Founders of professional service firms have a choice to make: Do they want to be the company, or do they want to build one?

 

Norma Rothenberg and Sally Jackson are unhappy with their businesses, for similar reasons.

Rothenberg, in her late 30s, was the public relations director of The McCall Publishing Co. when she decided that she ought to start her own agency. For a while, things looked promising. To get business for the new firm, NAR Communications, she drew on her contacts from earlier work in the industry, and she wasn't shy about calling on new prospects. In fact, finding clients was the least of Rothenberg's problems: She quickly had more than she could handle alone.

But as business got better, life somehow got tougher. If there was more work than one person could handle, how was it going to be split up? Who was going to do what -- and specifically, what was Rothenberg going to do? She had started the company, admission she didn't have the slightest idea what her role in it was to be. She hired people who weren't capable of acting independently, then faulted them when they didn't. She didn't want to manage, but wouldn't let anyone else manage. She knew she couldn't do all the work herself, but she constantly meddled with the people she hired to do it. She was afraid of hiring people who might be better than she, or who might want to approach clients differently.

For Rothenberg, starting her own firm engendered confusion, self-doubt, and anxiety. "I want you to know," she said over a take-out salad in her midtown Manhattan office, "that I am embarrassed to tell you what I'm about to tell you. I have gone through six secretaries and four assistants in the past nine months. I don't know if I'm not paying enough, or not hiring good enough people. . . . They say that I'm too demanding, too much of a perfectionist." Now Rothenberg is working with a consultant who intervenes, as she puts it, "every time I'm convinced again that I can do it all better by myself and that I should fire everybody."

Sally Jackson's situation isn't as stark as Rothenberg's, but it isn't all that different, either. Jackson worked for the PR arm of two advertising agencies before she decided to try it on her own, and soon she had more business than she could handle. Today, if a Boston-area company wants to stage a highly visible grand opening or an attention-getting promotional event, one of the first people it will think to call is Sally Jackson.

As an agency, though, Jackson & Co. is in a rut, promoting one event after another. Jackson herself is too busy to spend time developing new markets, let alone developing new services; large potential accounts don't seek her out, she says, because they perceive her as small. Jackson doesn't have the same difficulty with delegating and supervising that Rothenberg has, but she, too, has seen her two-to-three-person agency reach its limits far short of her expectations for it.

"I feel like I've come full circle," says Jackson. "I've done it; it's been successful; and people respect it. Now it's clearly time to do something different." But to diversify, the firm would need to grow larger, which would mean hiring more people and creating a more complex organization. That is where Jackson, like Rothenberg, has balked. "My limits have to do with management," she says, "and the company's limits are my own."

What Jackson and Rothenberg have in common is not simply their trade, public relations. Rather, they are caught in the same dilemma that confronts every entrepreneurial professional, affecting lawyers and consultants as much as it does financial advisers or flacks. Most such professionals launch their start-ups without deciding whether they are in business to practice a profession or in a profession to build a business.As a result, they find themselves unable to do either one to their own satisfaction. And their companies, started with such confidence and enthusiasm, become sources of frustration for the increasingly unhappy founders.

But because this dilemma is so widely shared, it would be surprising if there weren't a few lessons to be learned from people who deliberately chose one road or the other -- or who learned from harsh experience exactly where their personal priorities lay.Paul Franson and Milton Glaser fit in the former category.John Brockman fits in the latter.

Franson, a former journalist, opened a public relations shop in 1980, when he was 40. "I wanted to build a business," he says, "and this was a business I could build with very little investment." He set it in San Jose, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, and he made high-tech companies his market. In just four years, Franson Associates's annual billings climbed to $2.5 million and the work force to 43. O'Dwyer's Directory of Public Relations Firms for 1984 listed Franson's as the country's fastest-growing PR agency.

Franson never had any doubt or ambivalence about why he was starting the company. He had clear ideas about how public relations should be done, but no fascination with doing it himself. "From the beginning," he recalls, "I knew that the challenge I faced was to make a business out of it, not a personal service. So I set out from the start to hire people who could do the job." This was not the same thing as building an organization to help Paul Franson deliver public relations services. "I do want it to be an extension of me," he says, "but through education, through my showing new people how to do things the right way.

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