Tom Richman

Assets And Liabilities

 

Graydon Webb, on the same subject, says, "There's a certain point you get to when you say, 'All right, Graydon, it's nice that you know everything about your business, but it's too big for you.' One of the biggest things I've had to wrestle with in the last year is, At what point do I back away and let the company perform?I could be as much a part of the problem in our growth as anything else."

Webb has already hired -- and fired -- one president, whom he found to be "too structured" for G. D. Ritzy's frantic growth rate. So has Lorraine Mecca of Micro D, the Santa Ana, Calif.-based distributor of microcomputer hardware, software, peripherals, and accessories. Webb insists that he is ready to let go, to turn operations over to someone else and turn his own energies to creating new restaurant concepts for the company to pursue. Mecca doesn't seem so sure.

Micro D's first president, for example, was not its CEO. Mecca retained that title and its prerogatives. "It was selfishness on my part," she says. "I was not ready to give it up. It was hard enough not to be president anymore." In early February of this year, less than a month after her president's departure, Mecca's plans for replacing him were still vague. People who know Mecca suggest that she is never vague when she is firmly committed to a decision.

The changes in the company and in the chief executive's job both cause and reflect changes in the CEO's personal life. Graydon Webb's father, a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchisee, was generous with his cash. He also collected cars, and young Graydon, according to stories told, drove a Rolls-Royce while attending Ohio State University. So the four-door Buick he drives today is no big deal. It is not suddenly having money that unsettles Webb, but being a public person in a town like Columbus. "It's a goldfish bowl," he says, and he keeps a check on his public partying. He used to play keyboard and sing in a local rock band. Now he just sits in form time to time, worrying that the image of a rock musician is not one the chairman of a public company should cultivate.

Michael Wayne is just a little touchy about the Mercedes-Benz he drives in Lapeer, Mich., deep in the heart of General Motors country. "It's really the cheapest car to drive," he says before being asked; explaining such matters as resale value.

Lapeer, 30 minutes east of Flint, lacks Houston's tolerance for ostentatious displays of newly acquired wealth, but even if it didn't, Wayne would feel awkward spending lavishly. We ate dinner at Korby's Family Restaurant, where the liver and onion plate comes with soup, bread bar, salad bar, and dessert bar, all for $3.99. After Durakon went public, Wayne bought a new house, but he is sensitive about revealing what he paid. "Mike's a sudden success," says Gary Ferguson, who was Wayne's boss at IBM and now works for his former salesman. "I don't think he's comfortable with it yet.It's too new."

It has been a long time since Wayne personally had to trim the plastic truck-bed liners Durakon manufactures, and he retains no nostalgia for selling. "I think how difficult it would be for me to have to go back and do the things I used to do," he says. Wayne is a different person now; he has grown. "When I left IBM, if somebody had asked me if I could be chairman of the board of a company and responsible for directing audited financial reports . . . and developing corporate objectives, I'd have said, 'No, there's no way I could do that.' If there had been an ad in The Wall Street Journal, there's no way I could have applied for the job. . . . But being in the job, I was forced to learn all that stuff as I went along. . . . My job is easier now than when I first started the company because then I was doing everything."

Lorraine Mecca, who like the other CEOs has plenty of money, finds that the costs of doing her job are not trivial. "If you want to be a success in business, then you have to give up something, and it might be either your home life, your children, your social life, or your emotional life. There's not time for everything. You can be mediocre at everything, but if you're going to be really good at any of those choices, you have to give up some of the others. Me, I have a housekeeper who spends more time with my children than I do. If I were not married, there's no way I would ever meet and develop a relationship with a man. I have very little time for my spiritual life. I don't have a civic life. And I do very little with friendships -- anything that doesn't have to do with business. I don't have time to cultivate relationships that aren't profitable."

But the rewards, aside from money?

"My world," Mecca says, "is much larger [than what] my life might contain. If Micro D did not need me tomorrow, I could do or be anything I want, because now I'm only limited by my own imagination. . . . I made a New Year's resolution to get to know some people who don't know anything about computers."

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