Will Success Spoil Jerry Gorde?

On the road to the revolution, a young radical took a detour and wound up as CEO of a $6-million company.

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Jerry Gorde, the 32-year-old president of Virginia Textiles Inc. in Richmond, is in a small office next to the second-floor conference room where he will soon make a presentation that could complete what he calls the "Turkish Connection" -- a chance to almost double the company's sales in one year. Gorde sits in a large, fan-shaped wicker chair behind a highly polished mahogany desk. The walls are paneled in walnut; the carpet is a rich, deep brown; the lighting is overhead and recessed. It seems vaguely funereal, but Gorde laughs at the observation and says that, on the contrary, it is an official "president's office," even though it used to be a storage closet.

Too many times, he says, while he was loading trucks in his cutoffs, sweating under a hot southern sun, one of his well-meaning salespeople would rush up to him with a client eager to meet the president of the company. It happened so often that he had to write a memo on the subject. Given a few minutes warning, the memo said, Gorde would be glad to assist in a sale by running upstairs to the "president's office," changing into a business suit, and there receive visiting bankers and customers in a corporate splendor that would make them feel secure. Appearances are important to the world of traditional business, particularly for Virginia Textiles, where the reality is markedly untraditional. And it would be inappropriate to uncover him in the office where he actually works, down in the warehouse next to the soda machine, which he shares with four other people and two dogs.

The irony of a quick-change artist playing upstairs-downstairs games amuses and pleases Gorde. "I'm a walking contradiction," he says, quoting a line from songwriter Kris Kristofferson, "partly truth and partly fiction."

Suddenly, as if he has just heard "Two minutes to showtime" and a knock on the dressing-room door, Gorde jumps up and announces that it is time for the meeting.

Among the men seated at the conference table are Orhan Asliturk, chairman of Oras Group of Companies, a Turkish holding company with global reach based in Istanbul, and Murat Agirnasli, president of IVO Import & Export Co., Oras's trading division in Western Europe and the United States. They want Gorde to open the U.S. market for them so that they can introduce a new line of T-shirts and sportswear made of Turkish cotton, which is allegedly superior to domestic cotton, and less expensive as well.

Gorde flips rapidly through charts of the deal's major objectives and statistics. Between the dressing room and the stage, a change has come over him; there is an edge now, and the confidence of a veteran performer. Although he is dressed in a flannel shirt and gray corduroy Levis, it is clearly part of the overall dramatic effect -- the daring, brilliant, nonconformist wunderkind, a comer, the right man to bet on.

For a while, the atmosphere is more self-congratulatory than deliberative. All agree that there are profits to be made, and they are apparently sampling the feast in their minds. Then Gorde says that if he has to spend $100,000 up front to prime the market, he expects to recoup his investment through a specific schedule of cooperative advertising allowances over the next 36 months. This gives everyone on the other side of the table heartburn. They find it very difficult to agree to specific allowances, given the fluctuation of cotton prices on the world market. "Of course we can agree," Gorde insists. "Everybody we need is right here in this room. Who else do we need?" To which Agirnasli, a little surprised by Gorde's brassy push for the goal line, says, "C'mon, Jerry, quit playing the hard-assed businessman." And Gorde says: "I can't. That's what I am." Then the contestants feint and jab at each other for another half hour until Gorde finally wins his allowances. Later that afternoon, Gorde will recall the struggle and say, "God, I love it. I'm good at it."

Good is an understatement. In 1976 Gorde bought a 200-square-foot T-shirt shop in Richmond. From that modest beginning, he has engineered the creation of a $6-million company with five divisions: retail, direct screen printing, advertising specialties, wholesale distribution, and monogramming. Over the past five years, Virginia Textiles has grown at a compound annual rate of 94%. The company has won a place on INC.'s list of the 500 fastest-growing privately held companies in America two years in a row. And Gorde has reaped the benefits: Honored by the city of Richmond as its Small Businessperson of the Year, he owns a 1963 Corvette split-window coupe, pays himself $1,000 a week, and recently bought a small house in a woodland setting near the James River.

By any traditional measure, Jerry Gorde's business career is a triumph -- but therein lies the contradictions with which he must wrestle. Gorde has not only built a dynamic business, he has given it a human face -- open, employee owned, and democratic. But the more successful he gets, the more he worries that he has betrayed his own ideals. "It is quite a shock to me when I think of the person I have grown to be," he wrote in his personal journal. "How in the world did I become so lost?..."

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