Chapter 12. When Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough

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

One of the hardest things to accept about business, and maybe human behavior in general, is that most behavior doesn’t seem to be rational, but whimsical, irrational, and emotionally driven.  Decisions are based on emotion, and then the intellect is summoned to justify them.  Business could be gained and lost for some very arbitrary reasons.  My response to this was mostly terror.  On any given day I knew the wrath of the gods could descend on my head for reasons far beyond my control.  Since all of my contracts were on a month-to-month basis, I understood that on any given day I was only 30 days from bankruptcy court, if enough of my clients were to cancel my contracts at the same time.  No business was guaranteed, even if you were doing an excellent job, and the specter of economic death hung over your head all the time.  It was imperative to build relationships inside the client’s organization on at least three different levels.  Whenever possible I would build a relationship with the CEO of the corporation, my manager would build a rapport with his peer in the client’s organization, and we would try to match up our cleaners with the personalities of key people on each floor.  Generally speaking, it took all of us as a team to keep a tight grip on business.  Everyone was important, and I always told our people to avoid stepping on hands when climbing up the ladder, because those same hands could expedite the way down (or out the door!)  A disgruntled secretary in a client’s building could make our work life miserable.

Sometimes it took considerable creativity and persistence to win a potential client’s business.  At one point in my business life I had lost a lot of business, was in a world of hurt, and knew I needed to close a significant sale soon or file bankruptcy.  I had been working on this one contract for a year and a half, sending letters, leaving messages, and being generally ignored.  Suddenly one day I got a phone call, they expressed a desire to visit some of my existing clients and to my office.  They wanted to make sure I was big enough to handle their business (the contract would ultimately be worth about $30,000 to $50,000 per month.)  At the time my whole business was smaller than their contract, but I knew I couldn’t let them know that.  I was running my business from my century-house, an unrestored, dilapidated place badly in need of repair.  My office was in the basement of this house, where the ancient floor had ugly yellow linoleum and sloped about ten inches from one side of the house to the other.  I had painted the inside walls of this basement with whitewash, and I had a few filing cabinets and some ugly desks there, and one part-time secretary.  Upstairs I had converted a two-car garage into a living room, with two windows facing the driveway.

On the morning the prospective client was due to arrive, I hired four white, unlettered vans, and I hired four temporary laborers.  I brought them to my property an hour early, told them to back up the vans to an old barn at the back of my driveway that was filled with a lot of junk, and told them to load up some of this junk onto each van, drive around anywhere for ten minutes, and then return to the barn, unload the junk, reload the same junk, and drive around again.  I told them to do this until I told them to stop.  When the prospective client’s managers arrived, the first thing they remarked about was how modest my office was.  I told them I could easily have something more substantial to look at, but of course it would be my clients who would have to pay for it.  They said Good Point!  While they were partaking of coffee and pastries from a table strategically placed by the windows of my living room, they could not help but look out the window and notice the continual stream of white van traffic in and out of my driveway and all the loading and unloading going on.  They commented that I “had one hell of an operation” out there.  We spent a couple hours touring a small account I had nearby, and they went home satisfied that they had found the right supplier for their company.  And they had.  We provided a lengthy list of services to their company for years, earning several million dollars from them in the process.

Working at Watchtower headquarters my exposure to the IRS had been the absolute minimal.  Having virtually no income and no expenses, my tax returns were done for me and were exceedingly brief.  So my first real experience with the IRS came many years later, when my bookkeeper quit unexpectedly.  When I cleaned out her desk, I noticed a pack of unopened envelopes held together with a rubber band.  They were all from the IRS, and when I opened them I discovered to my dismay that we had not paid payroll taxes for quite a few months, the IRS had discovered this and was giving us about ten days to fork over about $140,000 or they would shut us down.  With my heart in my mouth, I looked up the IRS in the phone book, found their address, and went down there for a meeting with destiny.  Eventually I was assigned an agent, an older woman who wore the most unseemly broad-brimmed hats imaginable, contraptions that vaguely resembled a Mexican sombrero.  She peered out at me from the shadows of her hat and asked what I owed.  I told her what I thought, and she agreed.  Then she asked me if I was making money.  I said no, for that was about the time we were losing money on large contracts due to a shortage of labor.  She asked if I could change that.  I said I thought so.  Then she told me I was the smallest of her caseload, and I needed to go out and make a lot of money and then come back to see her in six months.  I thought, well, that was nice of her.  So that’s what I did.  I came back in six months and learned that she had retired.  My case then got caught in a jurisdictional dispute between two IRS districts, and by the time they settled their argument, I had paid them off.  Of my $140,000 bill, over $30,000 of it was in penalties.  I wrote the IRS a 100-page letter complete with a table of contents and appendix requesting abatement of the penalties, and in fact they did cancel about $19,000 worth of penalties.  I wondered at the time if they ever actually read my 100-page letter, or gave me the abatement just so they wouldn’t have to.  I wasn’t about to ask however.

