Chapter 10. Save the World, or Save Myself?

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

My $90/month corporate office 1981

I apologize to my readers, for I have gotten ahead of myself in this story.  Picking up where I was at the beginning of Chapter 9, I had twelve part-time people working for me, and I was taking $800 per month out of the business to live on.  I had this dinky little office in the basement of a building near the apartment where Barbara, I, and our first daughter Meghan lived.  The office was about the size of a closet, one room, and there was this deep ditch outside the basement door to the building, with a wooden plank thrown across it as an entrance.  I paid $90 per month for this.  There was a large standpipe from the floors above that went right past my desk, and whenever anyone upstairs flushed a toilet, you could hear it whistling right past my desk on the way down into the sewer.  I had an old metal battleship desk I had bought from a customer for $25.  I was drowning in problems and had no idea where to turn to for help.  And I couldn’t think of whatever else I could do if this failed.  It was not uncommon at all for me to work 24 or even 36 hours straight before collapsing in bed.  I did not consider myself a businessman at all; I felt totally incompetent and foolish.  What kept me going was desperation and fear of failure.  Barbara and my combined, adjusted gross income that first year was $5600.  We were below Appalachian poverty level.  I’m sure we qualified for all kinds of government Welfare, but we didn’t even know it existed and it never occurred to us to ask.  It never occurred to us that we were anyone’s responsibility but ourselves.

I went to the town library and looked up trade journals and sent in a card to one of them.  I started getting junk mail, and eventually I saw an advertisement for a trade association convention to be held in Orlando, Florida.  I figured out what it was going to cost for Barbara and I to go down there, and it was about $600.  I don’t remember where we got the money from, but we went.  I was shocked.  I expected to meet a whole bunch of miserable sods like myself trying to stay alive, and there were some.  But I also met many very successful operators, some of them multi-national,  with literally tens of thousands of employees each. 

 I went to all the sessions and greedily lapped up all the information.  I was a sponge.  When I came back, I had more questions than answers.  I knew I needed a mentor, someone to guide me.  While in Orlando, I had asked around about what this trade association was, and who ran it.  I didn’t know anything about the nature of trade associations.  Well, it had members in 25 or 30 countries, including most of the largest operators in the world.  They had a Board of Directors that ran things, and this Board was made up of contractors that had been nominated by an anonymous Nominating Committee that met once a year.  Board members served for three years, were unpaid, and traveled to Board functions at their own expense.  Not a very good deal.  But I figured if I could get nominated to the Board of Directors, I could sit in the Boardroom during meetings like a mouse and learn from these people what I needed to learn.

So I went home and thought, what I need here is exposure.  I need to get my name out there.  I am a nobody.  Well, what do I know how to do?  The answer was obvious, I know how to speak and to write.  So I called the trade journals and asked if they needed writers.  Little did I know that all trade journals need writers, especially free ones.  So I made committments to write on all kinds of cleaning and management issues.  I didn’t need to know about all this stuff, I just had to engage in some journalistic research and then write the papers.  Which I did.  So in the next couple years I got in print fairly frequently, more so I’m sure, than any other contractor out there.  And I always got my byline, John Bechtel, and the name of my company and my location.  When my articles started to get published, I ordered lots of extra copies, and started giving them out to prospective customers to show them what an authority I was on this subject and that.  I got a contract for a whole chain of grocery stores after I wrote an article about how cleaning grocery stores was no place for amateurs.  No one was more of an amateur at the time than I was.  I had already mastered the first rule of journalism:  Pretend you know more about something than you really do.

