by Tom Blair
It is interesting what human beings can accomplish if they have to versus how little they accomplish if they are allowed to. When a light aircraft crashes in the wilderness of Alaska, the bush pilot and his two passengers walk three days through freezing snow, eating nothing but toothpaste retrieved from a toiletry kit, and finally stagger into a remote trading camp. Meanwhile, we have another human being, manufactured by the same God as the downed bush pilot, lying on a couch watching I Love Lucy reruns. While this poor soul doesn’t possess the initiative to interview for a job, he is able to muster the strength to waddle to the front door to see if the mailman has dropped off a welfare check. In a way, and I don’t mean to be ungrateful when I say this, but Dad and I weren’t trying our hardest to get ahead. We were content. I found myself believing that being content made me discontented. Or, as Peggy Lee sang, “Is That All There Is?”
It wasn’t an easy decision. It wasn’t a popular decision with my parents. I decided to leave Bankers Life. I wanted to work harder and smarter than everyone else so I could have more than most for my family. That previous sentence is not honest. My family would have had more than enough if I had stayed at Bankers Life. My kids would never have gone hungry in our warm and secure home. Rather, it was me wanting to get on the playing field; if I worked as hard as Li and applied myself, big rewards would be waiting. Clearly, I had a magnificent head start on Li. I was a white male, over six feet tall, who spoke perfect Midwest English and had an Anglo-Saxon name pronounceable to all. I owned dark-blue suits and I could name the starting quarterback for every NFL team. If Li could move up his success curve from where he was, I should take a risk, a risk to do better.
I decided to go into business. But what business? Without excess capital the choices were limited. Becoming a consultant seemed to be the most cost-effective. Stationery, business cards, airline tickets, and an answering service would be my manufacturing plant. A problem: My reservoir of experience was not impressive as gauged to any existing industries. What made sense was for me to consult in a new industry where there were no gray-haired sages—that new industry being the expanding HMO industry. I had already visited one HMO and had attended an HMO conference; I could place this sliver of experience under a magnifying glass when presenting to prospects.
Made another tough decision: I decided to leave Des Moines. Mom and Dad, and for certain my boss Mr. Hurd, thought Alice and I were crazy to give up a good job and a close-by family. But given that I was targeting the HMO industry as my marketplace, Washington, DC was the source of all good. HMOs were being spawned by a giant federal grant program that incubated fledgling HMOs. The administration and money spigot for this program was in Washington. Actually, in a suburb of Washington: Rockville, Maryland.
EMILIE, 1624: Father counseled us of a magnificent new land. Acres for all with opportunity for all. His friend, Mister Raymonds of the Gloucestershire Council, told of the New World. Crops, livestock, and fishes more than one could partake. Told we that in London a play recounted the emeralds and pearls that hung from trees as leaves in the land at our journey’s end. When asked how far, told a fortnight to London and two months at sea. At the end of the journey in the most lovely place, Jamestown, on the James River of the New World. Told that those before us built delightful cottages where we could live. Those before would greet us and bestow upon us gracious hospitality.
Alice and I flew in for a weekend of house hunting and returned discouraged. A $20,000 house in Des Moines cost a daunting $40,000 in the Washington area. We ended up buying a less-than-perfect house for a little over $30,000. I won’t say that we lied and cheated to acquire a mortgage, but we did manage some ambiguities. The mortgage company wanted copies of my W-2 statements. This I could provide. I didn’t mention that my pending resignation rendered them irrelevant. To help with our pleadings for a loan, much ado was made about Alice resuming her teaching profession. We didn’t add that this would be at least ten years away, given the age of our three munchkins.
On a sweat-dripping hot August weekend Alice and I packed up our worldly possessions and squeezed them into a U-Haul trailer, which was carefully and hopefully hitched to the bumper of our Ford Maverick. The trip to DC was memorably awful; consider an un-air-conditioned car, 95-degree humid afternoons, three kids aged three, four, and five, and a goldfish in a jar.
