A Vermont business broker shows corporate refugees how to become successful entrepreneurs.
These days, business broker James Howard has been selling off small New England companies like an auctioneer on a hot streak. In the last year, Howard clinched almost a deal a week, at an average commission of $28,000; his six-year-old company, Country Business Services in Brattleboro, Vt. (already the biggest small business brokerage firm in New England), netted a million dollars in revenues in 1981.
"Making money," Howard says, "is something I've always known how to do."
But making money is not how Jim Howard keeps score. Howard is a man with a sense of mission, and selling businesses is his way of changing the world in small but important ways. ("Head-quarters of the Revolution," proclaims a wooden plaque on the wall of his sparsely furnished office.) His real triumphs are people -- the hundreds of frustrated corporate managers he has plucked out of big compoanies and taught the values of self-determination.
"If you buy a small business from CBS," says Howard, "you've made a decision: to take control of your life and business simulanteously, because you believe more in your own ability to deal with change than in a corporation's ability. You don't cop out when things get tough, because you care about making your business -- and your life -- work."
Howard believes the world would be a better place if more people took control of their own lives, and he preaches constantly about how to do it. His own company operates as a model, with clearly defined procedures, manuals, flow charts; the people who buy companies from him get regular advice -- almost always free -- on how to manage a business in a rapidly changing world. And Howard's preaching clearly seems to make a difference. Out of the more than 150 companies he has sold, only a handful have failed.
Learning how to stay in control, Howard adds, is a skill he's been learning and teaching all of his life. Like most of the entrepreneurs he's put in charge of small manufacturing firms, country inns, retail stores, and restaurants, Howard was a middle-aged refugee from the world of large corporations when he launched Country Business Services in 1976. He had spent 20 years managing a family-owned public relations firm that grew to become the nation's sixth largest, with elegant offices in New York City and a client roster studded with Fortune 500 companies. Increasingly, though, Howard began to wonder how well his impressive clients understood their own world.
"Late in the 1950s," he says, "things were already out of control. When I began to practice public relations, the companies I consulted for didn't have any idea of marketing. They were part of a hardware-oriented, product-oriented economy; they thought in terms of making, selling, and distributing a thing, and they believed if the thing were well made and priced properly, demand would follow. And they got away with it, because they were operating in a very forgiving context. There was rapid population growth. There were undiscriminating markets, created by the baby boom. International competition was limited. Quality standards were lax.
"So, I'd propose some orderly planning to clients -- usually based on a unifying concept, one that would force them to make and keep promises to specific markets, think about how they ran their company, even who they hired. And in many cases my suggestions were just dismissed as radical."
When Howard's firm landed the 1968 Nixon election campaign as a client, he found more evidence of drift. "I thought Nixon and the people around him would be the most competent in the world, because they were the most powerful. But my first discovery was that they were horribly insulated -- and really, not too smart."
By 1970, the close he perceived had affected Howard. He went into a psychological tailspin. "I was blaming myself for the ills of the world," he says. "I had lost self-confidence. The harder I worked, the worse it got. I became more and more nervous, even frightened; I wasn't even communicating with the people around me, the one virtue I'd placed so much value on." Finally, he had a nervous breakdown. He sold his agency. And he had a two-year struggle to pick up the pieces.
Howard fled New York for a stone cottage, without running water or electricity, in Vermont and began -- unsuccessfully -- to dabble in real estate sales. As he struggled to put his life back together, Howard began to look for the sense of control he found so lacking in the corporate world.
"When you have a breakdown," he says, "it's your understanding that collapses. I'd always been a decentralist, yet I'd been overwhelmed by how out-of-control things actually were." Worse, the rate of change was increasing, and Howard saw no sign that big corporations were willing to ask the kind of questions that would let them cope with change. "They just dig into a trench mentality, centralize their assets, put the emphasis on short-term goals like price warfare, and subjugate middle managers and blue-collar work force to the bommon line.No wonder there's a leveling off of growth," he says.
Howard knew there was no point in going back to New York, to the mental chaos of working with big companies. If he were going to take charge of his own life, Jim Howard would have to run a business of his own.
What kind of business? The trick to staying in control, he realized, was to understand thoroughly what you're doing. And that meant asking questions -- lots of questions.
A compulsive list-maker, Howard began by writing down all the goals he could think of for his life. "I resolved to be completely happy with whatever business I was going to start," Howard says. "That way, I wouldn't resist change -- I'd be eager to respond to it, to stay happy."
