With A Little Help From His Friends

A long-shot start-up company gets help from a number of helpful, interested businesspeople.

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These days a long-shot start-up doesn't have to go it alone

It was the unlikeliest of new ventures: an actor with little business experience sets up a company to manufacture toilet partitions. But Greg Braendel is confounding the skeptics, thanks in part to an array of heavy hitters lined up behind him. Why would Fortune 500 suppliers, fancy lawyers -- even a Big Eight accounting firm -- all be willing to help out a start-up so far off the beaten track?

-- J.C.

Greg Braendel's accountants and consultants come from giant Peat Marwick Main & Co., which is providing its services on a reduced-fee basis. His lawyers are with the Los Angeles branch of White & Case, a venerable New York City firm; they aren't charging him much either.

In fact, nearly everyone seems to want to help out his young company. Braendel's vendors extended him credit before he had so much as a D&B rating. A nationwide network of reps and distributors are selling his wares. Du Pont and Formica Corp., which manufacture some of his raw materials, are helping him with his marketing. UA Theatres, Brunswick Recreation Centers, and the United States Air Force signed up as customers when his company was scarcely a year old.

By now you've doubtless decided that Gregory Braendel -- it's pronounced Bren-DELL -- is some high-tech hotshot with a decade's experience at Hewlett-Packard Co. Not so. He is a 44-year-old itinerant Hollywood actor, who for 20 years has supported himself with a variety of jobs while garnering a few small parts in television movies and commercials. He has no M.B.A.; indeed, he has only the barest experience in business of any sort.

Nor is his company likely to be the next Lotus Development or L.A. Gear, riding technology or trendiness to the top. Thrislington Cubicles, as it's called, manufactures bathroom partitions.

Bathroom partitions? Bear with me. We'll start at the beginning, because the saga is an object lesson in how even a start-up with an unlikely founder and an offbeat product can have a noticeable impact on the marketplace. Braendel took on a seemingly impossible task. What has made it merely difficult, rather than impossible, is a dramatic shift in the way the business world treats entrepreneurs.

My wife and Braendel had known each other as children. I first met him in 1984, on a family trip to Los Angeles. He took us on an insider's tour of Hollywood; he played a tape for us of the time he kissed Cheryl Ladd in The Grace Kelly Story. Three years later I saw him again, when he was passing through Boston. This time he didn't want to talk about acting, he wanted to talk about the toilet-partition company he was starting. From the sublime to the ridiculous in three short years, I thought -- until he began to explain himself.

Think about it, he said. Every hotel, restaurant, airport, school, office -- every public building, everywhere in the world -- has bathrooms, and in those bathrooms are stalls. Somebody has to manufacture those stalls. This is one big market.

Right, said I. And doubtless there are some good-sized companies supplying that market. Maybe so, he replied, but their stuff doesn't look like this. That was when he spread out his four-color brochures.

Yow. Like everyone else, I had conjured up an image of bathroom stalls in plain metal, gray or white, most likely with the latches missing. The enclosures Braendel was showing me hardly looked like rest-room equipment at all. On the contrary: they looked as if they had emanated from some high-fashion design studio, perhaps for use in a jet-set client's poolside cabana. These, it turned out, were the bathroom partitions manufactured by a company with the elegantly British name of Thrislington Sales Ltd.

The story poured out. Thrislington had been making and selling the cubicles in the United Kingdom for the previous several years, and had already captured an appreciable fraction of the market. Braendel's English cousin, Adrian Emck, worked with the man who had designed them, and had come to America looking for ways to market them here. Braendel -- not unmindful of the pecuniary possibilities -- agreed to help his cousin out. At Thrislington's expense he flew to San Francisco to consult with an architect friend, then back to Hollywood, where he located a company called Bobrick Washroom Equipment Inc. "My idea was to find a manufacturer, then sit back and collect royalties for 10 years or so," Braendel says. "Then I could pursue my acting career."

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