It was a couple years later that the telephone call came.  I was sitting at my desk beside my standpipe, when the phone rang, and this lady named Carol Dean says she was the Executive Vice President of the Building Service Contractors Association International at a meeting of the Nominating Committee in Toronto, Canada, and I had been nominated for a seat on the Board of Directors.  She explained the terms, and I asked her what I could anticipate in the way of out-of-pocket expenses to accept this position.  She replied $5000 to $10,000 per year for three years.  That was about equivalent to 60 to 100 percent of my annual gross salary.  I tried to be cool and not gulp.  I asked her when I could get back to her, and she said she had to know within a few hours.  I went to lunch and then called her back and accepted.  When I told Barbara about it, she flipped and asked where I thought I was going to get that kind of money.  I told her I didn’t know, but I would find a way.

So they had heard about me.  The Mouse That Roared.  This pathetic, tiny operator in a rural county of Ohio who wrote all these articles.  And as long as I kept my mouth shut in the Boardroom, no one would ever know how little I knew, or how much I was learning.  Now all I had to do was figure out how to pay for it.  I was still going to night school at the local university, and sleeping through half the classes.  Barbara wanted to know why I didn’t apply for a real job at the General Motors assembly plant that had some openings; her brother-in-law Roy had applied and been accepted.  She also had a lot to say about the fact that the water pipes in our apartment were frozen and we were washing the dishes in the bathtub.  Barbara wasn’t the type to suffer in silence.

My fortunes began to change when Alden Foxhall showed up.  He had called a few times, some pesky guy trying to sell some product to clean carpet with.  I had no money, I didn’t know how to clean carpet, and I had my hands more than full just keeping my few cleaning people on the job.  Alden was quite insistent, however, and one night he showed up at our apartment house, and insisted on taping off a little square of carpet and cleaning it as a demo.  I wasn’t particularly impressed with his product either,  but Alden was a nice, older , and very sincere man.

A few weeks later Alden called me; it was a Tuesday morning.  He asked if I wanted to clean 60,000 square feet of carpet in Cleveland that same night.  I said, Alden, I’ve never cleaned carpet in my life, not even with a grocery store rental unit, I have no equipment, and no extra employees.  All my employees had places they had to clean locally that night.  Well Alden says he has a customer in Euclid, Ohio who has to have 60,000 square feet of carpet cleaned that night, and they had called all the large carpet cleaning companies in Cleveland and they had all told this company they were crazy, it couldn’t be done, and certainly not on that short term notice.  Curious, I asked Alden some questions, like how much equipment would I need, how much chemicals, how many people, how long would it take, and so forth.  Alden said I would need a whole truckload of chemicals and equipment, which he could get from Pittsburgh that afternoon, and that I would need twenty people to work all night.  I figured my labor and materials would cost me about $7000, so I doubled that and told Alden to tell the company if they would pay me $14,000 by 10 a.m. the next day, I would have a crew of 20 people on their premises by 8 p.m. that same night.  Alden agreed to teach all 21 of us what to do with all this stuff.  I told Alden I would pay for everything the next morning after I got paid.  I got 20 people up there that night by offering them $100 in cash by 11 a.m. the next morning if they went.  Most of them had day jobs and called off sick the next day.  The company whose carpet we cleaned was Bailey Controls, and they were owned by Babcock and Wilcox, which had just been acquired by McDermott and Company.  The Chairman of McDermott had just informed Bailey Controls that he was coming to visit the next morning, and in a panic, they decided they had to have their carpet cleaned before he got there.  I figured by 10 a.m. the next morning I would own a lot more equipment and have $7000 in the bank.  I had no idea how much 60,000 square feet of carpet was.  It sounded like a lot.

Well, we went up there, did the job, and got paid.  I bet the chairman of McDermott never even noticed the carpet.  And all of a sudden life looked a little differently.  I called up the manufacturer of this carpet cleaning product and signed up for their school in Racine, Wisconsin.  I learned a lot about carpet, carpet cleaning, and marketing.  Quite by accident I had been accepted into their school for Distributors instead of Carpet Cleaning Professionals, where I belonged, and I learned all about Distributor pricing.  Rather than make a fuss about their mistake, they made me a Distributor.

