Moore had no trouble filling his appointment calendar. He locked into a number of small-plant contracts, the kind of $10,000-and-under jobs that Weston thought too puny to touch. He also was more cognizant of his own limitations than he had been the first time around, turning to people like his friend Steve Kellogg for additional horse-power. Kellogg was happy to have the extra income and helped out on the engineering functions and proposal writing, things Moore wasn't always confident he could do very well. Their relationship deepened. Not too long after, Moore called Kellogg to offer him a senior managerial role -- and a nice piece of the action.
Kellogg almost said yes.
"In the end, though," he now admits, "what stopped me was I just couldn't see working for Charlie. I mean, I could see working with him. And, considering how Charlie felt about the equity issue, being offered 15% of his company was pretty attractive. Still, my gut instinct told me that, sooner or later, my having 15% when he had 85% was not going to work. That upset Charlie, but what could I do? I honestly thought it was a situation that could wind up threatening our friendship."
Having turned down the offer, Kellogg completed his LBO of YWC in 1981.
It was at this point that the two men really began grappling with the independence-versus-security issues that had come to dominate their private dialogue. These issues burned keenly for Kellogg. At Weston, he had exhausted every conceivable option for work experience (including a stint with the sales force) before reaching the conclusion that he would a) never get equity, or at best a token amount; and b) never penetrate the upper reaches of management, or at least not soon. Later, in the launch phase for YWC, he applied theory to practice, and the results convinced him even more.
"We had tremendous chemistry," he says. "We all worked round the clock if we had to. Was it pressure packed? Sure. There was constant pressure.
"But," he adds, "and it's a big but: everybody knew exactly where we stood, exactly what kind of cash we had to generate to stay in business. I believe in my heart and soul that the more open and honest you are with the most intimate details of your company, the more your people are willing to make that kind of effort."
"This is an extremely high-pressure industry," agrees Bob Bradley, who oversees YWC's testing lab. "The glue that kept [YWC] from flying apart in the early days was Steve, Don Johnson, and me. We always had each other -- we could always relax, sit down, lay it all out for the three of us. Charlie, I'm afraid, lacked that kind of insulation."
Indeed, for two companies ostensibly in the same business, YWC and C. E. Moore could hardly have looked more different. Kellogg was an open-door, we're-all-in-this-together type of manager who deliberately blurred the line between hard work and fun. He set tough growth goals and expected 18-hour days from his employees when they were on a deadline; yet he also invited them on company-sponsored ski trips and other strictly social functions. As his company began to grow, moreover, he recognized its need for automated systems, Big Eight accountants, and heavyweight attorneys: the kind of professional support a company often requires to move forward without falling on its face.
Not so Charlie Moore.
"From what I can tell, Charlie ran a oneman show," says Hugh Hanson, who joined C. E. Moore as president last November. "He tried to clone himself as much as possible. The more contracts he got, though, the harder it became to see each client personally. He never seemed to learn the difference between delegation and abrogation."
"When Charlie tried to grow [the firm]," adds Dan Hudson, "his style was to brow-beat people. If a project report went out with a typo in it, he'd call you in his office and scream bloody murder. There were times when the form of a memo seemed a whole lot more important than its content."
Moore's management style was not entirely ineffective. His company was debt free and prosperous. He himself was a master salesman and a consummate technician, earning a reputation to the effect that, says Hanson, "when [a client] hired C. E. Moore to run its plant operations, the state regulators backed off." And although the company itself never grew much beyond the $750,000-a-year level -- "Dad kept saying he didn't want it to get any bigger than he could handle himself," says Brian -- it was consistently profitable. The company earned 20%, 30%, even 40% pretax margins, far beyond the 10% earnings of YWC.
To most observers in and around the company, however, C. E. Moore Associates also grew to suffer from its CEO's insecurities. Somewhere along the line, Moore's obsessiveness crossed over into neurosis, and that isolated him even more. He might have built up a support network among old Weston contacts or industry colleagues, but he was uneasy among his peer group (he never took an active role in Pennsylvania's chapter of the Water Pollution Control Federation) and quirky about keeping up appearances. He would angrily reposition the office furniture if the cleaning crew rearranged it. He refused to take a phone call directly, insisting that it be routed through a secretary and an administrative assistant before it rang on his desk -- even when the two desks sat no more than six feet apart. As for corporate culture, employees describe the social atmosphere around C. E. Moore as having all the warmth of a sludge press.
