"It certainly hasn't always been this way," Beaver says. "There have been times when I could've folded the cards and you would've thought it completely understandable. The pig's been worth the wait, but it's been a long time coming."
Although the turbulent process that eventually produced New Pig Corp. churned through its course within the past 10 to 11 years, evidence suggests that its actual headwaters are found even further back in time. Apparently, the truly gifted meaningful groper, like thoroughbreds and prodigies, shows an early bloom of talent. Consider Beaver as a young boy growing up on Maple Avenue in a kind of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" section of Bellwood, five miles north of Altoona. To either side of his parents' house lived two elderly spinsters who had taken to asking young Beaver, the only boy on his block, to mow their lawns, shovel their snow, or wash their storm windows at 50 cents per job. Beaver would later call this the "old-girl network" because, as he puts it, "you do a good job for one lady and she talks about it at the bridge club, and the next day you'll get 10 more ladies calling." For most youngsters, the implications of this common childhood arrangement extend no further than the corner candy store, but not so for Don Beaver. He must have sensed a more profound connection between cleaning and hard cash and would, in fact, spend the next 20 years perfecting its possibilities. Not surprisingly, then, when Beaver entered Illinois's Wheaton College in 1970 and needed spending money, what did he do but activate the local network -- and so effectively that a few of his former clients still seek him out to ask if he might look after their houses while they winter in Florida. Then he expanded. By his senior year, from an off-campus apartment he shared with three roommates, Beaver managed a complex service that called on as many as 100 part-time employees to clean offices and apartment buildings in downtown Chicago and 10 surrounding suburbs. Beaver himself earned more than $20,000 that year.
After college, Beaver returned to Altoona and founded a company called Best Possible Services Inc., a versatile little enterprise designed for uncertain but great undertakings and staffed by himself and a helper. His corporate logo included a hammer, a paintbrush, and a broom, but in fact the company's mission amounted to not much more than a collection of odd jobs. And while he was undeniably busy, he grew increasingly unhappy. "I was still schlepping around, washing windows and stuff," Beaver says, "and I'd see these guys from college getting jobs at Fortune 500 companies, and I knew they were lazy bums. Somewhere in there, I began looking for something more. I didn't know what it was exactly, but I wanted it." And with that sentiment, Beaver's meaningful groping rose to a more advanced stage of development.
Almost overnight, Don Beaver, the handyman, became Don Beaver, the construction impresario, in a transmogrification that required regular infusions of bank debt. "I was going to be a million-dollar construction business in a year," he says. "Suddenly, I had trucks, mortar mixers, radial-arm saws, and all kinds of scaffolding. You should've seen it." Largely on the basis of small-home remodeling projects, Beaver, to his credit, was able to push this new engine of ambition to revenues of roughly $300,000 over the next year and a half. Then the wheels fell off or, more precisely, were knocked off. Rising interest rates and the removal of income-tax incentives for home insulation combined with his own lackadaisical management technique to bring him to the brink of insolvency. "It was all volume and no profit," Beaver says. "I wasn't much interested in P&L statements -- it was a seat-of-the-pants operation. The only time my wife cried over one of my business ventures was in 1978 when she totaled up the checkbook and said: 'We owe $100,000 and nobody owes us anything.' That got me thinking."
In addition to his early start in life and fanatical persistence, the genuine meaningful groper can also be identified by another distinguishing characteristic. Even as he gropes through wreckage that to an ordinary mortal would be utterly depressing, the meaningful groper has an almost supernatural ability to discover amid the rubble the bright glitter of new promise. So it was that Beaver found Ben E. Stapelfeld -- and found, too, a reaffirmation of his destiny as Bellwood's own "Mr. Clean," the once and future Head Hog.
Stapelfeld, now 36, is in charge of manufacturing and finance at New Pig and is regarded by Beaver as cofounder of the company. Before he joined New Pig full-time in January 1986, Stapelfeld had managed a $5-million, family-owned general-contracting business in Altoona. The two men first met on job sites in 1978 just as Beaver's construction empire was reverting back to sand. Almost immediately, it was clear to both men that their talents might be profitably combined. "Don and I are very different people," says Stapelfeld, "and I guess that's why we get along so well. He's 'get it,' and I'm 'do it.' He's great at sales and marketing; I get the manufacturing done. He's the idea man; I'm the filter. He'll come up with 100 ideas a year, and maybe 99 go down the tube -- but there's always that one." And fortunately for Don Beaver, good friend Ben was on hand early enough to catch what was a very intriguing idea indeed.
