Paul Frison is president of ComputerCraft. Billy Ladin is vice-president of marketing. He also happens to be founder, majority stockholder, and chairman of the board.
Billy Ladin is short and wears bow ties. Paul Frison is tall and does not.
Ladin dashes wherever he goes -- through the office, around his stores, to the car. Frison runs marathons out-of-doors.
Ladin talks everything out. Frison wants reports and memos in writing.
Ladin wants it now. Frison would rather wait until you're sure you've got it right.
Ladin is spontaneous and doesn't make plans. Frison is organized and does.
If they weren't so different, they probably wouldn't be able to work together. But then, if they weren't so different, there wouldn't be any point to their working together. Where one is weak, the other excels. What one dislikes, the other prefers. Where one has no experience, the other is expert.
As a complementary team, Ladin and Frison make perfect sense. Every business could use one. There is just this single, small peculiarity about their relationship.
Day to day, Ladin works for Frison, who is president and chief executive officer of ComputerCraft Inc., an expanding, Houston-based chain of 62 retail computer stores (at the moment). Ladin, his employee, is executive vice-president of marketing and acquisition. But Ladin is also the founder of the company, its majority stockholder, and the man who hired Frison. Once a quarter, they turn things around, and Frison works for Ladin. These reversals occur when Ladin dons his chairman-of-the-board hat.
A bit of confusion about who's who at any given moment is just one of the costs of keeping this odd-couple team intact. For Ladin, it is a trial, an experiment, to see whether he still can contribute value to ComputerCraft's growth even after it has grown beyond his own management capability. "It's no shame to me that I can't be a great CEO," he says. The question is, can he be a great employee?
A friend describes Ladin as the "Fourth of July." He gives that impression. He can't sit still. If he isn't talking, he is listening -- energetically in either case. You never know when he will shoot off a new notion. And impatient? Whether it is a cup of coffee or the answer to an inventory shortage problem, he wants it right now. He thinks in broad concepts; small details elude and bore him. He is just the sort of person you would expect to be on his third major business start-up, which is what ComputerCraft is.
Alongside Ladin, Frison seems calm, deliberate, cool, and polished, his rough edges smoothed by 21 years of jostling through the management ranks at American Hospital Supply Corp. and later at Lifemark Corp., a hospital management firm where he became president. He is friendly but circumspect, much more cautious about what he says and to whom. He is briskly efficient and predictable -- not explosive. If he isn't remarkably inspiring, he is very reassuring -- just the sort of person you would expect could bring order to a high-flying start-up business that has more dreams than plans, more energy than organization, and more dedication than discipline. "The first thing we're going to do," he told Ladin when he became CEO of ComputerCraft, "is get control of this company. No more acquisitions until we've grabbed the reins." But it was worse than he thought. "For the first few months," he says now, "we couldn't find the reins."
What brought Frison to ComputerCraft is the familiar story of the rise and demise of the entrepreneur: Man (Ladin) starts company, runs it till he can't, brings in manager (Frison), and retires to board. Only this time, Ladin rewrote the plot. He had fashioned the concepts of his first two companies -- Lifemark, the same company later headed by Frison, which Ladin started in 1969, and Mobile Communications Corp. of America, a beeper and automobile-telephone company he started in 1973 -- and then left the execution of the concepts to others. Lifemark achieved annual sales of $600 million before being merged with American Medical International Inc. in January 1984. Mobile Communications's sales were $48.7 million last year. Ladin takes pains to be sure that his listener understands that he is not criticizing the people who ran those companies, but, he says, "I have the chutzpah to believe they would have been better companies if I had stayed involved." That is why he is putting everyone at ComputerCraft through all this bother.
A good deal of the bother, of course, had nothing to do with Ladin's staying. It was the normal response people have to getting a new boss, to any major change. Worried senior executives had to be reassured that Frison wasn't going to clean house -- at least not for 90 days. Some old-guard/new-guard antagonisms developed as Frison began hiring his own brand of manager. The good old days improved with age. Senior vice-president Armand Shapiro recalls when "the culture here was not to worry about who screwed up, but just getting it fixed and getting the job done." Now, he says, people worry first about covering their own backsides.
Ladin's staying on as a vice-president has compounded some of these usual problems, and added some unusual new ones. Because he is still in the company, and chairman of the board as well, Ladin is a magnet to anyone unhappy with new procedures or rules. "People have come to me and said, 'Do you know what Frison is trying to do now?' If I react at all, I've undermined Paul." And there is often confusion about which hat he is wearing at any given time -- especially in the minds of the troops. Executive vice-president Dennis Reaves, a recent arrival, was talking about closing a classroom in a downtown store to save room. "And somebody," says Ladin, "asked me how I would feel about that. I said, 'God, I think it would be terrible.' Word got back to Dennis that Billy said you can't close the classroom. If I weren't chairman of the board and largest shareholder, nobody would give a damn what I said about classrooms, because it isn't my area. When am I passing down corporate policy, and when am I the vice-president of marketing? That's what they have trouble remembering." Other vice-presidents, he says, sometimes hold their tongues at meetings. "They're scared to fight, and that's real hard on me, because all I want to be is one of the guys out there working in my area."
These problems and others -- for example, Ladin dares not comment on anything when in a ComputerCraft retail store lest he throw the manager into a panic -- will pass in time, however. Reaves says he isn't afraid to take Ladin on, and frequently does. Anyway, those aren't the issues on which Ladin's experiment will succeed or fail. Sometimes Ladin may want to be one of the guys, but he can never really be just that and he, and Frison, know it.
There is only one relationship in ComputerCraft that is crucial to the company's growth and survival, and that is the delicately balanced and terribly vulnerable relationship between founder and CEO. The experiment Ladin and Frison have undertaken will succeed only if they can remember who is wearing which hat, if they can protect their own egos from deliberate or inadvertent bruises, and if they can live by the commitments each has made.
The Ladin-Frison partnership resembles marriage after a lengthy courtship. The big issues -- whether to have children, where to live -- have already been settled. For this odd couple, it is the little issues -- who sits at the head of the table during department head meetings and who talks to the press -- that need dealing with constantly.
