Poor Messrs. Hoffer. They spent $50,000, then they called and called, but they never got the supplies they'd paid for, let alone the million-dollar business they'd dreamed of.
But behind the bravado, Brothers was desperate to keep the company afloat. She poured in all that remained of her personal assets, her $25,000 divorce settlement and $40,000 in accumulated retirement funds. Only her car was left, a gold Corvette, the crown jewel of the divorce settlement from Don, the last memento of their years together.
By the fall all she had left was her charm -- a considerable asset, as Dale Kloss found out. With plenty of money in his pocket from the sale of his successful mortuary business back in Cleveland, Kloss had bought 50% of a failing Florida Pop-Ins franchise. Before long, Kloss had turned the business around and sold it back to Brothers, who promptly fell behind in her payments. When he went to see Brothers about the money, a shouting match ensued that led to a date for drinks, then to a Saturday-night dinner. Somewhere in there Kloss lost interest in the overdue payment.
In his own small way, Kloss took the place of her ex-husband in Carol Brothers's business life. By his own account, he loaned her $12,000 to make payroll during the fall of 1985, all of which was repaid promptly. He leased cars to her franchisees. To help her pump up the numbers, he let her list him as the owner of 12 Florida franchises. He even lent her his credit card. "Little Boy," Brothers called him.
"She's a remarkable woman," marvels Kloss, now a professor of funeral services at The College of Boca Raton. "I lived with her and she worked me over, but it's hard to be mad at her. I'm short and fat and insecure, but I never felt insecure with Carol. She was never out for a free ride. I never had the impression I was used."
Brothers's dedication astonished him. Each night they'd go to bed together, he says. Then, when he was ready to go to sleep, she'd get up and go back to work, writing notes throughout the night, filling page after page of yellow legal pads. "She lived for the business," Kloss remembers. "She was like a gambler at the racetrack. In the back of her mind she always felt if she could just do this little bit more, she could pull it out."
THE FALL
IN THE END, CAROL BROTHERS COULDNHT PULL IT OUT. By the fall of 1985, Pop-Ins was drowning in a tide of legal bills that was sweeping her, inexorably, toward the bankruptcy court. Tom Bolles had sued over the $25,000 stock deal. A new franchisee was threatening to sue over the money-back guarantee. In Illinois, franchisees had stopped paying royalties and changed their name to "Maid My Day." The states of California, Illinois, and Virginia were investigating her operations.
But Carol Brothers had one last gamble to try before she went under, her most audacious yet. She decided to start a brand-new company -- Pop-Ins Maid Services Inc., she called it, to distinguish it from the original Pop-Ins Inc.
The idea was simplicity itself. By incorporating under another name, Brothers put the embarrassing details of her past out of the selling picture. The new company's FTC disclosure document showed the virgin financial statements of a start-up, not the old company's negative net worth. Better still, Brothers was able to sweep under the rug most of the long history of franchisee litigation. Ed Crawford agreed to sit on the new company's board of directors. According to Brothers, so did the Commerce Department's Andrew Kostecka, whose participation was kept secret, she says, for fear of running afoul of federal conflict-of-interest regulations.
But try as she might, Brothers could no longer escape the past. She'd hoped to run her new Pop-Ins through company-owned district offices around the country, staffed by veterans of such franchise luminaries as Mr. Build International and PepsiCo. But she could not put the team together. "No mangement, no money, and a bad reputation," one potential recruit said later. "Obviously just starting a new company to hide old problems," another agreed. Kostecka hung tough, according to employees who said he spoke to Brothers by phone almost every day. Crawford, however, pulled out, resigning from the board after just 10 days.
Inside the Pop-Ins office, operations dissolved into comic opera. Employees watched their embattled CEO swing from grim determination to giddy ebullience. Desperate to make the new company work, she was sleeping less and traveling more, using up her credit at a different travel agent every two weeks before moving on to another. One Pop-Ins accountant left, sent to a veterans' hospital for alcoholism and Vietnam flashbacks. His replacement, Dale Kloss's CPA, was facing a federal embezzlement rap. Employees heard endless promises of big changes and new plans, until they were dismissed en masse after a tearful phone call from Brothers in Atlanta.
The final blow came from Ted and Stephanie Zajac, the husband-and-wife M.B.A.s who had signed on so hopefully at an IFA convention a few years before. Brothers had flown to Dallas to explain the benefits of the new Pop-Ins to them in person, but the Zajacs weren't listening. Instead, Stephanie began her own investigation. She soon determined that the Carpet Cleaning Compound lost most of its potency when repackaged by Don Brothers's chemical company. She talked with Nacy Eversman, the former accounts payable manager from Columbiana, and Tim Borden, who had made copies of Pop-Ins' fraudulent records. And she checked on James Hurt, the CPA who had signed off on corporate audits from 1980 through 1984, only to find that he had failed to renew his license in 1982. Zajac tried calling the FTC and the IFA with what she had found, "but no one would ever talk to me about it," she claims. Finally she called an attorney -- the same attorney, appropriately enough, who had brought the fraud charges against Pop-Ins five years earlier.
