Dream Machine

RJ Corvette is one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, but the real growth curve is being charted in employee expectations.

You wanna know the secret to a good hollandaise sauce?" asks Rod Olsen. "You have to let the butter cool before you stir in the egg yolks. Otherwise, the eggs actually cook in the butter. That's what makes the sauce grainy. Let the butter cool, then add the eggs and stir that rascal like crazy."

Olsen offers this counsel while dousing a heavy volume of Tabasco sauce into a cup of fish chowder. There are groans around the table. Olsen glances up. "I don't know what it is about this stuff," he says. "I just love the taste of it." The restaurant, which is in Newport Beach, Calif., is crowded even on a Tuesday night. Seated with Olsen are three other employees of R&J Corvette Parts Inc., and Joseph J. Marlow, co-founder and chief executive officer. Together they make up roughly one-quarter of the Anaheim, Calif.-based company.

All of 26 years old, Olsen is the oldest and by far the most voluble of Marlow's dinner companions. He is also, Marlow says privately, the most promising. In Marlow's book, that means the young sales supervisor is long on honesty and hard work -- attributes that approach religious status at R&J. Perhaps more important, Olsen has the intelligence and drive for perfection that Marlow sees as part of "your classic Type A personality." Marlow is very big on Type A personalities.

Olsen, meanwhile, seems very big on everything. Animated, arms akimbo and legs bouncing on the balls of his feet beneath the table, he sends the conversation barreling this way and that, taking off from culinary advice and covering everything from corporate land-holdings on the southern California coast to how one can live like a king in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, while spending almost nothing. As to the latter, it helps if you speak fluent Spanish, which, Olsen adds after a long pull on a Heineken, he does.

Such effusively cosmopolitan discourse is more than a little startling, coming as it does from someone who works 60 hours a week behind the counter at an auto-parts store. But R&J Corvette is something more than an ordinary purveyor of spark plugs and distributor caps. In seven years, it has grown from a tiny, family-run spare-parts store into a national sales and distribution operation that employs 21 people. The company now contracts with independent manufacturers to produce a line of authentic and custom-made parts for Corvette automobiles, which it sells at its own store and to a network of wholesalers, retail shops, Corvette owners, and Chevrolet dealers. In 1983, R&J ranked #313 on the INC. 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. Revenues for the fiscal year completed March 31 were $3.2 million -- up nearly 60% from the year before.

The real growth curve at R&J, however, is being charted in employee expectations. Although most insist they could go elsewhere for more money, Marlow's staff members tolerate low pay, grueling hours -- and, it turns out, a few quirks in their boss's management style -- because they are convinced that they will one day end up with middle- and senior-management positions in the company. Those jobs literally don't exist yet, but from the employees' perspectuve, it seems only a matter of time before they do. "We've seen where this company is going, and we have a saying about it," explains 21-year-old Joe Marlow Jr. "We always say we're betting on the come."

In the game of craps, "betting on the come" allows a new player to get into the game by wagering on somebody else's roll of the dice. Whatever number comes up establishes the point the new player hopes will be matched before his competition wins. Or, as Rod Olsen diagrams the concept relative to R&J, "it's a way of betting that is really more of an investment in the future."

Marlow appears to be of a similar mind with regard to his employees' prospects. Anyone and everyone in the company, it seems, is a protege. While working on cash flow projections recently, Marlow put 19-year-old Jennifer Yocky, a shy and determined administrative assistant, to work collating some of the figures. Yocky asked what the numbers meant, and by the end of the afternoon, Marlow was explaining the whole revenue-forecasting process. "She may be able to do it for us by herself someday," Marlow says. Yocky, he adds, is a Type B personality, the sort of "detail-oriented person you need in an organization to help offset your As."

As easily as Marlow separates people into tidy categories, Rod Olsen abruptly divides himself from the dinner table in Newport Beach. This happens immediately on finishing his entree, but not before Marlow has ordered coffee and "snowshoes" for himself and the reporter who has joined the staff for the evening. Snowshoes are something of an inside joke with the people at R&J: three ounces of whiskey, a splash of peppermint schnapps, and a chorus of "Uh-oh. Snowshoes!" before the drinks are swallowed straight down in two gulps.

"Well," says Olsen, pushing back his chair, "time to take off. I've gotta work in the morning, and it's late." It is, in fact, not quite nine o'clock.

"That's one thing about Type A people," says Marlow. "Sometimes they're so obsessed with their work they have a one-track mind. Don't mistake it for rudeness."

An ex-cop and former U.S. Army Ranger, Joe Marlow brings a strange brew of military discipline and fatherly concern to his current line of work. Marlow has fined employees for being even a second late, yet is known around the office as an easy touch for a personal loan. He trusts his people enough to delegate most day-to-day decisions, but routinely requires them to take an annual polygraph test. A maker of ironclad rules, he has reversed himself when confronted with objections from subordinates. He demands long hours for low pay, but will not let any of his department heads work unless he is present in the building. Determined that his employees should further their educations, he has begun paying their way for night classes at several area junior colleges, but encouraged his own son to do a two-year hitch in the Army before coming to work for R&J. ("I wanted him to get his maturity first," says Marlow.) With virtually everyone in the company currently enrolled in school, books and tuition are running R&J from $2,000 to $3,000 a year, but that figure could multiply by 10 if people move on to four-year universities, as Marlow hopes they will. Yet their boss is so frugal when it comes to routine matters that he shares an office with the marketing manager and routinely books his own business travel on cut-rate 30-day tour packages.

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