As the founder of a company takes off the various hats he wore at the outset of the enterprise, it becomes imperative to focus on staff development, that is, developing depth on the management bench.  If you neglect this aspect of growth, it gets really lonely on that bench, talking to yourself all the time.  It was largely due to this loneliness, and my desire to develop mentor relationships with those who could help me, I developed a Board of Directors to advise me.  One of the Board members was a faculty member of a local Vocational School in charge of their Adult Education program.  After several years on my Board and impressed with our growth as a company, he volunteered to take  a one-year sabbatical from the school if I would hire him on as Vice President of Operations for that one year at a matching salary.  I agreed, for I knew I desperately needed help at the top.

We both knew within a couple months that this whole thing was a bad idea.  I remember visiting a former client with my friend to do an exit interview, i.e. find out why we had lost their business and where we had failed.  The client explained in embarrassing detail all of our shortcomings.  As we left the place, my friend and V.P. of Operations commented “I could have saved that account, but I don’t have to take that from anybody.”  My poor friend who taught Business Education for budding entrepreneurs at the local school was getting his first exposure to free markets and discovered he didn’t find the sovereignty of the consumer to his taste.  Belatedly, I remembered comments he had made before about the advantages of tenure at his school.  He had even bragged on one occasion that he ‘would have to rape one of the students on video camera to get fired.’  I remember having laughed at his remark, not taking him seriously.  I should have.  He left my company and went back to education, from which he subsequently retired.

That was not my only attempt to look for academic qualifications for senior management staff.  On another occasion I hired a young Ghanian immigrant who had just recently graduated with a phD in Staff Development from a large university.  I thought, ‘Perfect’, just what we need, only to discover that this guy’s idea of staff development was to study the issues for a few years and then write a scholarly paper about it.  He was incapable of organizing three men in a closet, and a sense of urgency was a totally foreign concept for him.  I’m sure he is presently in charge of some large governmental agency back in his native Ghana, and a frequent attendee at large international conferences addressing global issues.

After having been in business for well over a quarter century, it is still hard for me to handle a lawsuit with equanimity.  After all, I work very hard at doing the right thing, more so, it seems to me than most.  So I take it very personally when I get sued, because a lawsuit in business almost always implies some form of willful negligence or heedless disregard for others, something I have never been guilty of.

It seems to me that plaintiff’s attorneys are modern pirates looking for wealth to plunder.  Like politicians, they masquerade as altruists, doing all “for others” and for “society”.  It is an inversion of values when those who produce are pronounced greedy and selfish, and those who confiscate and plunder are selfless and protectors of the unfortunate.  Our tolerance for these pirates is a subject of scorn in much of Western Europe.

