“Gerry and Bruce really grew up together,” says Shel Diller, a close friend and longtime colleague of Halle’s. “Their whole adult life was together and they were one person. All of Bruce’s thoughts and everything were with Gerry. They were one person. I have never, ever seen a marriage like they had. Ever. Ever. God, they were one person.”
Without his guide to the outside world, Halle retreated into his business and the company of a few close friends. He’d spend time in semi-retreat with Father Ray Bucher, who had officiated at Lisa’s wedding and become a friend of Bruce and Gerry’s. A devout Catholic, Halle argued with Father Ray about the mistake God had made in taking Gerry. Halle remained true to his faith but believed The Boss had not been true to Gerry—or to him.
Bruce Halle remained in mourning for the better part of two years, ensconced in his home in Paradise Valley or his retreat in Colorado. Slowly, he came out of his shell and began to return to many of his old activities, but only within a small circle of friends and, of course, Discount Tire. Strongly committed to the American Heart Institute, he agreed to serve as honorary chairman of their annual Heart Ball in 1992, but his appearances at charitable and social events were minimal.
Halle’s return to normalcy was sidetracked dramatically in the spring of 1993. The Phoenix Suns were playing the Chicago Bulls in the NBA finals. Halle and Bruce Jr. flew to Chicago with Karl and Stevie Eller to watch the Suns lose their third of the first three games in the series. On the way home to Arizona, Halle stopped off in Snowmass, Colorado, to spend a few days while the Ellers and Bruce Jr. continued to Phoenix.
“I got up the next morning to ride a mountain bike up there, and I generally wore a helmet. I just didn’t on that day for some reason. It was a trail that I rode all the time,” Halle recalls matter-of-factly today. “I came off my bike and landed in some rocks. Didn’t have a helmet on and I was in a short-sleeved shirt. I’m bleeding out of my head. I’m unconscious, a lot of skin gone, a broken collarbone, and I landed in some rock, but I must have crawled three or four feet because I was right in the trail, out of the rocks. So, I can’t remember any of that. A young boy, a local boy who was riding his bike, spotted me and called the medics and they came and took me to Aspen Hospital. But I didn’t wake up there. They kept me sedated and they moved me to Denver, to Swedish Hospital, and I woke up there.”
In fact, Halle was nearly dead when the twelve-year-old boy happened upon him and called for help. Internal bleeding posed a major threat, but swelling of the brain from his head injury threatened permanent damage or death. The staff at Aspen Valley Hospital lacked the tools to provide complete treatment, so they kept Halle deeply sedated while arranging to transfer him to Swedish Medical Center in Denver.
“In Denver, my daughters Susan and Lisa were really something. They went to a Ralph Lauren store and bought sheets and pillowcases and all the beautiful stuff that he has and decorated my whole room. It was gorgeous,” Halle says, willing to focus on every aspect of the experience except his brush with death. “Nurses and doctors in the hospital just wanted to come to my room to look at the interior, not at me.”
Bruce Jr., who had already moved to California to open Discount Tire’s operations in that state, called Dr. Ralph Lilly, a neurosurgeon and family friend, to oversee his father’s care. Lilly had Halle transferred to Hermann Hospital in Houston, where Lilly practiced, both to provide more personal care for his friend and to insulate him from any demands of the office. Halle was a workaholic and Lilly knew he would want to get involved in the business before it was wise to do so.
Lilly had personal insight into Halle’s recovery path, having suffered a brain injury himself a few years earlier. Lilly had met Halle shortly after the Halles moved to Arizona, and the two men would often ride together in the desert near their homes. Bruce and Gerry had been supportive of the ailing doctor after his injury and he was determined to return the favor.
For several days, it was not clear whether Halle would live, and it was a few weeks before anyone had an inkling of the condition he would be in when he returned to work. Back at the company, the shock was severe.
