Kuolt's Complex

Sooner or later, every successful entrepreneur has to face the possibility that his company has outgrown him. Milt Kuolt did it twice, and it wasn't any easier the second time around.

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Milt Kuolt had been through all this before -- that agitation of the spirit, that spasm of discountent. It had driven him out of Thousand Trails Inc., the first company he had founded, and now it was haunting him again, this time at Horizon Air Industries Inc., his second. It was a strange malady, a kind of occupational disease peculiar to entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, it always seemed to strike at a moment of triumph, when the dream that had given birth to the company was emerging as full-blown reality. In the glory of that moment, a troubling question presented itself: Had the company outgrown the person who had founded it?

Kuolt had been wrestling with this question for two yers when I first met him back in 1981. At the time, he was chairman and chief executive officer of Thousand Trails and -- to all outward appearances -- the picture of entrepreneurial success. That success dated back to 1969, when Milton G. Kuolt II (his last name is pronounced "Colt") had finally lost patience with the state parks and other verdant glades that he and his family frequented in their 16-foot Terry Travel Trailer. The campgrounds were too crowded; maintenance was deplorable; and they weren't safe, what with the boozing and pot smoking and all manner of raucous hooliganism.

Kuolt had pondered this sad predicament for a while and had struck on what was then a startling innovation. He would build his own campground, called a "preserve," replete with cozy travel-trailer pads in the woods, a pool, a clubhouse, and other amenities. He would then sell nature lovers a lifetime membership in the preserve, giving them the right to use it and any others he might build in the future. If his own preferences were any guide, he figured, there would be thousands of takers for his "modest man's country club."

As it turned out, he was absolutely right. Starting with a few sites that he cleared with his kids, he had built Thousand Trails into the largest membership campground system in the country. By 1981, the company had 27,600 members who had paid average membership prices of up to $5,795 for the right to enjoy a patch of sylvan splendor in any one of 19 preserves located in five states and British Columbia. From Milt and the kids whacking away at the underbrush, the company had grown to more than 900 employees, with annual sales of $40 million and profits of $3.3 million. Thousand Trails was as big a success as the great outdoors it sold.

"But," says William Peare, then president and chief operating officer, "Milt wasn't comfortable. He wasn't happy. How'd I know? Well, he said so. You know him, he always speaks his mind. At least once a week for two years he'd say, 'I don't like this. I can't get my hand around this anymore."

The company had become too big, an institution. "You had to take on a bureaucracy, whether you liked it or not," Kuolt says, "and I've never cozied up to bureaucracies. I get upset with them." There was, he finally decided, no way to relieve his discomfort short of leaving the company. "I felt that I was much better in the formative stages of a company, in the creative stages, in coming up with new concepts, as opposed to taking a proven product and making it 5 or 10 times its size. I felt that takes a whole new type of discipline, a new type of management thinking."

After a year of discussion, he brought in another chairman and CEO, sold most of his stock, and walked. Now a multimillionaire, Kuolt announced he would start Horizon Air Industries, a new regional airline based on Seattle, serving the Pacific Northwest. It seemed, in some ways, an odd selection, given the restless, impulsive nature of the man and the grinding technicalities of the airline business. But, the choice of industries aside, Kuolt had no doubt about his decision to leave Thousand Trails. "The worst mistake an entrepreneur can make," he told me back then, "is to think that the abilities he had to run a company of 20 employees are good enough to run a company of 850 employees."

To be sure, the dilemma that Kuolt faced in 1981 is hardly unique. It is part of a pattern that every successful entrepreneur can recognize. You take an idea and a little money, find a handful of believers, and together set out to build a new enterprise against all odds. The quarters are cramped, the hours are long, the pay is thin, but it doesn't matter. There is a magic in the work, a special shine. You are a family, bonded together in common purpose and commitment. Exuberant, enthusiastic, and dedicated, you accomplish prodigies of endurance and self-sacrifice. The idea takes hold, and the company grows -- the first million dollars, 5 million, 10, and still rising.

Then it strikes -- let's call it "Kuolt's Complex." In the fullness of your accomplishment, you find it strangely hollow. The company is too big, too complex. What is that person's name? Where did that family feeling go, and where the magic? You find yourself stranded in the breach where impulse and improvication must give way to systems and planning, and the fires of creation are cooling on the routines of disciplined technique. You sense -- vaguely at first, but more certainly as your awareness deepens -- that your own talents by themselves, so productive at the start, are no longer of the kind and quality to carry the enterprise further. Others around you see that as well. But it's your enterprise, isn't it? You birthed it. You are its loving parent. How can you let go? What can you do?

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