This unlikely management style has won rave reviews and spawned high ambitions among Marlow's young employees. Last year when he negotiated salaries with his four-person sales staff -- Type A personalities every one, he says -- he offered an across-the-board increase of $1.60 an hour. They declined, asking instead for a $1-an-hour raise and .5% of sales beyond each month's projected gross.
"I told them they were crazy," Marlow recalls. "I told them there was no way they'd be better off. But what are you going to do? It's very difficult, from a management standpoint, to control a group like this. These are people who won't stop working and who won't take a pay raise when you offer them one."
In the first eight months of the fiscal year, the sales staff failed seven times to make more than they would have had they taken Marlow's offer. Things began to turn around in December, however. Working seven days a week from Thanksgiving through Christmas, the company turned in all-time record sales during the month.In January, which is normally slow, revenues dipped a neglible 2%.
"We may still come out ahead," says Rod Olsen optimistically. "But it was never the idea of the dollars and cents with us anyway. It was the idea of being rewarded for hard work."
That, more or less, was the same idea Joe Marlow and Richard White had when they started the company in Livermore, Calif. White, a 43-year-old former aircraft technician, is the president of R&J, which he and Marlow own on a 50/50 basis. Apparent opposites -- Marlow is tall, rail thin, and gregarious; White is short and almost painfully reticent -- the two shared a love for Corvettes and a dislike for working for other people. They met in 1974 and spent several years buying and rebuilding cars and often going to "swap meets," weekend gatherings of Corvette aficionados that draw as many as 10,000 car owners. The Corvette's emerging status as a classic was then generating a growing demand for authentic replacement parts, and Marlow and White began to collect a sizeable inventory. Their names were passed among other Corvette owners, and soon they were getting phone calls day and night from people in search of parts.
There is some good-humored disagreement between the two men and their wives, Betty White and Sheila Marlow, as to just how the company came to be started.
"Things just began getting a little out of hand," says Sheila. "Betty and I were finding spare Corvette parts piling up in our living rooms." The wives maintained, at first anyway, that all they asked their husbands to do was "store" their automotive supplies somewhere else.Joe and Rich claim they were told to "open a store," and promptly went out and began seeking financing for the venture. In those days, Marlow says, it was still possible to buy a used Corvette for $1,000. "I'd hate to admit how many times we haggled over $50 on the price of a car," he says. It took them three months to come up with two $5,000 loans to open a modest, 980-square-foot shop. Marlow remembers it as seeming an enormous amount of money at the time.
"We had no idea how to go about it at all," says Marlow. "Neither of us had ever borrowed money except to buy a house or a car. Besides, nobody we talked to seemed to have any confidence in the idea."
Their own confidence was limited enough that both Marlow and White kept their regular jobs while getting R&J off the ground. Marlow, a police officer working nights, ran the shop in the mornings. White took over in the afternoons as soon as he could get off from his job at the Alameda Naval Air Station. Sheila and Betty filled in the gaps -- gaps Rich White admits often amounted to most of the daytime hours. The store was open six days a week; on Sundays the two men would work area swap meets.
"We were always half-tired, half-awake," says Marlow.
Business, nonetheless, was good. The store was doing around $25,000 a month in sales against what Marlow calls "virtually no overhead." Marlow eventually asked for a leave of absence from the police department in the spring of 1979. Several months later, convinced that the automotive market in California was centered in the south, the two men opened a second store, this one in a nondescript industrial park hard by the smog-bound Santa Ana freeway in Anaheim, not far from Disneyland. Business was even better there, enough so that White quit his other job, Marlow made his leave of absence permanent, and they closed the Livermore store.
As the company has grown, Marlow and White have continued to share the work of financial planning and general operations, while dividing certain other management responsibilities between them. White, whose expertise lies in mechanics, does product development and makes manufacturing arrangements. Marlow has overall charge of marketing and personnel.