LUKE, 1851: Sand as hard as rock, looking down, no footsteps to confirm our progress. Slowly at first, just a breeze. A furnace, but a breeze. Then harder the wind blew, all white. Our goal, the mountains, no longer in front of our path. A glance to the right, to the left, no mountains. In the wind not sand, but a vapor of alkaline. Burning eyes and burning throat, choking and gagging on air of salt. At that moment everything I had, or thought I would ever have, thankfully traded for a gulp of cool water. Walking, staggering on, praying the Captain would scream a halt, commanding everyone to take a swallow from a keg, but he marched on, his head bowed, not bowed in defeat, but bowed to study the compass he held, the compass pointing west.
I glanced back, Arch shuffling, his eyes two slits on a caked white oval. Mother’s bonnet pulled from her hair to cover her face. Mary, poor Mary, her arms on Father’s shoulders, walking behind his lead, with her face buried in his shirt.
Progress was slow; we stopped every hundred miles to add a quart of oil because our Ford had lost bladder control. As we passed through Peoria my confidence was elbowed out by a mob of mental doubters. I kept glancing in the rear-view mirror, perhaps hoping to see my father and mother overtaking me in their Chevy, wanting to tell us that Bankers Life demanded I return. That day, while heading east on I-80, I would have gladly taken a 20% pay cut to have my old job back. The only thing that kept me going was thoughts about Li. He had come to this country with no friends, no job, no money, and little understanding of the language. He didn’t turn back.
I had no clue. Not only didn’t I have a clue, I didn’t know there was a mystery. The avalanche of prerequisite administrative tasks that accompanied the birth of my company almost caused a corporate stillbirth. Bell Atlantic had no enthusiasm for installing business phones for a startup entity. Blue Cross, Travelers, Aetna, Cigna—no one wanted to provide health insurance for a company with two employees. Plus, none of this mattered because no building manager was prepared to lease space to a company with neither a current address nor a balance sheet.
In time the ugly pile of obstacles was tunneled under by the application of immense imagination and sleight of hand. And these were the easy problems. The hardest challenge was convincing a prospect that he or she should contract with a vagrant consultant from Des Moines. My age was another hindrance; being closer to acne than to gray hair puts one at a disadvantage when marketing experience and brain power. I persisted. I learned that 90% of marketing is showing up. I traveled, I traveled, and I traveled some more. It wasn’t easy travel, either. It was hard travel and cheap eating. More often than not I ate dinner at a fast-food place; for 99 cents a small Coke, fries, and a grilled meaty substance on a sesame seed bun.
JACK, 1864: It was after Sharpsburg—or Antietam, as the war’s victors commended it to history—with sparse rations, that I ate, gagged, my first horsemeat, repugnant to taste, repugnant to mind. Two years later, with my skin stretched taut over bone, the smallest slice of stallion or mare was most craved for.
After two months of toiling in the vineyards of health care, my first sprout. With a muted sigh of relief I signed up a developing HMO in Philadelphia. For a princely fee of $250 a day I generated financial projections for their recently spawned HMO. I struggled mightily to make their deliverable better than perfect. I quickly grasped that building a company is not unlike rock climbing. Just as one firm handhold allows a climber to lever himself into a higher position to stretch for the next handhold, one satisfied client provides the credibility to ask for a larger assignment from the next prospect.
The good news was that my company had revenues that first year; the bad news, business expenses
and personal expenses were higher. And I quickly add, personal expenses weren’t tabulated with nights out at the movies or steaks on the grill. Our lifestyle in Rockville was 100% Midwestern austerity. Alice saved the day. The cost of daycare and all the other expenses of a working mom would have swallowed most of any salary she would earn by going back to teaching. Plus, with three kids in the most malleable time of their life, a stay-at-home mom seemed prudent. So Alice became a babysitter; she took in Megan and Joey. Their mom was a nurse at Holy Cross Hospital who was happy to pay Alice $1.25 an hour to care for her two offspring. The $50 a week earned from childcare covered our grocery bill, plus $10 of walking-around money.
As a respite from her babysitting career, Alice enrolled in freebie night courses at the local community college, the first a course in accounting. Alice had assumed the role of my corporate bookkeeper, but her college schooling in elementary education didn’t touch on debits and credits. If the truth of the matter be known, the real reason she enrolled in night school was that her brain was turning to pudding. With five children at home, three of ours and two revenue-generating toddlers, Alice’s professional development was limited to reading See Spot Run and keeping the fingerpaints out of the apple juice. Night school allowed her to interact with Homo sapiens who were potty trained and spoke in multisyllabic words.