“There was no ‘me’ then,” COO Steve Fournier remembers. By 1993, all corporate functions had already been consolidated in Arizona, and Ted Von Voigtlander was no longer involved in daily operations of the company. Bruce Jr., Gary Van Brunt, Tom Englert and Bob Holman were working at the corporate office as vice presidents, but there was no succession plan for Discount Tire and Halle had not created an estate plan.
Predictably, in hindsight, the culture kicked in to keep the company on an even keel. Discount Tire continued to operate as it had and the lost boys kept the business running smoothly until the boss could return.
Halle’s recovery was relatively fast, in light of the injuries he had suffered, due to both the fortunate timing of his discovery by a local bicyclist and the years of physical conditioning that kept his heart and lungs in excellent condition. He returned to work with a vengeance later in 1993, determined to reestablish his personal momentum and prove to his team, and possibly to himself, that he was the same dynamic leader he had always been.
The accident had changed him, although not as much as is common after a brain injury.
He continued to suffer from vertigo and had trouble bending down to pick up a pen or tie his shoes, but that was the most visible difference in the company’s founder. Close friends and family noticed, however, that Halle was more serious, less likely to play a physical gag or tell a joke. Far from somber, Halle was back to enjoying his life, grateful to be alive at all, but he was not as playful or jovial as he had been in the time before.
A person looking at the company’s progress during the period of personal reversals might have no reason to suspect that any mishap had occurred. From the end of 1988 through the end of 1993, the company opened sixty-five stores and built revenues nearly 70 percent to $519 million.
Halle had upgraded to his largest jet so far, a Lockheed JetStar formerly belonging to Circus Circus Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Seeking a new pilot familiar with the larger plane, Halle found Bruce Gensemer, who had flown previously on Air Force One and was in the business of training pilots to fly the JetStar. Halle lured Gensemer to the company and opened a link that would eventually bring four Air Force One pilots to Discount Tire.
“When they quit working for the president, they come to work for the real president,” says longtime friend Shel Diller.
The company had been named Arizona’s Most Admired Company for a second and third time in 1990 and 1991, and Halle received Eastern Michigan University’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 1993.
Halle had received a more meaningful honor, in a backhanded way, when Goodyear Chairman Stanley Gault called him in 1991. Halle had just moved Tom Englert to the corporate office to join Bruce Jr. as a senior vice president of store operations. Gault wanted to interview Englert for a position as head of Goodyear’s retail tire stores and he wanted Halle’s approval before approaching Englert. Halle said he would make no promises about the future and allowed Englert to check out the opportunity. It didn’t take long for Englert to recognize the differences in culture and the political climate between the two companies and he opted to stay in the fold at Discount Tire. In 2004, Halle would promote Englert to chief executive officer.
To Halle, the incident was important on several levels. Gault’s decision to obtain Halle’s permission for the interview suggested an awareness of Discount Tire’s importance in the industry, even if Goodyear was not yet selling directly to the company. Gault’s interest in interviewing one of Halle’s top managers was an indication that the talent pool at Discount Tire was at least on par with even the largest company. Englert’s decision to stay where he was, with no promises from Halle, affirmed the strength of the bonds Discount Tire had established with its people.
The five-year period that began with Gerry’s illness was personally unsettling for Bruce Halle as an individual. Professionally, it seem
ed, he and his lost boys were becoming a juggernaut.
RESET BUTTON
Todd Meerschaert had it made at Discount Tire after winning the keys to his first store. Just twenty-eight years old, he’d moved up from senior assistant to manager of the sole Discount Tire outpost in Lakewood, Colorado. He loved his job, loved the company and loved his location.
In 1990, though, life fell apart as the father of two preschool boys went through a painful divorce that also led to poor performance at work. Eventually, Tom Englert, then vice president of the Colorado region, sat down with Meerschaert for a life-changing conversation. Englert had talked to Meerschaert about his performance before, going so far as to buy him an alarm clock with the admonition to show up on time each day. Now, Englert was taking his store away and moving him to Boulder as an assistant manager.
