The closest I could come today to that experience, I guess, would be the $120,000 purchase of the property we had been leasing at our truck-tire recapping facility -- quite a difference from the $20-million cable plant. Come to think of it, though, that highlights another interesting contrast between owning your own company and working in a corporate environment. The decision to build the plant in Kentucky took over a year, and even that was considered fast. I decided to purchase the recap property on one morning and negotiated with the owners that same day. I arranged bank financing the following morning by phone, and the deal was consummated on the next afternoon. The net result of being able to move quickly, before the owners reconsidered, was to pick up a property for $120,000 that had been appraised at $190,000 and that also eliminated a $30,000-a-year rental fee. Not a bad return on investment.
In the same way that I miss the opportunities to meet the likes of Alan Greenspan, I also miss the intellectual stimulation I got from people I had had access to in big companies. Fred scoffed at this notion, too, but in a small company you just don't have the same pool to draw from. I remember with pleasure working with Larry Morris, my controller, and Rusty Asdourian, my vice-president of manufacturing, at General Cable, and John McClung, who was my vice-president of operations at Gould. They are tremendously sharp men, and I learned more from them than I ever learned from the people to whom I reported.
I think I missed those exchanges more in my first month at Battery & Tire Warehouse than I do now. It's also true that I have since figured out some ways to compensate for the loss. For example, I joined The Entrepreneur's Network in St. Paul, and a group of us now meet once a month and act as an ad hoc board of directors for each other. The entrepreneurial wisdom I've picked up has been invaluable. I also make it a point to keep in touch with a half dozen old friends, interesting people such as Larry, Rusty, and John. I give them a call every other month or so, not necessarily to ask about business, but to hear what they're up to and to talk about whatever's on my mind.
Whatever I may miss about being in a large corporation, decision making is one area in which Fred's frustration can't be denied. It is such a delight now to make decisions based on one criterion only: is it a good decision, in both the short term and the long term? When you are making a decision in a large corporation, you also ask yourself that question. But then, in parallel and with virtually no exceptions, you have to ask yourself, how will this decision look at corporate headquarters? Can it be defended against attack? If it goes wrong, what's the recovery procedure? God, what a pain in the ass that was! As Fred says, "Life's too short for all this hassle." Besides, it's bad management.
Today, my goal is not to make all perfect decisions, but to make a fairly high percentage of good ones, and to make sure that the bad ones are not catastrophic. It's been great having the marketplace be my judge instead of that bureaucracy. Let me give you an example of the difference. We ran into a real mess with one customer at Battery & Tire Warehouse, which caused us to write down a $100,000 receivable. I was highly responsible for this blunder, which occurred to a large extent because of my total lack of experience in credit and collection. It was a very expensive education, but did make me quite savvy in the area -- so much so that I designed and implemented a slick exception-reporting system for accounts receivable that we are now marketing to other companies. The interesting point, however, is that if you use my rule of 50, then the $100,000 mistake would equal a $5-million write-down in my prior world, and I doubt that I could have survived an error of that magnitude.
The Fortune 500 atmosphere is extremely punitive. I remember being shocked by the statistic that the average tenure of a general manager at Gould was less than two years. But later on, the figure didn't surprise me at all. People in the corporate world play to a higher audience that equates action with results. The constant pressure is to demonstrate that you are a tough manager capable of making tough decisions -- such as firing the general manager if you've had a bad year. I can recall two specific occasions where plants -- mind you, whole plants with hundreds of people -- were shut down to demonstrate to higher management that the decision makers were tough and action oriented. In neither case did the economics justify the shutdowns when looked at over the long term. As a business owner, I no longer have to prove my competency through touch-looking actions, image, and style. Our customers couldn't care less. They want service, results, and reliability.
I hear a lot about the tremendous stress and pressure of running your own company -- the awareness that you have bet the family farm, and it's all on your shoulders. I read in this magazine last February an account of a phenomenon called entrepreneurial terror. Granted, there is a continual dread of failure -- I can't really agree that it's terror -- but at least it's the marketplace that is making the judgments. In the corporate world I always felt at the mercy of some individual hundreds of miles away who was making sweeping decisions that had profound implications for my life. Consider the number of people being arbitrarily bumped by the current wave of corporate restructuring. Terror? Entrepreneurs don't have a monopoly.
Fred finally interrupted me before I could go off on another tangent. "Hold on, Charlie," he said. "I'm getting too much on the one hand this, and on the other hand that. Let's get down to the bottom line. Are you really happy you made the switch?"
"Are you kidding? Hell, yes!"
