In the end, they'll call it corporate vision. But to Don Beaver, it looks more like years of false starts, wrong turns, and belated inspiration.
NO DOUBT, IF NEW PIG CORP. continues to grow at its present rate, Donald L. Beaver Jr., its founder and "Head Hog," will shortly be enshrined as an authentic "visionary," another of those business pioneers who saw beyond the status quo to achieve a new solution to an old problem. And the pundits will point to him as further proof of what has so often been said -- that vision is the real secret of entrepreneurial success. The prospect amuses Beaver greatly, because if his own experience is any guide, what passes for vision might be better described as a kind of meaningful groping in the dark.
Although their hagiographers often make the entrepreneurs' ascents appear sure and steady, where even the occasional difficulty is merely another opportunity for a display of heroic resolve -- since the ultimate outcome is never really in doubt -- Beaver suspects that for most people, visionary progress more likely follows the foggy course of his own career. And that, Lord knows, was a lurching procession of distractions, reverses, frustrations, and houses in hock, where the happy ending was anything but certain.
"I'll bet there are a lot of people who can identify with me: 'Hey, he's been whammied, too," Beaver says. "Vision? Sure, I had vision. I'd struggle and struggle, and then I'd see a light at the end of the tunnel and I'd say, 'Oh man, at last!" only to find out that it was another freight train coming through and that I'd have to hang on to the cowcatcher all over again."
At the moment, the 34-year-old Beaver is lifting -- proudly, but carefully, at arm's length -- the crowning glory of his meaningful groping, a bit sodden and slimy perhaps, but still a dream come true. Forty-six inches long, about three inches around, a tubular sheath of white polyester filled with the ground-up, highly absorbent pith of corn cobs, the "pig," as it's called, looks less like its four-footed namesake than it does a huge pork sausage. Even so, Beaver insists, this ersatz swine, depending heavily from his outstretched arm and glistening with oil, is, in fact, a perfect marriage of form and function whose effects are not at all unlike the real thing. "Nobody thought to package industrial absorbents this way before," he says. "Can you believe it? I mean, it's so simple. For a long time, even I couldn't see it."
Ultimately, though, a pig's right to trade on the good name of its barnyard cousin resides not in its form but in its stupendous, unabashed gluttony for certain types of industrial refuse. Two pigs, for example, weighing roughly one pound apiece, can absorb, in 30 seconds, four times their own weight or nearly a gallon of machine oil or hydraulic fluid before they are sated. "We call up our customers and ask them how they like our pigs," Beaver says, "and some of the funnier ones say, "They suck.' Oh, boy, do we love to hear that."
"They make great doorstops, too," says Fred L. Beers, who is standing next to Beaver. "You just can't beat 'em." Beers, a general maintenance man at the 100-year-old Blank Book Co., in Roaring Spring, Pa. (population 3,000), points out that before the pig in Beaver's grasp was so rudely disturbed, it was busy lapping up a problem that had bedeviled the company for some time. Lodged snugly under the gearbox of a shrink-wrap machine, the pig spends its days swallowing drops of oil falling from a small crack in the gearbox above. Before he started using the pig, Beers had tried other methods to control the leak, since it was too expensive to replace the entire unit. For example, he threw clay pellets on the floor -- a composition known technically as fuller's earth and popularly as cat litter -- but was dissatisfied with the side effects. Dust from the pellets wore down bearings and hydraulic mechanisms; employees tracked the oil and clay mix into other parts of the plant; and it was a chore to clean the stuff up with a broom and shovel. Then he tried what he thinks was treated sawdust for a while, but that left him discouraged as well. And to make matters worse, each of these methods captured only some of the oil; over time, the greater part of the leakage followed an ingenious route of escape. First, it seeped through the floorboards, then it pooled slowly above a fluorescent light fixture in the ceiling of the floor below, and finally, one day, it announced its presence from on high with a viscous eclat that landed next to a desktop computer.
As Beaver admires the victorious pig, his face occasionally achieves that look of majestic wonder usually associated with visits to the Grand Canyon. It is not merely one pig and one problem at one company that Beaver sees dangling before him, but a vision far richer, containing the image of thousands upon thousands of machines in plants throughout America all weeping their dark, oleaginous tears while the resident Fred Beers frets. What could be more common to industry, Beaver is thinking, than the pile of cat litter or the clump of cloth rags soaking in a puddle of oil. Annually, businesses spend roughly $100 million for some 600,000 tons of fuller's earth and another $60 million for various kinds of rags. Then the image changes and each pile and each clump is transformed into a pig, and a Fred Beers is smiling and paying cash. Yes, a good dream, Beaver thinks, far off but sweet all the way through. Besides, he is already off to a good start. In the year and a half since he incorporated New Pig, based in nearby Altoona, the company's sales have reached $4.5 million, contributed by some 10,000 customers throughout the United States, including representatives of more than 95% of the Fortune 500.