ABIGAIL, 1777: Today as others, up before the sun. The chamber pot emptied and cleaned, some small chores accomplished before Sarah’s questions and Baby Charles’s needs. Bread and jam for Sarah after her face washed and her hair stroked. Then she pretends to feed her doll as I nurse Baby Charles. To the field all three to say good morning to Mrs. Brown. I on the milking stool with Baby Charles in the sling. Sarah picks handfuls of grass and offers Mrs. Brown her breakfast. My hands once soft are no longer. Mrs. Brown looks back and down as to say, “Why so?” By the time the bucket is half full, Mrs. Brown has no more. Then down the path from the meadow to our house. The foul smell from the privy calls out to be filled with earth. Into our home, then to the field for the day’s chores. For each chore done, another one standing ready. A dinner for Sarah with answers to questions always asked. The last nursing of Baby Charles, Sarah’s prayers said, then they to sleep. Baby Charles’s soiled napkin washed and hung by the stove. An entry in my journal and then in the quiet and darkness of the house I can speak uninterrupted with my worries.
I struggled through the second year of business, only to have my ego raise the ante by convincing me to hire a couple of folks I could resell as consultants. Within a few months I waded into major trouble. Our billings were up because I had more people in the field, but cash flow fell into a crevasse. Rent and salaries had to be paid right away. Clients tended to pay 60, 90, 120 days after the work was completed. A second mortgage filled the void between payables and receivables that year. When I started my company I wouldn’t have considered risking my home equity for the enterprise. But just as a Vegas blackjack player will often double his wager in an attempt to win back a string of losses, a businessman will sometimes double the stakes, his loans, to stay in the game. At the end of my first three years as president of my own company I had slid from a modest family net worth to personal guarantees that stacked higher than my combined home and car equities … as they say, I was upside-down.
There were few Saturdays I didn’t work a full day at the office. Sundays Alice and I tried to protect; church attended more often than not. For me, taking our three jumping-jack kids to Sunday morning services was not unlike having a hand grenade with a loose pin in my jockey shorts; always a feeling of impending disaster as our three youngsters squirmed on the wooden pews. For cheap Sunday afternoon entertainment Alice and I would wander through Potomac in our Ford Maverick, perusing open homes. Potomac, adjacent to Rockville, was considered the upper crust. Houses didn’t sit on quarter-acre lots, they were artfully poised on superbly landscaped two- or five-acre parcels. Homes weren’t priced at $25,000 to $75,000, they were a princely $300,000 to $500,000 and even more.
When I first strolled through one of these mega-homes, I was stunned; never stood in a house that had ceilings higher than eight feet. Most Potomac homes had ten-foot ceilings, others eleven or twelve. The higher ceilings seemed logical once I read that Clare Boothe Luce claimed that one required high ceilings for lofty thoughts. Joining the ceilings and walls were eight- to twelve-piece crown moldings in intricate designs. The mini-mansion exteriors were elegant masonry, handmade brick set in Flemish bond. Aluminum siding had long ago been excommunicated. Floors weren’t plywood hidden with wall-to-wall carpeting, they were eight-inch planked and pegged hardwoods buffed to a luster. Homes in Potomac were different from anything in Des Moines. Curiosities at first; later they became much more.
For five years my company’s revenues followed a steady crawl upward. Earnings weren’t steady, earnings were scary. Things were so bad that a couple of years I risked going to jail. No, I didn’t rob a bank, I just didn’t make timely FICA payments for employees. I borrowed from the IRS. Of course the Feds wouldn’t have used the term “borrowed” in the indictment. I got myself in a steel box. I couldn’t afford to close down the business because the debts—all personally guaranteed by me—exceeded the assets, assets that were somewhat nebulous … how much is a used typewriter really worth?