Before I move on with this story, I have to tell you about a little incident that happened that night at Bailey Controls.  As about 20 or so rolled into the lobby of Bailey Controls, a guard came up to me and said, Are you with Bechtel?  And of course, since my name is John Bechtel, and the name of my tiny company was Bechtel Building Maintenance, Inc.  I thought it was certainly appropriate to respond in the affirmative.  The guard continued, Well, follow me.  And he led us to a hospitality suite reserved for the big Bechtel Engineering firm out of San Francisco.  He showed us where the liquor cabinet was, and then left us.  Only a few minutes later, he hurried back and said You’re not with Bechtel Engineering!  And I replied No, we’re with Bechtel Maintenance, and he said, Oh, you’re not allowed in here!!  And he expeditiously ushered us out of there.  Well, we really didn’t have either the time or inclination to drink before working anyway.

Now it just so happened that the landlord of my office, such as it was, was a guy named Don , and who decided to give his wife, who was a gorgeous babe, a new business to play with.  He started a residential cleaning franchising business, and put his wife in charge of it.  They sold franchises.  One day Don and I got to talking about this carpet cleaning product, which is a dry cleaning process, and I threw some coffee on his wife’s new white carpet in her office suite and then promptly removed it, to his amazement.  He said he needed to sell this stuff to his franchisees as part of their start-up package.  So I started selling the equipment and chemicals to Don, and he resold it to his franchisees, with what I thought was an astronomical mark-up.  I asked him what he was going to do when sooner or later one of them read the label on the packaging, called the manufacturer and discovered they could buy this stuff much cheaper than they were paying him.  I told him they were going to feel they had been ripped off.  Also, I listened to the pitch Don’s main operations guy gave on this stuff, and he made claims I would never have made, and I looked at Don with raised eyebrows, and Don’s reply was, “Hey, everyone has their style.”  Style, eh??  Eventually this guy’s “style” came back to bite Don.

But Don bought a lot of machines from me, and a lot of chemicals, and I ended up becoming the fourth largest distributor of these products in the country within a year.  The manufacturer  knew I was a cleaning contractor, so they sent someone down to visit me to find out what the hell I was doing with all this product.  I was buying it 38,000 pounds at a time.  I was selling it to hotel chains, and I was working on a possible deal with Wendy’s fast food franchise, who have carpet in all their retail outlets.  Don was taking the product and repacking it in his own containers, and thereby removing any labeling that would tip his franchisees off where this stuff came from and how much cheaper it could be purchased.  Apparently he and his Operations Manager had very compatible “styles”.

Meanwhile, Don’s wife, who was definitely a Show Dog, got lots of national publicity and their franchising business was booming.  So was mine.  Even Bailey Controls called me back six months later to clean their 60,000 square feet of carpet again.  For the same price.

I managed to pay for my three years internship on the Board of Directors, and my business and acumen began to grow.  Don’s franchisees figured out what was going on, and the franchising business went out of business.  Don’s wife backed up a semi tractor-trailer to the office building one day and cleaned out his offices, and maybe later she cleaned him out too.   I used to hear them yelling through the thin walls of my office.   Don and his wife got divorced.  It was hard to feel sorry for Don.  He reaped what he sowed.   I missed his wife.  I thought she  was unethical and haughty and arrogant, but she sure was nice to look at.  I took the money I had made from the carpet cleaning chemical business and put it into my janitorial business, and for the first time I had some working capital.  Before ever I took my first course in economics, I already understood at a gut level the importance of investment over consumption.  Barbara and I were still poor, but I knew things were going to change.

