Jerry Gorde gave his employees an ESOP, a majority on the board, and lots of corporate culture. What he never gave up was control
FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, JAY Nathanson thought. What's he up to now?
Nathanson abruptly turned off the tape player and nosed his burgundy-red Ford into the parking lot. Stunned, he tried not to stare at the senior managers waving placards outside the Vatex Corp. plant. It's a picket line, for chrissakes. Jerry Gorde and his buddies have set up a picket line.
Nathanson parked, then stayed in the car for a moment to figure his next move. He'd be damned if he'd join that line -- assuming that's what Gorde wanted. No. He'd just walk right past it and go to work. Grimfaced, he got out of the car, put his head down, and strode on into the building.
Once inside, he shuffled a few papers. But he was too distraught to work. He wandered back out, saw a friend sitting in her car watching the picketing, go in. Together they commiserated. Suppose a customer drove up! And what about production? Nathanson was one of Vatex's top sales-people, and was only too aware that the Richmond, Va., company was entering its busy season. By today the workers weren't going into the plant; they were staying outside, yukking it up with Gorde.
This is total insanity, he thought ruefully. Who would ever believe it? A CEO picketing his own company.
There's one guy who'll never understand, though Jerry Gorde as Nathanson walked past. Well, who needed him? By now, the picket line he had established was having its desired effect. Employees came up, puzzled, then stopped and talked. Most of the managers did too. Some picked up signs: "Vatex used to be a fun place to work -- why sin't it now?" or "I'm mad as hell and won't take it anymore." Guerrilla theater, Gorde reflected -- just like his days in the early 1970s, when he organized street demonstrations with Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Do something dramatic. Shake people up.
It was, without a doubt, time for action. Ever since the blowup a month earlier, Gorde had been watching the bickering, the feuds, the jockeying for position. It had sickened him, even made him think about leaving the company he had built -- and he really didn't know whether he could ever again trust the top managers who had rebelled against him. But if he didn't do something soon, the company would die.
And now his tactic, the "strike," was working. Amazingly, all the managers seemed to be on his side. Everyone, that is, but Jerome Golfman and his buddy Nathanson. Well, if there were a few who refused to lay down their swords, to get back to business, they would just have to be forced out.
Maybe today was the day. Ben Kutner, Gorde's chief lieutenant, was calling a meeting, and Gorde knew he would be expected to speak. If any of the employees wanted to know who was behind the trouble. . . .
Smiling and chatting, Jerry Gorde walked into the plant.
Plant. Well, you could call it that. Certainly the fancy new building housed the company's five multicolor automated screen printing presses, state-of-the-art machines that turned out gross after gross of the colorfully emblazoned T-shirts that were Vatex's chief product. And certainly there was warehouse space, shipping platforms, offices, a conference room. But plant? That made the company sound like United Widgets Inc., some straight-up, capitalist business run by greedheads and inhabited by automatons. Look again at the building. See those Grecian columns painted on the facade, sassily mimicking one of staid Richmond's best-known edifices? See that portrait of Jerry Gorde at the top of one of the columns? Walk inside, in the production area where the rock music is blasting, in the corridors where half a dozen dogs are lolling about, in the art gallery that occupies most of the building's central core. Check out the art itself, surreal painings at once lewd and revolting, with titles like Greasy Priest Hair Stink and It's Just a Sweat. Not your usual corporate art; not your usual plant; not your usual business.
Time was, you could get high on the contradictions. Vatex Corp.: on the one hand, hippie heaven; on the other, a phenomenally successful business, four straight years on the INC. 500. Jerry Gorde, in one guise a ponytailed ex-Yippie; in another, chairman and CEO of one of Richmond's best-known small companies. What a difference a decade made. In 1972 Gorde was organizing demonstrations at the political conventions in Miami; in 1984, chosen Virginia's Small-Business Person of the Year, he was invited to a ceremony at Ronald Reagan's White House. "It took the White House security system three months to clear me," he says, delighted with the irony.
To Gorde, such trappings of success were both personal triumph and philosophical validation. He hadn't expected to wind up in the business world; in his early twenties he had been a kind of itinerant activist, supporting himself through leather craft and odd jobs. But when he bought a cousin's T-shirt store in 1977, he figured maybe he could make his own little revolution, succeeding at the capitalists' game but refusing to play by their rules.
Somehow he had pulled it off. From a single retail outlet with the earthy name of Dirt Shirt, the company began to grow. Custom screen printing and monogramming. Advertising specialties. Blank T-shirt wholesaling. Clothing outlets in college towns. In 1980, sales of the company, then known as Virginia Textiles Inc., passed $1 million. In 1984 they topped $11 million, and the number of employees hit 70.
As the company outgrew its early family-style informality, Gorde experimented with forms of democracy and participation, trying to make Vatex a community as much as a business. An internal board of senior staff ran the company. Managers took on extra jobs such as disbursing 5% of the profits to charity every year. "We're asking every employee to become an owner and a partner," Gorde told INC. ("Will Success Spoil Jerry Gorde?" February 1984) -- and he put his stock where his mouth was, issuing new shares for an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and awarding equity bonuses to key employees. Before long he owned only 25% of Vatex.