Many nights I would have gladly bargained with the devil and forfeited a few years of my life expectancy to be back in Des Moines. At three in the morning I would find myself roaming a dark house, pausing to peer into the kids’ bedrooms, their cherub heads resting on pillows that were collateral for Citizens Bank. One major advantage, though: Standing Carl Sagan-like on the edge of a financial black hole is better than fresh contact lenses. Vision becomes acutely clear and the decision process elegantly simple. “Alice, shall we have a picnic this Sunday with the kids? Or perhaps I should go into the office and push out a deliverable early with the hope that the client pays in a timely manner, thus permitting me to avoid defaulting on the line of credit that we personally guarantee. Gee, guess I’ll go into the office, sweets, if that’s okay with you?”
It all held together. By the eighth year cash flow was no longer exciting, it was merely an item of interest on the monthly financial statements. I was off the personal guarantees and more than five hundred employees marched in my army, the vast majority of whom were more competent than less. Wait, that’s neither a fair or kind statement. Most were great. Alice and I expended immense energy into cultivating the workforce. Alice had her finger on the morale of the company. If somebody was having a personal problem, we tried to help. A lot of money was lent at zero interest. Plus we put in some programs that were hyper-employee-friendly. Because Alice and I had run out of money on our honeymoon, the company implemented a “honeymoon bonus” for the staff. For any employee who married, we provided an extra week of vacation, not charged to them, and handed over a $2,500 bonus check.
Another of my favorites—but there was a hidden agenda with this one—was the American Car program. If an employee bought a GM, Ford, or Chrysler product, we picked up half the monthly car payments, including paying the taxes on the imputed compensation. Employees collectively purchased over 250 American cars. The hidden agenda: In our inventory of prospects were numbers of union health plans. The company had a nice write-up from the UAW praising our “Buy American Program.” This scored big points with union prospects.
On our Sunday afternoon tours of the mega-houses of Potomac, one builder had shone above all others: Pat Cullinane. Real estate agents spoke in hushed tones when referencing Pat’s homes. I came to learn he was a Renaissance man, with interests spanning hunting to opera. He was unmarried, with a private nine-hole golf course circling his bachelor pad. Pat’s propensity to consume didn’t include the sinkholes that open up in the financial pastures of most married males. Pat had no need to save for college tuitions or to contribute to the happiness of an orthodontist. Because he didn’t need to maximize personal revenue, Pat only built a single
house every two years or so. And he only built them if he liked you … and if your really big check cleared.
We went back to Des Moines three or four times each year to visit Mom and Dad. My sister was in Kansas with her husband. It was a two-day drive each way. Our Ford Maverick had been gleefully traded in for a Chevrolet Capri; it had air conditioning, a more impressive invention than the wheel itself. From the Capri we later traded up to an Oldsmobile 98 with its Rocket V-8 engine, and then a silver Cadillac, shod with optional Vogue tires. I never had the nerve to drive the Cadillac to Des Moines, so we kept the Oldsmobile as the Des Moines shuttle bus. Two days out, two days back allowed for a three-day visit if I was willing to blow up an entire week. Three days with my parents was probably just about right. Mom and Dad loved the kids, but they were used to tranquility. As a parent I saw three children; my parents saw thirty fingers. Mom’s collection of Hummel figurines moved to the highest shelf in her china cabinet as our Oldsmobile crunched down on my parents’ gravel driveway.
Speaking of cars, one of the Sunday-night programs I watched as a kid was Route 66. These two young guys, Buzz and Todd—I told you they came in pairs—were vagabonds who somehow could afford the newest model Corvette. The weekly plots were strained, but the speeding Corvettes were great. Back in the late fifties the only two-seat sportscars in the United States were the Corvette and Thunderbird. A fuel-injected Corvette was one sexy beast; as a teenager I had a poster of a maroon ’61 Vette on the back of my bedroom door. I tell you about Route 66 as backdrop to Magnum P.I. By the early eighties TV producers had moved up the exotic car curve. Magnum drove a red Ferrari 308 in this weekly series. My boys were old enough, and the TV censors were aggressive enough, that the males of my family could savor the program together. It was my first exposure to a Ferrari. As a teenager I knew the various International Harvester models. As an adult I learned the technical aspects of a Ferrari Daytona, Boxer, and 308 Spider. In Des Moines a Corvette was a fantasy; in Rockville a Ferrari was an objective.