Looking back on several decades of organization building, I realize that my greatest disadvantage was not having had any practical experience in the “real world” before starting a business.  But to be fair to me, please remember that I had no intention of ‘going into business’; what I had done in effect was create a job for myself.  In the beginning that was all I really wanted; I desperately wanted not to starve, and since I couldn’t find a job, I created one.  My second great disadvantage was the fact that I never had a mentor, someone experienced to coach me, pointing out where the rocks were beneath the water.  So with nothing else to rely on, I turned to my old stand-by:  I would learn how to run a business from the printed page.  Without hands-on training on how to talk to people at the front lines, where the rubber hits the road, I became something of an intellectual business owner, who could spout the principles and who had mastered the lingo of the trade, but couldn’t really make himself understood to the little people who took the trash out at night.  I became what I was later to call an articulate incompetent.  I could think like a Chief of Staff, but I needed the skills of a Drill Sergeant.  So I promoted cleaners to become the drill sergeants, and I tried to teach them skills I had not mastered myself.  I was afraid of my own employees.  The only boss who needs to be afraid of his employees is the boss who is afraid of his employees.  You can never manage successfully from weakness.  If your employees sense that you are afraid they will quit, it empowers them, and it is unrealistic to think they won’t try to use that power to their advantage. 

Periodically I had no choice but to take things into my own hands, and I had to deal directly with the cleaners.  I would sit down with them and discuss what I had on my mind in the most (to me) patient, enlightened manner possible.  I would walk away from the discussion satisfied that I had achieved my goal, usually to discover that they didn’t go to work that night and had quit their jobs without notice.  Or, contrarily, I would learn later that they had been flattered and impressed that the “big boss” had come out to talk to them, but had no clue what I had said. This always came as a great shock and disappointment to me, because I had geared my vocabulary way down and had made a great effort to speak simply and directly.  Sometimes I can’t help thinking that if someone else had looked in on our operation and had known what was going on, they would have laughed, for what I really eventually did succeed in doing was getting my supervisors to imitate me.  Which meant they too could quote the lines from the company handbook, but they too couldn’t really get it done.  At one time I joked to a friend in the industry that our buildings were just as dirty as our competitors, but we were more sincere.  Obviously in time I learned but it was very difficult during the early years to overcome the conditioning of almost three decades; conditioning that told me money was the root of all sorts of ‘injurious things’, that told me to eliminate the self, or the “I” in my language.  Jehovah’s Witnesses achieved what the Communists and the Socialists of the world could only dream about.  In life with Jehovah’s Witnesses, life also revolved around “Society”, but with a capital S.  The Society with Jehovah’s Witnesses meant the theocracy, the church leadership.  In the world outside Jehovah’s Witnesses, “society” , with a lower case s, meant the greater good of the greater number.  Both were utopian concepts, and both involved the use of coercion in one form or another, but always in the guise of altruism.  Obedience in both cases was (and is) achieved through social or cultural pressure, and both cultures encouraged or required self sacrfice as the noblest virtue.  In the one, you sacrificed for God, in the other you sacrificed for whichever gang was running the show.  And in both cultures, the pursuit of material gain was considered selfish.  Of course, the reason people work hard is to advance their personal interests, with the reward of keeping their earnings as they see fit, and to improve the quality of their own life.  If they succeed to a modest extent, it is considered a virtue; if they succeed to an unusual extent, their virtue becomes their vice, and they feel obliged to hide their wealth, apologize for their wealth, or give away their wealth in conspicuous displays of charity.  There is a fundamental and philosophical contradiction between their belief systems and material success.  Like Plato long before, they even split material wealth off from spiritual wealth, and divide man into two selves at war with each other, his upper and his lower self.  For many years a sense of guilt about money and wealth served as a powerful subconscious force that routinely sabotaged my best efforts in the business world.

I came of age at the very peak of the Big Welfare State (the late seventies–the Age of Jimmy Carter), although I had no historical or political sense of what was happening in the world around me.  I couldn’t have told you the difference between a Democrat and a Republican if my life depended on it.  Struggling to survive tends to narrow your horizon somewhat.  During my time as a Jehovah’s Witness, my exposure to civic affairs was limited to a few grade school classes, and whatever Watchtower had taught me about their own organizational successes in seeking constitutional protections.  As I turned to books and periodicals to learn how to run a business, what I learned shocked me.  A lot of what I read was about how to comply with government regulations.  Government regulations???  What could there possibly be to regulate about taking out the trash?  As I attempted to build an organization, little did I know that once again, I was a mirror of my generation and the politics of my time.  My company became a microcosm of my culture, as you will see.

