Power Trips

Some company owners exercise their imaginations not only in the office but out of it. What's striking about their vacations is not where they went, but why.

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The word vacate, when you think about it, has unpleasant connotations, like giving up, or leaving empty, and for many entrepreneurs, vacation strikes the same dismal chord. The ethic of entrepreneurship just doesn't seem to allow for vacations. When your business is hanging by a thread -- and when the thread, you think, is a delicate weave of your own guts, cash, and cunning -- it can be demned hard to leave the corner office empty.

That isn't the only problem.

Take Terry Van Der Tunk, for example. Seven years ago, Van Der Tuuk bought Graphic Technology Inc., a producer and printer of bar-code labels in Olathe, Kans. Before that he was vice-president of finance at Select Brands Industries Inc. and executive vice-president of Helzberg Diamond Shops Inc., in Kansas City, Mo. "In all that time," Van Der Tuuk cheerfully reports, "except for my twentieth anniversary, I have taken vacations of less than a week."

What keeps Van Der Tuuk in the office year after year isn't the tenuousness of a new enterprise: Graphic is up to $15.4 million in annual sales, and has appeared twice on INC.'s listing of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in America. Nor is it the expense: "I can afford pretty near any kind of vacation anyone would want." The reason, then? "I know it's trite," says Van Der Tuuk, "but I love my work so much it doesn't seem like work."

Bourgeois Fils & Co., a 30-employee investment banking firm in Exeter, N.H., is also well past the hanging-by-a-thread phase. "It took me three or four years," says founder Bert Bourgeois, "to get it to the point where it could pay the bills, then to grow it beyond a boutique.And all that time, the pressures were just too great. I never even thought about vacations."

But now Bourgeois thinks about vacations a lot, and in some detail. He wants to go on a trip to Brazil. He learned Portuguese and Spanish at Harvard, but has never had a chance to use them. So he'd like to spend a week down there brushing up on the languages, then another week traveling around listening to music. Barring that, he'd be happy with a vacation in which he learned to drive fast cars. So what's stopping him? He isn't sure where to start, he says. Why not with a few phone calls? "Well," he confesses, proud but also a little puzzled, "I have real trouble asking people for things."

It could be that Van Der Tuuk and Bourgeois are eccentric, but it seems unlikely, given the reputation of entrepreneurs for workaholism and fierce independence. Yet neither of these qualities is what troubles most business owners contemplating the idea of a vacation. A good vacation begins in a dream, a fancy -- and who has time to dream? When dreaming is to be done, most entrepreneurs dream of matters like collecting receivables.

Most, we said, not all. There are a number of growth-minded small-business people who exercise their imaginations not only in the office but out of it, and who have found ways to pursue their own growth while pursuing their company's. Their stories are something more than a travelogue, for what's striking about their vacations is not so much where they went, but why. To this diverse group of entrepreneurs, taking a vacation seems to mean seeking or finding as much as it means leaving. And maybe that, in turn, has something in common with what it takes to build a business.

Holidays in extremis. Right now, as INC. goes to press, Dodge Morgan is rounding Cape Horn, heading toward Bermuda, on the last leg of one of the most awesome psychophysical ordeals a man can put himself through. Since last fall, he has been sailing around the world, nonstop, alone, in a 60-foot sloop. If all goes well, he will slip into Bermuda sometime before the end of April. If he does, Morgan will have circumnavigated the globe in far less than 292 days. In the record books, this is a winning time. In the living of it, Morgan will have run risks to life and sanity that most people would rather not meet up with in a lifetime.

Morgan is 54 years old, and the owner-publisher of the weekly Maine Times. Until 1984, he was chief executive officer of Controlonics Corp., a Westford, Mass., manufacturer of electronic equipment, which he started in 1972 and sold 12 years later. He is also one of those people, apparently, who gets edgy even thinking about vacations.

"Dodge hates vacations," says his wife, Manny. "For years, his family had to force him out of the office, and the only way you could do it was to put him on a boat, doing something, as he says, 'positive.' He wouldn't at all like anyone to think he's on vacation now; he is working harder than he ever worked in his life. If you asked his occupation, he'd say, 'sailor, self-employed."

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