"The bottom line is that everybody expects 100% from everybody else. If you don't get it, you have a problem." A lot of companies would like to have such problems. Says Joe Jr.: "A good, average worker would be considered a loafer here. You're always striving to catch up with somebody. Any kind of bitching around the shop is always about somebody who could be doing better."
Woodbridge recalls one occasion when he had to step in between two employees whose discussion on how best to do things threatened to escalate into a demonstration of how they might rearrange each other's looks. "We do work as a team here," he says, "but because it's so young, people tend to get a little eager sometimes."
There is the attitude that responsibility must be shared. One often-repeated analysis of Marlow's management style is the rope metaphor, which employees routinely recite chapter and verse. "He gives us enough rope that we can trip and fall," says Joe Jr. "But not so much that we can hang ourselves."
"Rich and I remember what it's like to work for an employer," Marlow says."Your employees are your company. When you take away the latitude for them to make decisions in the best interest of the company, you only hurt yourself."
"I think Joe understands that management is like drinking wine," says Woodbridge. "You can drink a few glasses, but if you try to drink the whole bottle it's going to be tough to handle. So he's started to delegate."
And delegate he does -- although Marlow has made his own priorities so clear that there is rarely any doubt as to what he expects from his staff. At weekly meetings with his department supervisors, he hashes over his abiding concerns about job performance, the key to which is that employees are expected to "handle" things on their own.
Not long ago, the supervisors complained about a company rule forbidding employees to date one another. "They told me that they wanted the policy changed and that if a problem developed, they could handle it," Marlow remembers. "I said fine.So far, I haven't had to handle it." Meanwhile, Joe Jr. and Jenny Yocky have become extra friendly in their spare time.
There is the attitude that dishonesty is a mortal sin. "As long as you work hard and don't lie to Joe, you can get whatever you want from him," Yocky says. "If you lie to him, though, you've had it."
Marlow is not the least bit defensive about his practice of subjecting employees to annual polygraph tests, a policy that is carefully spelled out on job applications. The questioning deals with theft and the taking of drugs "other than marijuana." But the tests' principal purpose, Marlow concedes, is to ensure honesty.
"We're not Big Brother," he says. "Our employees don't want to work with somebody who lies or steals or uses narcotics. We treat people like responsible human beings. I don't want somebody standing by the door shaking people down at night. Anyway, theft is the least important reason for the tests. I can catch a person who steals easier than I can a person who lies."
So far, R&J has had little occasion to confront either problem. One employee was let go a couple of years ago after a series of weak performance evaluations and two less than satisfactory attempts to get through his polygraphs without, as Marlow puts it, "lighting up the machine" on the question of lying to co-workers. Under California law, it is illegal to fire someone on the basis of polygraph tests.Under Marlow's interpretation, it is all right to ask someone to resign.
Finally, there is the attitude that the company will always find ways to succeed -- and to carry its employees with it as it does. Last year, as R&J geared up to introduce its first full-color catalog, Marlow was aghast to discover that the color photography alone would run upwards of $28,000; total cost of the previous year's black-and-white version had been only $33,000. "So we did what we always do in those situations," he says. "We got everybody together and asked if anyone knew who could do the photography." When it turned out that Jenny Yocky's mother was studying photography in night classes, she was hired to do the job. R&J saved $19,000, and the catalog produced results far beyond expectations -- orders are coming in from as far away as Switzerland and Pago Pago.
Volume at the Anaheim store, in fact, now accounts for only 25% of the company's business. Among the better-selling catalog items is a "baby doll" nightie emblazoned with a Corvette emblem, one of some 130 nonautomotive accessories developed recently by Rich White. A new line of wooden dashboards, designed first for Corvettes and now being rapidly modified to fit other cars, appears to be very hot. The company was recently courted by several area banks -- including, says Marlow, "one of the big boys from down on Wilshire Boulevard" -- to provide a $350,000 financing package for new inventory. Car enthusiast Reggie Jackson, better known for his baseball exploits at nearby Anaheim Stadium, has expressed interest in investing in the company and signing on as a spokesman.
So if you want to know the recipe for success at R&J Corvette, here it is: Take one idea for a business, blend in the right attitudes and a few good eggs to work with, stir that rascal like crazy, and watch it rise."If our projections are even 80% on target," Marlow says, "the people you're looking at here are middle management in 48 months."
To which Rod Olsen adds emphatically: "It has to happen."
