And when it came time to quit his public podium, even that was done in classic Harrell style. Harrell had first gotten involved with Jacksonville Cable as a favor to some friends of his son; characteristically, he soon envisioned something larger, such as turning it into a new national magazine. But the venture was floundering financially, and Harrell was powerless to do much about that himself. As owner and publisher, he insisted on a 50? cover price to mitigate his cash-flow problems, a move that rankled the president of the sponsoring cable company, whose subscribers had been promised a freebie. After some public squabbling, Harrell suspended publication and sold the magazine back to a handful of its employees. His readers were thus left wondering how on earth he had gotten out of France to return home a decorated hero. The cable company was left with a six-figure lawsuit for meddling in the business operation.
It was vintage Harrell. "When you look down the highway where Wilson has been," says Wellesley, Mass., management consultant John "Jack" Connolly Jr., former president of Harrell's domestic brokerage business, "you see a lot of wrecks lying by the side of the road."
"Traveling with Wilson is not always profitable," agrees Art Linkletter, who has bought a few tickets on the Harrell Express himself, "but it is rarely dull."
Nine o'clock on a sunny December morning, a Saturday: Harrell has already breakfasted with Bill Caldwell, president of Harrell International Inc. (HI), to sound him out on a scheme he has just hatched. Caldwell, a former vice-president of Consolidated Food Corp.'s L'eggs Brands Inc., works closely with Harrell on a variety of consulting projects and possible new-product launches; his marketing specialty is setting up distribution systems serving such mass-merchandising retail chains as drugstores and groceries. Harrell, who is HI's board chairman (there are only three other full-time office employees, plus Jack Sussman, HI's consulting tax accountant), gets more directly involved with deals related to the grocery-products industry. To this industry he brings more than 30 years' experience as an independent food broker, selling food products to retail grocery outlets on behalf of manufacturers and processors.
Harrell's new scheme ("we could be talking, uh, half of 1% of a $100-billion business, Bill") is to organize a coast-to-coast broker network with one specialized service feature: expertise in handling refrigerated products, the most difficult grocery products to manage successfully. It is his belief -- indeed, it is the central tenet of his salesman's soul -- that brokers are the unsung heroes of the retail, grocery business, the guys who stick their limbs on the line and make new products go. The fact that they routinely perform this function on 30-day manufacturers' contracts makes it a business with little security and lots of petty politics. Harrell argues passionately that any food producer with a hot new commodity and half a brain should value the broker as a partner, not dismiss him as a necessary evil. Brokers, he points out, are well-paid, influential members of their communities with ready access, social and professional, to the top rungs of supermarket management.
Ordinarily, the industry's political dynamic works in exactly the opposite direction. That 30-day service contract leads to a face-off: In front of every $250,000-a-year broker with a contract stands a $25,000-a-year manufacturer's sales rep with a Don Corleone complex. "Take care of our needs first," snarls the rep, "or we cancel your act." The broker is thereupon expected to fall to the carpet and beg for reprieve. Harrell does not buy this Godfather trip because, for one thing, he thinks it is counterproductive, and for another, it was always largely wasted on him. And why was that?
"Forty years ago," he explains, "I bailed out of a P-38 with my clothes, my chute, and my face on fire. I went 10 days without drugs or sleep. Germans were shoving bayonets into the hayloft where I was hiding. You think that after that, some lowlevel 'broker poker' from General Foods could walk into my office and make me quake? No way. No fucking way. I ate them alive. Because guys like that are useless if they can't find ways to scare you, and I'd already visited the outer limits of human fear."
Harrell has also visited the outer limits of strategic genius. It happened most dramatically in 1967, four years after he bought (for $30,000) a struggling company making Formula 409, a spray cleaner.
In truth, practically everything about 409 was serendipitous, including the fact that Harrell had firsthand knowledge of the cleaner's popularity -- his military customers adored it -- even among consumers who never saw any advertising for it. And surely it was good fortune when Harrell ran into a food broker in a Honolulu bar, who first suggested -- and then helped implement -- a brilliant strategy for domestic distribution: subcontract the ad work and produce commercials in-house; buy air time market-to-market, at discount rates; hire local personalities with local credibility and give them a piece of the action. Nor did it hurt when Harrell wandered into Art Linkletter's office, hoping to buy his high-profile pitchman's services for 409, and eventually walked out with a check for $85,000 and Linkletter in a 10% equity position.
But all that was only the warm-up for what happened next, and what happened next was one part luck to about six parts chutzpah.
"Procter & Gamble waited until we'd gotten up to around a 5% market share," recalls Harrell, "and then they got ready to roll out their own spray cleaner. Cinch, I think it was called. It didn't take a genius to realize that, with their marketing muscle, they could blow us completely out of the water. In fact, I once said as much to Procter's president, but I'll get back to that story later, because it makes a nice postscript.
