Lurching from crisis to crisis, growing faster than they could handle, Wes and Nancy Creel's company was in trouble. So were they
IT'S CALLED A STRESS TEST. A DOCtor hooks you up to a monitor and has you walk on a moving treadmill that keeps getting faster and steeper until you find yourself running, not walking, and gasping for every breath. As you struggle, your mind starts to wander, searching for something -- anything -- to concentrate on. More often than not, you start to think about the treadmill itself.
A treadmill, thought Wes Creel as he sweated through his stress test at Dallas's Cooper Clinic back in January 1986. Perfect. That pretty much summed up life at his company, Creel Morrell Inc. Sure, business was booming. And yes, the Houston-based graphic-design firm had made the INC. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies for three years running. But the faster it grew, the harder he found it to continue. We're on a treadmill, he thought, and "someone keeps raising the incline."
Every employee had a favorite anecdote. Cinda Debbink, who was running the Austin office back then, says this one is pretty typical. "We tell a senior designer to produce an annual report," she recalls, "and as always, we are close to deadline by the time we tell him." But no sooner does he sit down at his desk than he is called away to do a business card for another client. Then, before he can get back to his office, there are questions about a brochure, and someone else stops him in the hall to talk about an ad running in tomorrow's newspaper. The designer, glancing up at the clock, wonders how he'll ever meet the deadline for the annual report, when he realizes they have run out of paper. He excuses himself and rushes out for supplies.
Since the company was constantly juggling four or five big jobs (such as the annual report) and scores of little ones (such as the business cards), it wasn't unusual to see the lights burning all night in Creel Morrell's offices. About this time, employees started saying, not entirely in jest, that the company's initials, C.M.I., stood for Crisis Management Inc. Creel appreciated the humor; after all, he had horror stories of his own to tell. There was the time, for example, when he'd been flying all week, scurrying around for business, and returned to his hotel to find a message that read, "Can you give us the OK to send a $100 check to the typesetter?"
This isn't funny, Creel thought. Here we've been in business for seven years, and my employees are making jokes about putting a mobile home on the roof so they can get some rest, and I am still deciding what kind of soft drinks should go in the company vending machine and when we should pay the smallest of bills.
Something had to be done. Only 33, Wesley L. Creel was grossly overweight -- the result of gobbling down fast food between crises at the office. That is what had brought him to the Cooper Clinic in the first place. He felt lousy and wanted to know what physical toll he was paying for the stress of running the business. He already knew the emotional cost. He rarely saw his two small daughters and nobody -- especially not his wife, Nancy, who is also his business partner -- could remember the last time he had been in a good mood. So he knew there were problems. What he wanted was reassurance that his health would hold out while he worked on solving them.
He didn't get it. "The doctor looked at the test results from the treadmill and everything else, and he asked me how old my kids were," Creel recalls. "I told him the girls were four and one. Then he said if things didn't change, I'd never see them graduate from high school."
The results of the physical exam, combined with the general chaos, left Creel reeling. Now things had to change. But how? He had no idea. He was totally unprepared to deal with such problems. Like so many company founders, he had been too busy getting the company up and running to think about what might happen if the business took off, and he had never dreamed that success would come so fast. It had been only seven years, after all, since Wes and Nancy had teamed up with designer Eric Morrell to launch the business, laying out brochures in their home. If you had told them back then that they would soon be running a $4-million company with a 50% annual growth rate, they would have laughed at you.
But now success was here, and it was no laughing matter. They had 40-odd employees who could hardly keep up with the work -- designing signs for shopping malls and office buildings, creating corporate logos, writing and printing annual reports, what have you. It was a dangerous period, the point at which small companies often die. The orders are coming in faster than you can handle them, and you are, ironically, being smothered by success. In this case, moreover, there was a chance that, even if the company survived, its president and chief executive officer might not. That was scary. Even more frightening was the fact that Creel didn't know how to change things. True, he could watch his diet and start an exercise program, but that would only buy time. The real challenge was to eliminate the underlying problems with his company.
Creel tried everything. Management by wandering around was in vogue, right? So he wandered around -- and promptly got in everybody's way. Managers manage, right? So there were lots of meetings, especially about the crisis at the office, but nothing ever came of them. "When we got together, people would talk about the things that were bothering them," says Nancy Creel, who was in charge of the company's marketing. "That made everyone feel a little better, but -- after the meeting was over -- the things that made them unhappy were still there. Nothing really had changed."
It was at about this time that Creel saw an ad for a planning seminar being given by Robert M. Donnelly, a former corporate planner for IBM and Exxon. Why not give it a whirl? he thought. So he went, listened, and walked away convinced that Creel Morrell could use an outsider's perspective. Maybe someone else could see patterns in the confusion, patterns that he was missing.
His first thought was to hire Donnelly, but he had some reservations. At $1,500 a day, plus expenses, the guy certainly didn't come cheap. And anyone who introduces himself by saying, "I am a business doctor. I listen, examine, and prescribe a course of action," is not the sort who makes you reach instantly for your checkbook. On the other hand, Creel needed help and saw a way to get it without spending cash. After looking at the rough handouts that Donnelly used for promotion, Creel proposed a barter deal, offering to redesign Donnelly's marketing materials in exchange for help with planning. Donnelly agreed.
