really good kid, a good student, a good person.” But Lane admitted she was surprised that her former student excelled without a college education.

“Would it have made a difference in my company?” Benson wondered. “Maybe I wouldn’t have made some of those mistakes along the way. But it is what it is. You make the best of what you have.”

She mentors young women contemplating a business career, as well as networks through various associations with other women business owners.

“In the times we live, education is more and more important,” Benson said. “There are more opportunities now for people to figure out how to go to school than in the past, so if you can go, do it. … In life, you have to be happy with what you’re doing.”

Mirror staff writer Cherie Hicks is at 949-7030.