Englert was hitting the reset button, a tool used regularly at Discount Tire to salvage the careers of good employees who hit a wall. In some cases, a family illness or other personal challenge will affect job performance. In many situations, though, the management team has simply made the mistake of promoting someone too early or moving a manager into the wrong job.
The reset button is a parable for the life of Bruce Halle; in fact, it’s a normal pattern of life for most people. As a child, as a college student and as a new dad starting out in business, Halle hit dead ends and had to reboot several times. When his employees hit a wall in a similar way, he wants to give them the same opportunity he received.
Englert says the company gives its employees a wide circle of latitude and a small number of rules that allow no deviations. Steal from the company, abuse your employees, or mistreat customers, and the exit door is wide open, Englert says, “but if you’re over-promoted, that’s our mistake, not the employee’s. We can’t and shouldn’t penalize people because they can’t fulfill a role that we asked them to handle for us.”
Englert’s decision was a hard blow to his ambitious store manager, but “it gave me a good opportunity to refocus and rediscover how I felt about my position and how I had let that get away from me,” Meerschaert says today.
After less than two years in Boulder, Meerschaert had regained his momentum. Regional Vice President Richard Kuipers, who had taken over as Colorado VP when Englert moved to the corporate office, promoted Meerschaert to manager of the Grand Junction store, which Meerschaert took as a sign of immense confidence.
“The amount of trust they gave me, to take over a store that was five hours away from the regional office, knowing I wouldn’t get visited much by the regional office—that showed me they believed in me,” Meerschaert says today. He repaid that trust by building sales and profitability and, later, transforming the Fort Collins store into the highest-profit shop in Colorado.
In 2000, Tom Englert called again, this time to promote him to assistant vice president of Discount Tire’s San Diego region. In turn, Meerschaert has taken the opportunity to hit the reset button and salvage several of his own employees’ careers.
“While I was running the Fort Collins store, my senior assistant left and we had two other assistants to consider as a replacement,” he recalls. One person was excellent at details but not as strong on personality, while the other was stronger on personality and not as good at details. “Of course, we chose the person with the stronger personality, who didn’t improve on details, while the detail guy got much better in dealing with people.”
After about eight months, Meerschaert switched the two, demoting his senior assistant manager to an assistant level. Ultimately, the demoted assistant, Cleveland Muller, worked his way back, taking over as manager in the same Fort Collins store where he had been demoted years ago. Today, he tells a story similar to that of his former boss.
“It was hard from a pride standpoint,” Muller says. “But I got a chance to go to other stores, get more training and be promoted again, first to senior assistant and then to store manager.”
Meerschaert’s current boss, San Diego vice president Ray Winiecke, ran into the reset button in the early 1990s while working as a senior assistant store manager in Troy, Michigan.
“I wasn’t accountable and I didn’t take ownership when I was left in charge of the store,” Winiecke recalls today. “I didn’t treat the job like I had much to do. I was in charge. I had made it. I wanted to be friends with the workers instead of supervising them, and if I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t think of it as critical.”
Both Winiecke and Meerschaert use their own experience as a training tool for newer guys coming up the ladder. “The choice is theirs,” Winiecke says. “This is either going to be a blip on the radar or a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to them. I can tell them this has happened to me, and now the choice is theirs. What they choose to do now is up to them.”
Meerschaert applies his own experience to help challenged managers change direction and get back on an upward arc at the company. The first step, of course, is getting those people to ask for help.
“When I teach a class, one of the first things I share is that I was demoted and re-promoted,” Meerschaert says. “It always brings somebody up to talk to me at the end of the class. Guys who are struggling and in a room with a lot of guys they don’t know won’t necessarily stand up and make themselves vulnerable in front of a group, but they will if you make yourself vulnerable. It gives them a chance to connect with you, and it gives you a chance to talk to them. Whether they have been demoted or think they are in danger in one way or another, I can let them know it doesn’t have to be the end of their career. It can be an opportunity to refocus.”
