Beaver still could not yet see the idea as a viable product in its own right. This time he saw it as a tool that could "revolutionize" the emerging ICM business. He now developed an assortment of prototypes in various fabrics and lengths, including one pig procursor that turned out to be eight feet long, weighed 60 pounds, and "handled like a live boa constrictor." He even got several local machine shops to test the prototypes with good results. But just at that moment, his entry into the ICM market came to a halt with the news from ServiceMaster and the defection of his star franchisee.
What did he do with the pig then?
Right. He forgot about it.
"Since I was no longer in the ICM business," Beaver explains, "of course I no longer had a tool to revolutionize it. I had limited vision. There were too many distractions, a lack of focus."
For nearly a year, the pig lay dormant while Beaver struggled to resuscitate Sermac. Then, in February 1984, the pig awoke -- and again it did not know what it was. This time the pig thought it had returned as a loss leader come to save Sermac. In Beaver's latest plan, franchisees would distribute pigs to their customers at some nominal cost in the hope that it would open the door to selling them cleaning services. Reeling under the heady influence of this concept, Beaver traveled to the national conference of Sermac franchisees in Pittsburgh and appeared on the dais before the dwindling group with a pig dangling from each hand. Each pig had dollar signs drawn on it on black magic marker. "This," he announced, "is Project Moneybags -- the salvation of Sermac." The franchisees were enthusiastic, and they proposed names for the new product, good, stout names like "Soil Sausage" and "Oil Weenie." Their interest would wane, but at least Beaver now had the incentive he needed to finish developing the pig into its present form.
It was knwon as the Pig Pen, that space in Sermac's converted Altoona warehouse where James D. Bilka wallowed in the summer of 1984. Hired by Beaver as the pig's official research-and-development division, Bilka, a student at Pennsylvania State University, spent his time calculating absorption rates according to rigorous scientific methods. "I'd pour oil right on the floor to make it as real as possible," he says, "and then I'd try to clean it up. I used anything I could get my hands on -- clay, wood chips, even ground-up diapers. It was pretty nasty."
As Bilka poured, Beaver was off thinking about absorption, too, and eventually remembered an old cleaning job. He had been hired to remove caked-on grit from the walls of an industrial plant without pitting the surface underneath, which ruled out sandblasting. Searching for alternatives, Beaver read in a technical journal that the Navy had solved similar problems during World War II by blasting with ground-up corn cobs instead of sand. The technique worked for Beaver as well. But he also noticed that when the corn-husk bits fell on the floor, they had an extraordinary affinity for oil. Naturally, Bilka soon tried ground-up corn cobs and that pleased him, and then he found his way to the ground-up pith or center of the husk, which pleased him even more. Tests at nearly 200 local sites confirmed Bilka's findings.
By that fall, the pig, recognizable in shape and substance as the product being sold today, had been born. For a short time, its appearance gave Beaver the reassurance he needed as he entered that gloomy winter of 1984, when "everything came crashing down for Sermac." But its heady effects soon began to evaporate when he turned to his franchisees to find that only one was still interested in buying and distributing the pigs.
So what did Beaver do now that his franchisees would not distribute his pig? Did he forget it as he had before?
No. This time he went on to glory. Not in a straight line, of course, but on to glory nonetheless.
There is no one moment that Beaver singles out as that instant of subline revelation when he realized that the pig was worthy of its own place in the world. Rather, it was an accumulation of experiences and events that gradually revealed the pig's potential. "It's like what happens with kids," Beaver says. "They crawl around and crawl around, and then one day you notice they're up and walking. We had big troubles, but we also had this little cult following -- people who had been using the pigs for six months and just loved'em."
Beaver knew that it would take more than a cult following to keep the pig alive. It would take distribution. Yet in another of those curious inversions so characteristic of meaningful groping, Beaver now prolonged his suffering a little longer by discarding the one solution that eventually would solve his distribution problem.
Beaver suspected that the pig could be sold by direct mail, and after making some rough calculations and projections, he presented his plan to his board of directors and his advertising agency. Out of the question, he was told. Industrial products were not sold by direct mail to factories -- that was a misguided notion that went against all tradition. He must use distributors. Yes, distributors was the way it was done.
So he did. In the spring of 1985, he and a small band of fellow swine herders, including Doug Hershey, a dairy science graduate from Penn State who saw his new job as "agriculturally related," and Cyndee Williams, Beaver's sister, signed up 40 distributors. Within six weeks, they realized they had made a dreadful mistake. Some of the distributors returned their pigs, others refused to pay, and still others claimed that Beaver had misrepresented his product and threatened to sue. "No one was happy," says Beaver, whose views on distributors are today decidedly jaundiced. "The typical distributor is an order-taker for things people have been using for years. Nobody knew what a pig was, but they [the distributors] couldn't introduce a new product, educate the customer, and sell it."
