Why sell" Harrell's answer is coarse and to the point. "The world is made up of pirates and farmers," he says. "Pirates come in and kill all the natives, rape all the women, and level the landscape; farmers follw after them to till the soil, plant the seeds, build the communities. I realize you need both, but I was never much of a farmer." Or, as Linkletter puts it in a slightly different vein, "Wilson's one weakness, if you want to call it that, is always having to plunge ahead in high gear. He wants -- maybe he needs -- to risk it all, all the time."
Critics might find other weaknesses, too. There were a couple of hassles with the federal government a few years back. One, an Internal Revenue Service audit, recently resulted in a $275,000 settlement on an alleged $6-million tax liability. The other, a grand-jury investigation into Bird-Harrell Inc.'s (a subsidiary of HI) expense account procedures, moved Harrell to protect his operating companies by agreeing not to call personally on any Army and Air Force Exchange Service accounts for a period of three years. He also sold the military brokerage business -- for $14.2 million -- to a former colleague. While not denying the substance of the grand jury's charges, Harrell insists it was much ado about very little, the price paid for being in business with the U.S. military in the first place.
"They [the government] thought they had a big target to shoot at," he says, "but bribing generals was not my style of doing things. It wasn't a question of morals, really, it was a basic business decision. I found other ways to sell the accounts I needed to sell. Perfectly legal ways, too.
"Still," he sighs, "there's no stopping the sanctimonious once they think they can nail you."
If that is a fair assessment, then Harrell's balance sheet looks pretty good. Throw out Toasta-Pizza (Why not?Toaster owners did) and a few other ideas whose time never came, and his marketing hunches seem sound. The business record, moreover, speaks for itself. Whether launching a new venture or scuttling an old one, Harrell always stayed right where he wanted to be, at the center of the action.
Well, almost always. Harrell does have one painful regret in recent times: his failure to make a household cleaner called 4+1 into the Formula 409 of the '80s. The product itself was not bad -- 4+1 was a liquid concentrate to which the user added water at home, thereby saving considerable money -- and the organizational principle may have been brilliant. Harrell wanted to (and did) build a "Third Wave" company: All manufacturing was subcontracted out, all other functions were decentralized, brokers were drafted to lead the marketing effort. There were no -- as in none, zero -- regular employees. Linkletter signed on as national spokesman, as well as investing (with ex-"Bonanza" stars Lorne Greene and Michael Landon) in the $1-million tax shelter used to finance the venture. And the product actually achieved major supermarket penetration, totaling 90% nationwide, on the strength of the selling effort, a possible world's record for an item with no test markets in its dossier and a paper company behind it.
Alas, consumers shunned it. Says Linkletter: "For 25 years, I've been associated with products sold on their convenience factor: easier to use, more expensive. Here was a product that was more complicated to use but cheaper. We hoped the times were ripe for it to go, but we made a bad misjudgment."
"If nothing else," avers Harrell, "we set up a company that made the product king, and that's all-important. If the product's king -- not management, or the board, or the sales force, but the product -- then you've accomplished something."
And what else did 4+1 accomplish?
"We were the first company in history to go broke without going bankrupt."
Taking all that he has learned -- the good, the bad, and the ungainly -- Harrell now wants to apply it to revolutionizing the food industry. His current cause, building a new broker network, is in high gear for 1985. There are meetings scheduled across the country with old contacts and new faces who might want a piece of the action. Millions more dollars may come in as a result. If not -- if the whole thing blows up in his face, if Procter drops him in his tracks, if defeat looms in any form -- he will look upon it as another interesting chapter and move on to something else. Pirates think like that, he says.
So it is very possible that when the book finally closes on him, Whilson Harrell will be appreciated as a man of many subplots. Some will live forever in the annals of marketing lore, others will be hooted out of the back room. Whatever their fate, they deserve to be read as parts of a whole, for it is the whole that makes the story worth reading.
Oh, by the way. For all you Jacksonville Cable readers still wondering what happened, here's the last chapter of the Great French Escape. First, Harrell watched from his stretcher as the underground blows up this bridge, see, and then Patton -- that's right, General Patton -- sends in a tank to rescue Harrell and his buddy. His buddy is a fellow P-38 pilot, and it turns out that the guy driving the tank just happens to be the pilot's brother, although neither expects to find the other there. Really. They throw their arms around each other and throw Harrell on a Red Cross meat wagon, after which . . . aw, never mind. Wait for the movie.