Halle says the reset button is often a reflection of the company promoting an employee into a position where he is adding less value than before. Getting back to the earlier contribution level is the most important goal when that happens, he says.
“We’ve had people promoted to levels that were probably a mistake on our part, a level they couldn’t achieve at. Nice people. Good people,” Halle says. “And, of course, in our company, we don’t let them loose and say good-bye. We reassign them and they’re fine. Somebody who’s a great manager, it doesn’t mean he’s going to be a great assistant vice president, and a good AVP won’t necessarily be a good vice president. So how do you find that out? You give people an opportunity. You give them the chance to try it.
“Now, if you have a guy who’s a great store manager and you promote him to AVP and it doesn’t work for him, he’s still a valuable person to you. Use him in some other way. We’ve got many years invested in him, maybe ten or fifteen years, whatever it is. You can’t let that guy go. You’d be insane to do that.”
The reset button also encourages employees to take appropriate risks, knowing they aren’t putting their careers on the line when they agree to spearhead a new venture for the company.
When Halle established the Tires Plus Club in 1988, Jack Chambers, who had joined Halle in Michigan in 1967 and subsequently opened the Houston region for the company, was tapped to head the new venture. The experiment was a flop, and Halle pulled the plug three years later. Chambers kept his job, though, as Halle reassigned him to the corporate office to run the company’s advertising programs.
Halle sees setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow. If people learn from their mistakes and recommit to achieving more—as Halle did in opening his first store—the company would be foolish to lose their contributions. The only way to adjust effectively, he says, is to have the right person in the right job, even if it takes a while to figure out which job that is.
THE WHIRLWIND
In hindsight, Halle sees his bicycle accident through much the same prism as he sees the reset button.
It happened.
Nobody died.
Move on.
Having received a reprieve from The Boss, Halle was ready to get back to living at full speed, both in his company and socially. He had begun dating, off and on, shortly before the bicycle accident, although he would often ask daughters Susan or Lisa, o
r both, to escort him to company parties or formal charity events.
At one such event, the Crisis Nursery gala in 1993, Susan noticed that her father was checking out Diane Cummings, a widow whose husband had succumbed to pancreatic cancer a year earlier. In fact, Bruce Halle had asked her out once before, but she had no interest in dating. Now, she seemed to be back in the social whirl and Halle was considering his options.
Of all the women in the room, possibly all the women in Phoenix, Diane Cummings seemed to be the least likely match for Bruce Halle. Born and raised in Chicago, she attended the private Latin School, married well, and lived as one of the polished people who always held a mystique—and distance—for him.
In 1935, Diane’s grandparents, Anna and Joseph Lamprecht, emigrated from Germany as they grew concerned about the relatively new leadership of Adolf Hitler. The couple maintained their traditional culture in the United States, while Diane’s mother, a teenager when they arrived in Chicago, gravitated immediately to the freedoms of her new country.
The split of cultures would define much of Diane’s childhood. Her mother, Erica, would divorce Diane’s father when Diane was four years old, and the family would move back into her grandparents’ home in Chicago, where her grandfather would die the following year. Diane’s mother maintained her emphasis on the social whirl, while her grandmother took on more of the traditional role of a mother.
“My grandmother taught me how to cook and bake and clean and all the stuff she thought a young girl should know,” Diane recalls. “My mother taught me how to put on makeup and dress smartly.”
In 1952, when Diane was just ten, Erica married Eddie Meyers, a well-to-do Chicagoan who introduced Erica and her daughter to a decidedly upscale lifestyle. Still, he insisted that Diane take summer jobs and keep her own checkbook, learning essential skills that might be needed later in life.
6 Tires, No Plan : The Impossible Journey of the Most Inspirational Leader That (Almost) Nobody Knows (9781608322589) Page 13