My grandmother was the essence of looking inside for strength. She was very religious, but she didn't ask the Lord to do anything she could do herself. She taught me values: Don't worry about appearances, or money, or any of the externals. Get something in your head that no one can ever take from you.
White people used to like to pat me on the head. They'd always say that black children were cute, and they'd talk about how cute I was. My grandmother would say, "No, she ain't cute. But she's right smart, and she's going to amount to something one day." She didn't have any idea of what it was going to be, but she was absolutely confident that I was going to get out of Black Mountain, N.C.
My grandmother took great pride in being a housec-leaner, and she taught me to take great pride in that, too. In those times they had what was called the white-glove test, where these white ladies would come in with their white gloves and run their fingers underneath the tables and up over the doorjambs to see if my grandmother had left any dust. She never broke her conversation with them; she'd talk about all kinds of news and whatever, confident that the house was as clean as it could be, no dust to find. They'd leave, and she'd laugh so hard. She was making $2 a day, but I learned there that you do your job because you want to know nobody can do it better.
It didn't take me long in advertising to realize the facts of life. There were three things you could not do: one, be a woman; two, be an old woman; three, be black. And I was 30 years old, so that meant I was all three. Once a woman is past 25 in the advertising business, she's old.
This was during the time of the black revolution, supposedly, when everybody was going to run up and down in the streets, marching. We had a hair-care product account, and they wanted to have a demonstration in the streets, with all the women running up and down the street with this hair product on their hair, waving these cans in the air, demonstrating for this product. I said that was demeaning and stupid and I wouldn't do it. So, of course, I was fired.
You can't say, "I don't want to do that" if you work for somebody else. Work for yourself, and you can go broke if you don't do it, but you don't have to do it. I realized if I was going to work in this business, I had better work in my own company, because otherwise I was going to continue to get fired for the rest of my life.
I've changed since those days, though. Fifteen years of running your own business does some positive things for you and some negative things. You really begin to get a degree of self-assessment, to know what your delivery capability is and where your limits are. The downside of that is that you begin to know what you can't do. And everything I did when I started my company, I now know you cannot do. You cannot start a business and run it for two years losing $2,000 a month, but I did.
There was a way that I had at the beginning of dealing with clients that absolutely would be reprehensible today. I would tell them, very frankly, "This is it, this is the only way to do this. We will not do it three ways, we will do it one way, and that's it." I think the freshness of that, the innocence, if you will, was our saving grace. I did not understand as much about client handling and client politics as I do now. Then all I had was the idea and my commitment to fight to the death for it. And it worked.
But that comes only once in your life. Now I know the commitment alone won't work. So it doesn't.
"I could still lose everything. My home, my car, everything." -- Tom Pogemiller
In 1981, after five years as a Wendy's manager, Tom Pogemiller opened the first of his four Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre restaurants, a franchise operation founded in 1978 by video-game wizard Nolan Bushnell.
By 1980, Pizza Time was hot, hotter than hot, the prince of Wall Street, it could do no wrong. I went out there for the first franchisee orientation, before we'd even signed on. Nolan and all the executives walked in and said their thing; then they took us to a store where we saw people lined up in the broad day-light. I thought, Jesus, how can I go wrong? At that point, even the numbers of $800,000 to $1 million to open a franchise didn't scare anyone, including bankers.
In '83, the fad was over; all of a sudden an $80,000 store was doing $30,000. Meanwhile, Pizza Time was having a president-of-the-month thing. They were going through CEOs faster than I was going through aspirin. But they were saying, "Guys, don't worry, we're pulling this back together."
My wife and I went to a cocktail party at Nolan's big mansion, whatever the heck it is, that overlooks San Francisco, and when we got in the car and drove back to the hotel that night, she says, "You know, I should be impressed with this. But it doesn't make any sense when we see something like this and we see what we're going through on the home front."
I was at my central office when the press release came in the mail saying, basically, that Pizza Time Theatre had filed for Chapter 11. It wasn't even signed by anybody. The first thing I did was call my wife and say, "We've had troubles, but now I have no idea what to expect." One of the things that really bothered me was that my father-in-law had helped me out financially.
I could still lose everything. My home, my car, everything. I've personally guaranteed things. If it all collapsed, it would mean a personal bankruptcy. And yet, as much as I condemn Pizza Time, I've got to admit that for a young upstart like me, I had a lot of freedom. They didn't have the time to worry about what I was doing; they were too busy with their own growth. And believe me, if I had known how to run my ship back in '81 like I'm running it now, I would have had the money to weather this storm.
Who knows? Maybe I'll still be able to make it work.
