Beaver got the bad news from ServiceMaster first during a casual visit to the company's headquarters in the summer of 1983. "I looked down this hallway," he says, "and I noticed this new area staffed with maybe 10 to 15 people. It used to be a secretarial area, but now it looked like an executive area. 'Mmm,' I said to myself, 'wonder what that is?' So I asked a friend of mine there, and he told me that's where they were putting in the contract-management division. 'Oh, really,' I said. In fact, I said, 'Oh, really' about 30 times."
Two months later, as if ServiceMaster's entry into the field was not sufficiently discouraging, Beaver lost his golden goose. The star franchisee said simply that since all he was really getting from Sermac was the use of the name, he intended to change his name and dump Beaver. Sermac's ICM business, which had been averaging $10,000 a month, evaporated on the spot. "Ever see a duck get shot out of the air?" asks Beaver. "Boom. Bang. Well, that's how I felt."
For another year, Beaver struggled along until three days before Christmas in 1984 when he could no longer deny the undeniable: ICM was dead, the company was $400,000 in debt, his banker was refusing to extend any more credit, and the number of franchisees had dwindled to six. "Up until then," Beaver says, "I had been putting my fingers in all the holes in the dike, but now I had to realize that the company was never going anywhere."
The moment was dark, but it was also glorious, a moment that confirms the true meaningful groper in the righteousness of his cause. "Everything came crashing down for Sermac," Beaver says. "But," -- and here he pauses reverently as if to hint at the rapture of an apocalyptic sighting -- "the pig was rising from the much. Just to think of it makes my heart pound."
Much of the fumbling and stumbling, the false starts and busted hopes scripted for the Sermac episode were played out under lighting so dim that it seems inconceivable that Beaver could have been even more in the dark with the pig. Consider, though, that Beaver actually had the product and concept in hand at least twice before it ever came to market -- and at neither time was he able to fathom the larger significance of what he had.
As far back as 1979, there was included on Beaver's roster of activities a fixed-price contract obligating him to clean weekly various sections of a paper-processing plant in central Pennsylvania. To his surprise, this contract, which at the outset had appeared lucrative, soon lost money. The cause, after a brief study, was readily apparent: several machines that cut and shaped paper products were leaking oil. To soak up the flow, the employees threw down cat litter, but instead of replacing it periodically, they allowed the litter to pile up for Beaver's weekend crew. As a result, it took Beaver much longer to shovel up the oil-soaked clay then he had originally anticipated. "The cumulative effect of losing money," Beaver says, "is what made me realize that there had to be a better way."
First Beaver tried stuffing rags into the machine itself. Then he took to rolling up the base of the machine. Not good. They lasted only three days before they were completely soaked and useless. Then one day, while he was laying his cordon of rags on the floor, several of the company's employees who were watching the ritual joked that it might make sense to wrap cat litter inside the rags. At this precise instant, for which the official New Pig chronicles will no doubt chisel an appropriate lapidary inscription, Don Beaver can be said to have experienced his first porcine thought. "Yes, of course," he thought, "but not in rags -- in my basketball tube socks." Not good. The tube socks were too thick, and the oil was not getting to the clay fast enough. Beaver needed a thinner fabric. "Yes, of course," he thought, "my wife's panty hose." The next day Beaver marched onto the job site with two clay-filled, cut-off sections of his wife's hosiery, which, when slung over his shoulder, looked to a few alarmed machinists disconcertingly similar to real human legs. Much better. These devices lasted a full week and were so much easier to replace that Beaver was able to accomplished in one hour what had previously taken him 10.
But what did Beaver do now, now that he had in his hands this diamond in the rough, this prototypical pig?
He forgot about it.
"I just thought," he says, "that it was a great tool for us on that one particular job. And since I didn't have any others quite like it, well, the pig didn't exactly die, but it did go into a coma for the next four years."
During that summer of 1983, Beaver's porcine thoughts started up again. He was calling on customers with the franchisee who had pioneered the ICM concept, and one afternoon they stopped at a plant owned by one the country's largest automobile manufacturers. Inside the plant Beaver claims he saw men driving around in golf carts with dump beds behind them delivering cat litter to the production line; 11 men to be exact doing naught but shoveling cat litter -- a railroad boxcar full of the stuff each month. "This was the first time," Beaver says, "that I began to think about actually replacing clay with some kind of absorbent sock. Bingo, the light went on." It must have been a weak bulb, however, for what light there was still could not illuminate the pig for what it was worth.