The most frightening magazine I subscribed to was the Harvard Business Review.   I read everything as if it had been written for me, with my tiny little cleaning operation, and I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that the law was the law, regardless of size.  Being the egghead business owner, I clearly understood from HBR the concepts and always set about implementing them assiduously in my operation.  If it was an article about managing the sales function, I set about setting up a sales function to conform to the best authority in the business world.  I would design forms and systems for my sales force, which was me.  I was not being intentionally stupid, for  I knew that when we were ready for a real sales force, I would be ready.  When HBR addressed  PROBLEMS, I read the articles with the avidity of a hypochondriac turning the pages of a medical text on pathology.  Whatever the problem under discussion was, either I was convinced my organization was afflicted with it, or by God, I would see to it that it never was.  If it was an article about employee rights, I wondered if employers had any rights.  HBR often carried ads for further books one could read on any given subject, and I obsessively began to purchase and read management textbooks.  I felt like I was practically a family member of John T. Wiley and Sons, the Harvard publishing house.  The more I read, the greater my vocabulary of business expanded, and the further removed I became from the ordinary problems in my business; problems that begged for simple solutions I sometimes could not provide.  I could not bridge the gap between HBR, Mr. Wiley, and my supervisors.  And always, lurking in the background, the parental and church tapes played in my head, condemning me for seeking material success, pandering to my “lower self”.   I became an organization builder because my church-trained conscience forbid me the indulgence of enjoyment of success.  Virtually all of the profits of my business went to reinvestment rather than personal or family consumption, partly because of fear of failure, and partly because consumption produced guilt, the guilt of success and financial reward.  For me the material world and its blandishments, once I was past the survival stage, were an object of scorn and not virtue.  I was at war with myself; there was a profound contradiction between the value system I had absorbed as a true believer and success in the real world.  It was a very long time before I discovered that many millions of others shared this internal conflict.

Mssrs. Wiley published books on Employee Rights which I read, desiring to be an enlightened employer.  I was also a frightened employer.  As I devoured these, I couldn’t help but wonder, on what basis did employees acquire “special” rights, extra rights, that apparently the rest of us didn’t need?  I thought their rights were the same as my rights, i.e.  freedom to trade with whomever they wanted, for whatever reason, for as long as both parties wanted.  I was laboring under the illusion that my obligations to them were explicit; to fulfill my end of the agreed-upon terms.  Imagine my surprise to discover I had acquired unspecified, unwritten obligations, “social responsibilities” that sometimes took precedence even when the employee wasn’t living up to his end of the work-related bargain.  And I owed him because I was a beneficiary of “society that had made it possible to create and run my business.”  All I saw was other people doing the same thing I was, pursuing their own self-interest in trading with others.  I came to realize that my new undeclared responsibilities were because I was viewed as a “Lord” and my employees were the “serfs”.  Except that this was supposed to be capitalism in a free society, and it seemed to me it was getting confused with feudalism, which was anything but free, but rather existence by permission.

As Mr. Wiley provided me with more and more terrifying information about the dangers ahead, I built in more and more layers into my little organization to prepare ourselves.  We would be ready.  This (or that) would not happen to us.  I overcomplicated things, but in doing so I was postponing a day of reckoning of the contradictions between my religious  conditioning and my efforts to rise above the rat race.  I was philosophically a man at war with himself.

Back when I was at Watchtower headquarters, in the last few years before I left, and when I was clearly influenced by the thinking of Fred Maes (the Rousseau of Bethel),  I was outraged at the seeming callousness of Watchtower management and I was part of the protest movement.  After I left and ended up with a business, I rather subconsciously began to implement a management style consistent with my socialistic tendencies, a reactionary management style that would put the interests of others before my own.  My theory was that if you did this, the profits would be there, somehow.  I was wrong.  People inexplicably kept doing what they thought was  in their own best interests, and my great and noble experiment got me nothing more than negative cash flow and a lot of anxiety.

