Pei-Chen Jane Lee came to Columbus from Taiwan for graduate school, built a career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and launched UNICON International in 1990. What started as a one-placement-at-a-time IT staffing firm has grown into a full-service provider of workforce staffing, IT solutions, and managed services, with Fortune 500 client relationships spanning more than two decades.
For more than three decades, UNICON International, Inc. (UNICON) has quietly built a reputation as one of Ohio’s most trusted workforce and IT services firms. The company has served clients like American Honda Motor Co. (Honda) and American Electric Power (AEP) for over two decades, won multiple OMSDC awards, and evolved from a specialized IT staffing firm into a full-service provider of workforce staffing. IT solutions, and managed services.
Behind that growth is founder Pei-Chen Jane Lee (Jane), an immigrant from Taiwan. She came to Columbus Ohio for graduate school with nothing but a dream and began her career at AT&T Bell Laboratories. On the first day of her first job, her assigned mentor told her he couldn’t understand her English. He had been one of the people who interviewed and hired her for the job. “I was crushed,” Jane recalls. She stopped asking him questions after that. But by the end of that first year, the same mentor asked Jane to review his performance write-up before he submitted it. “I was shocked,” she says. “But at the same time, I felt flattered.”
There was also the co-worker who told her, “If you don’t like it here, go back to where you came from.” and later remarked, “You Asians are going to take over AT&T.” Jane looked around her work location. There were fewer than a dozen Asian Americans there. “Not until the day I become President of AT&T,” She replied calmly.
Those moments didn’t break Jane. Instead, they set her trajectory. “Very early on in my career, I set my goal,” Jane says. “I really wanted to prove to people that we, as minorities and women, can do an equally good job, if not better.”
She’s spent her entire career doing exactly that.
Five years after joining AT&T Bell Laboratories, Jane became the first Asian woman promoted to Technical Manager at her location. She managed large-scale real-time telecom projects and was eventually handed supplier management responsibilities on top of her technical leadership role. That dual assignment gave her something most founders don’t get before launching a business: an operator’s view of what a good supplier looks like from the buyer’s chair. She saw what clients needed and what suppliers often failed to deliver. And she started thinking she could do it better.
When AT&T Bell Laboratories later offered employees a special leave-of-absence program, two years with insurance and a held position, Jane initially thought she’d take six months off. She had two young children. The pace of corporate life had become relentless. But once she started exploring the idea of starting her own company, the possibilities took over. She used the full two years of leave. And she never went back.
In 1990, Jane officially launched UNICON as a lean IT staffing firm, built by technical engineers and managers from Bell Labs. They knew how to recruit technical talent because they were technical talent. The early model was deliberately low-risk: IT staffing, one placement at a time.
Then clients started asking for more. Project-based work came first. Then managed services. Then professional services, a category Jane initially resisted because it sat outside UNICON’s core IT identity. But the logic was hard to argue with. “We use recruiters internally. We use administrative staff. We know how to find those people,” she recalls. The expansion into professional services proved to be a success.
UNICON’s client relationships are long-term. Honda has been a client for more than twenty years. AEP, the same. Contracts like those are renewed year after year because UNICON keeps earning the work. In a services business where switching costs are low and competitors are always calling, two-decade relationships are the strongest proof of performance a company can offer.
The recognition and awards followed. Over the years, Jane and UNICON have received numerous honors, including five or six from the Ohio Minority Supplier Development Council (OMSDC) alone. Yet for Jane, the awards themselves were never the most meaningful part of the journey. In fact, when George Sims, OMSDC’s President and CEO, encouraged her to apply for MBE of the Year, her first instinct was to step aside. “We’ve won too many awards,” she told him. “I want to give the opportunity to other newer MBEs.” Sims looked at her like she was kidding. She applied. She won. Again.
But what shaped Jane’s thinking about OMSDC wasn’t the trophies. It was a program called the Center of Excellence, chaired at the time by Abigail Kofete of Cardinal Health, now OMSDC Board Chair. The program paired corporate members with MBE suppliers in a year-long cohort that met monthly, rotating through corporate sites. UNICON was the only firm sponsored simultaneously by two Fortune 500 corporate members – Honda and Nationwide Insurance.
“That program was one of the best I’ve ever attended,” Jane says. The value went far beyond networking. It provided firsthand exposure to how major corporations actually operate: their procurement processes, priorities, expectations and internal language. Meetings were held at the sites of various participating corporate members, where executives often spoke directly with the MBEs. The result was the kind of buyer intelligence that no brochure or networking event can replicate.
That understanding aligned naturally with Jane’s vision for UNICON: to be the “Best Business Partner for Success” for both clients and associates. Over the years, that philosophy has guided UNICON’s operations and culture. “The extremely positive feedback from our clients, associates and even job candidates made all of our hard work worthwhile,” Jane says.
UNICON’s next chapter is shaped by two forces pulling in different directions. The first is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Jane finds AI both exciting and unsettling. Her VP recently ran an experiment: after UNICON’s team finished a proposal the traditional way, he fed the same requirements into ChatGPT. The AI-generated version was, in her words, “equally good, if not better.”
That raises a question she thinks the entire services industry will have to answer: how do you differentiate a great supplier from someone who’s simply good at prompting?
The other force is legacy. Jane is direct about it. “I’m not getting any younger,” she says. “Before I become history, I hope I can contribute to making some differences.” That ambition extends beyond UNICON itself. She wants to help reshape how MBEs support one another, how corporate members create real opportunities instead of symbolic inclusion, and how organizations like OMSDC can advocate more effectively, especially as the policy landscape shifts.
She’s particularly clear-eyed about the gap between access and outcomes. OMSDC helped open doors by creating introductions and connections, she says. But turning those introductions into sustainable business relationships has always been the harder challenge. Too often, large corporations default to the assumption that bigger suppliers are safer and better suppliers. For MBEs, and for the organizations supporting them, the challenge is building enough proof, enough trust, and enough track records that buyers stop defaulting and start investing in capable local talent.
That’s what thirty-five years of showing up looks like. Not a single breakthrough moment, but a compounding record of delivering the results – over and over again that makes the next conversation easier than the last.
Jane is clear about what comes next. “How can we work together, between MBEs and corporations and organizations like OMSDC, to give every MBE the opportunity to prove themselves?” It’s not a rhetorical question. She’s been answering it for thirty-five years.
Jane’s legacy is clear. Showing up, doing the work, and leaving the door a little wider for whoever walks through it next.
How Can You Support OMSDC in Growing Ohio’s Economy?
If you’re an Ohio-based, minority-owned business ready to compete for larger contracts, or a buyer building a resilient, local supply base, connect with OMSDC. Start with certification, sourcing introductions, and practical guidance on the changing landscape: certification@ohiomsdc.org.
Have a success story you want to share? Email us at marketing@ohiomsdc.org or submit our story form.