Ironically, if determination, hard work, and a good idea were the only prerequisites for success, Carol Brothers might well be ranked in the entrepreneur's pantheon today. She gave eight years to building a business, 20-hour days, six or seven days a week, without ever taking a salary. Her problems with managing a rapidly growing organization, controlling cash flow, and abiding by all manner of government regulation would sound familiar to anyone who has ever tried to start a company single-handedly. Who has never written a check on Friday, praying that a sale would come through over the weekend so it could be covered? Or tried to look at the bright side of a bad situation, and put on the best face for customers and the press? Who would not sympathize with the entrepreneur who sacrifices a marriage and a life savings to the all-consuming passion of starting a new business?
Brothers would not have sold a single franchise if her initial idea of an upscale, standardized national cleaning company hadn't been sound. The most recent Franchise Opportunity Handbook, published by the U.S. Department of Commerce, lists 14 similar businesses operating today -- from Classy Maids U.S.A. to Maid for a Day -- with an estimated 952 franchise outlets and almost $50 million in sales. Pop-Ins, it's no surprise, is not a popular topic among her onetime competitors -- "growth without substance," one calls it, "a blight on the industry." But the criticism comes with 20/20 hindsight: growth without capital, after all, is the promise of franchising. And until the bankruptcy, Pop-Ins had been considered one of the industry's brightest lights, poised at the edge of a major national success.
Even today, more than a year after the bankruptcy, an extraordinary degree of passion surrounds the Pop-Ins story. Former employees worry that they might face prosecution themselves or lose professional licenses; a few, fearing retribution, agreed to speak with INC. only in hotel lobbies or darkened fast-food parking lots. Franchisees -- some angry, others fearful, still others just plain embarrassed -- remain obsessed by the charismatic saleswoman who tapped into their dreams and briefly dominated their lives.
Ultimately, it was the strongest of those franchisees -- along with employees -- who brought Carol Brothers down. It was their lawsuits that drove her company into bankruptcy. And it was their complaints that finally caught the attention of an investigator in the office of the Palm Beach prosecutor.
PORTRAITS OF THE CEO AS A YOUNG WOMAN
COLUMBIA, OHIO, IS AN UNLIKELY PLACE TO BASE a national franchise chain. The local market still sells Moon Pies, and Red Man Tobacco is advertised on fading barn doors. Eighteen wheelers rumble off the interstates, but they pause only for gas or to visit the nearby truck-stop massage parlors. How do you raise money in a community with 10 churches and not a single locally owned bank? Or attract managers to a town where entertainment is the $5.95 all-you-can-eat barbecue-rib dinner with salad bar at the Holiday Inn up the road in Youngstown? How and what do you sell?
Carol Brothers sold magic, the dream of owning your own business, and when she could she sold it through the press. She would come to town -- any town -- like a whirlwind, peddling her story to every reporter she could find.
For radio, she was quick-witted and bouncy. On television she was a knockout, with a different angle for every reporter she met.
For the lifestyle pages, she would talk about why she started her business. She'd been a busy young professional, on the road so much that she'd had little time for housecleaning. When she'd tried to hire a maid, she'd discovered how hard it was to find good help. Wouldn't it be wonderful, she'd asked herself, if she could just call someone and get courteous, reliable service? When she'd realized that thousands of women felt the same way, she had started Pop-Ins -- not just a cleaning company, but "the maid service with class."
For the business pages, she would explain Pop-Ins' impressive growth. For two-income families a cleaning service was no longer a luxury -- it was a necessity, and the opportunity behind her success. Pop-Ins was riding America's transformation into a service economy, and each time Brothers sold another franchise she was helping another entrepreneur ride that wave with her, providing all the tools needed to run a successful business.
Brothers would wax evangelical on the blessings of franchising, and what reporter could doubt her? Her own career, after all, was eloquent testimony to the benefits of the system. Here was a female entrepreneur, glamorous and chic, running a fast-growth national enterprise, just in on the corporate plane. It was good copy -- so good, in fact, that no one ever bothered to check whether it was true.
Actually, the more Brothers told her story, the better it got. Many of her fictions were innocuous, like claiming her husband's plane as her own or fudging on her age by a year or two. She inflated the number of franchises she had sold, too, sometimes by adding imaginary new stores to her count, more often by counting the sale of a master territory, with 50 potential franchises within its boundaries, as if it instantly added 50 real-life businesses to the Pop-Ins system. Her personal resume improved as well. At first she said she'd graduated from Penn-Ohio College; later she would claim a marketing degree from Youngstown State University; eventually she added training from a Chicago School of Interior Design to her vita. Then there was modeling in New York City and eventually a business in interior design, "working out of Sutton Place and North Dallas."