I was not learning everything from John T. Wiley, however.  I was also simultaneously learning from the book, and school, of hard knocks.  Following are some samples from both.

The most terrifying thing I learned was that not only was I responsible for anything my employees did on the job, and sometimes off the job, I was also responsible, and therefore legally liable, even if I did not know of their behavior, but in the judgement of an undisclosed someone, should have known.  I knew just enough about my employees’ lives that I knew I didn’t really want to know any more.

I was also discovering political correctness for the same time.  I learned that my Employment Applications were legally unacceptable because we asked such questions as did the applicant have a car to get to work (the job site was not served by public transportation), and we used to illegally ask our female applicants who disclosed they had small children about their anticipated baby-sitting arrangements.  I learned through the trade association that we needed to ask instead, “How did the applicant plan to get to work?” since fewer minorities owned vehicles than I presume, white anglos, and also that since we only asked the women about baby-sitting arrangements, this was discriminatory since we didn’t also ask the men.  Of course, we didn’t ask the men because in those days it was almost unheard of for a man to be the primary caretaker for small children.  I learned what things we could and couldn’t do during a union organizing drive (which I never experienced), and so on.  I was continually amazed at how incredibly complicated someone had made of the most simple things.  All I really wanted to know was if the human being sitting in front of me was willing and circumstantially able to show up for work. Whether it was legal or not to ask, we still had to find out what we needed to know to make a good hiring decision, so we refined our skills of “chatting up” the applicant, getting them to tell us what we needed to know without directly asking.  From my small corner of the world, however, our government, in the pursuit of some ideal or to placate some political constituency had long since taken leave of common sense.

The same was true when dealing with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  I learned about this organization because of an old black guy who worked for me named Jim.  Jim had been with me for a couple years and for a long time did good, reliable work.  Then he fell off the wagon and his work began to slide.  I talked to him about it a couple times, and finally I gave him a written reprimand.  Jim said, ‘You know you can’t ever fire me, because I’m black and I’m old, and I’ll turn you in.’  Well, in time I did fire him, and sure enough he turned me in to the EEOC for Age Discrimination and Race Discrimination.  We supplied them with all the documentation for his termination, and I thought that would be the end of the matter.  Then they called and said they wanted to know how many black people I employed and how many people over the age of 40.  I said I had no idea; I thought it was illegal to even ask such things.  They said I had to find out and get back to them with numbers.  So we went around checking out everyone’s skin color and reading their licenses to get their age, and we sent this information in to the EEOC.  It turned out that something like 80 percent of our employees were black, and almost half of them were over the age of forty.  So we clearly weren’t discriminating, and the case was dropped.  However I told  the lady on the phone from the government agency that it was purely an accident that our percentages of blacks and over-40 were so high because we didn’t hire on that basis, and I asked her what would have happened if the numbers had fallen below the acceptable percentage, whatever that was, and she replied that I would have been in a lot of trouble.  Uh huh.

 Not everything I learned about being an employer was from the government, however.  I learned a lot from my employees.  I had always viewed my business engagements, whether with customers or employees, as simply a matter of trading with each other, whatever we had to offer.  My customers understood this also, but my employees certainly didn’t view things this way.  They seemed to think, in most cases, that I was there to take care of them.  If they didn’t keep their end of the bargain, and I told them I didn’t want to do business with them anymore, the standard response would be “ After all I did for you!”, as if there existed some unwritten I.O.U. payable to them.  After a few years, my response would sometimes be, “I think you were paid in full when my check to you cleared the bank.”  I was beginning to realize I needed to focus less on saving the world, and more on saving myself and my family.  As ridiculous as it may sound, it was a tough lesson to learn.