My most extreme lawsuit was when I was sued for $19,000,000.  I was one of six co-defendents, and there were about a dozen high-powered lawyers involved in the defense, and one rather sleazy plaintiff’s attorney.  I say sleazy because it became apparent very early in the discovery process that he had few facts and was engaged in a lot of fishing and name calling.  I thought he was lazy, and his shoes always needed shined.  He was always late, and he always looked like he had slept in his clothes the night before.  When we met during the process called “Deposition”, he would ask a question, and you would hear the word “Objection!” echo around the long table a dozen times as each defense attorney had to voice his own version of the word for the record.  When it came time to discuss “settlement”, which is what they call the process whereby they shake down the insurance companies who are paying the exorbitant fees of all the defense attorneys, the defense attorneys simply discussed behind closed doors what the least amount they could offer that would make this guy (the plaintiff’s attorney) go away.  The conversation, as usual, had nothing to do with justice or injury or right and wrong.  As a matter of fact, the plaintiffs didn’t even get discussed.  It was assumed by all that the case was totally without merit, even though it had dragged on procedurally in the courts for five or six years, all of which worked in the favor of the plaintiff’s attorney, for the longer it dragged on, the higher the expenses for the defense and the greater the desire of the insurance companies to settle.  Of course the defendents’ (including me) attorneys settled, and we, the defendents, could not be told what the amounts were.  I added up the attorneys’ fees for just one deposition session, and the total came to more than $10,000 for a few short hours.  My total insurance coverage at the time was $300,000 so this whole case had a surreal aspect to it for me, because no matter how many zeroes you added after $300,000, the result was the same:  I was broke and dead in the water if I lost.  And by that time in my business life, I was fully aware that winning and losing had little to do with right and wrong.  It is a strange feeling knowing that whether or not you keep your home and your ability to support your family lies in the hands of some stranger, an attorney you don’t know, hired by your insurance company, to defend you against charges you can’t believe you’re hearing, for amounts that defy comprehension.  Objection, objection, objection, objection. . .

After almost ten years of being in business, after innumerable setbacks and mistakes, after opening up my first major branch office in another city, with over a hundred employees and inadequate and uncommitted management talent spread too thin, I was losing more money than I ever dreamed possible, and cash flow was a nightmare.  I owed the IRS money, payroll deposit money, and they will take your firstborn child for that offense.  This was 1985 and all the new computers and software we had just purchased weren’t working, and I wasn’t getting the accurate, timely reports needed to turn things around.  It was scary, and my wife, who had been my bookkeeper for years, decided this would be a good time to bail out and be a full-time mother.  The woman I hired as her replacement left to start her own cleaning business and compete with us.  And yes, it was right about then that the local Circuit Overseer decided to have a serious talk with me about my not devoting enough time to the door-to-door canvassing required of all Jehovah’s Witnesses.  He was particularly disturbed because I had recently been  asked by Bethel headquarters staff to give a half hour presentation to about 20,000 attendees at a recent convention at the Richfield (Cleveland) Coliseum, and this while devoting less than ten hours per month in the door-to-door evangelizing activity.  Brother Callai was a man of average intelligence who probably was promoted to Circuit Overseer as a reward for his dogged adherence to policy.  I’m sure he was more than a little annoyed by my prominence locally in spite of my abysmally poor performance evangelically.  I was still an Elder in the local congregation, so he pointed out to me that unless my numbers improved dramatically and quickly, he would recommend my removal as an Elder.

I thought about this for a few days, and then I approached another elder within Brother Callai’s  circuit and asked him to join me as a witness (without a capital “W”) in a meeting with Callai.   At the meeting I told Callai that we must not be reading from the same textbook (meaning The Bible), because the copy I had said that all that God required from his servants was “wholesouled devotion”, meaning the best your soul was capable of in your given circumstances.  I explained what I had been dealing with in the business world, and the setbacks incurred trying to earn a living, and I asked him by what authority he had the right to demand of me more than God did.  Poor Brother Callai was mortified, and he insisted on us joining him in prayer while he prayed for God’s forgiveness, and mine, for his error.  Walking out of that meeting I knew I would never knock on another door as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses again.  I had no feelings about it whatsoever, no anger, no disgust, no annoyance.  No nothing.  Just total indifference.  I was done.  I had been praying for many years to someone who either wasn’t there or wasn’t listening; I had been defending doctrines I didn’t believe and policies I couldn’t practice, I had been rewriting speeches of church leaders to make them palatable and comprehensible to the rank and file.  I couldn’t do it anymore, none of it.  I was done pretending.  I was no longer a believer.  I wasn’t sure what exactly I was, other than a businessman in a lot of trouble.