Burnout

EVERETT JEWELL DIDN'T KNOW IT at the time, but he was a victim.

"I'm tired," Jewell told his attorney at 3:30 on a spring afternoon in 1983. "I'm going home." Stretched out in his recliner chair, the president of Jewell Building Systems Inc. fell asleep in seconds, woke after midnight, and staggered into bed. He opened his eyes at 10:00 the next morning. Then he fell back to sleep until dinnertime. He remained sluggish and unable to concentrate, week after week, for another three months.

There is no clinical name for it, no exotic virus to dignify the condition. Jewell was simply burned out. It was only after he suffered those months that he began to understand that the underlying cause of his ailment was his management style.

Mostly overlooked in recent years, what with everybody so busy celebrating the entrepreneur, is the toll that running a fast-growing business often exacts on a person. Few escape the experience of company building with none of the many possible scars: the loss of a meaningful personal life, the breakup of a marriage, inattention to one's children, and such nagging chronic problems as irritability and fatigue.

More than half of the 1,139 small-business owners surveyed recently by Geneva Corp., a California-based mergers-and-acquisitions company, pointed toward burnout or boredom when asked why they were thinking of selling the business. "They said it in different ways, but that's what it boiled down to," says David Hoods, president of Geneva Marketing Services Inc.

Of course, burnout isn't unique to company founders, but the paradox of their condition may well be. Tired of "working for somebody else," many founders long to control their own lives. Ironically, some become more of a slave to their own companies than they ever were to any previous bosses. Many entrepreneurs "wind up like spiders caught in their own web," says Ian C. MacMillan, director of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

The web that holds them isn't the company; more often it's their own style of management. Starting a company involves extraordinary pressure and long hours, but many founders fail to share the pressure and hours with others as the company grows. They fail to delegate any of their authority; they feel guilty about spending any time away from their companies. Doing everything, and doing it year after year, exacts a terrible toll.

Those who recover from burnout often say that it was a particular event that enabled them finally to see their predicament with stunning clarity. It was an event that stopped them dead in their tracks, acutely alive. And acutely suffering.

Eight years ago, Bob Weiss stuck a telephone and a typewriter in his extra bedroom and declared that he now owned a public-relations firm. He was 24 years old, and except for reading countless press releases as a Denver newspaper reporter, he knew little about the business. His wife, Sonia Alyn Weiss, was a hospital's director of public relations, and he drew upon her to the point of borrowing her middle name. Alyn-Weiss & Associates Inc., he called it, figuring it would help to be listed first in the Yellow Pages.

He figured wrong on that score, but otherwise did fine. Denver was booming just fore and aft of the decade change, and the penny-stock market was jingling with companies in need of energetic, creative types like Weiss to get their names out. Hustling to learn his trade, before long he had five full-time and two part-time employees helping him serve 14 clients, including several as far away as Salt Lake City.

Weiss had no personal friends, only clients, potential clients, and leads to potential clients. "It was a relentless, manic pursuit," he says. He entertained at the exclusive Lakewood Country Club, showing off his low handicap; membership was courtesy of Alyn-Weiss & Associates. His dues at the Denver Athletic Club were also a business expense. Likewise his BMW, which he wrecked three times in even fewer years. Weiss was driving a fast car, wearing expensive suits and silk ties, and, he readily admits, "my behavior was schizo. Everywhere I went, I was dressed for business. I thought I was on stage, as if I might be stopped on a street corner at 1:00 a.m and be asked to be a spokesman for my client. I was on an ego trip of sorts . . . and I just carried the gig too far."

There were a few early warning signs, but Weiss shot past them. "I used to get sick. About every three months I would go down for about three days, always with the flu. I think I was simply run down from working too hard," he says. Even when he was healthy, he had time for nothing but business. "I didn't even own a new sweater. I had no casual clothes." Nor a life outside work. His marriage fell apart in 1982.

Weiss never flirted with self-destruction the way other fast-track company founders did. Often, young fellows like himself were "eaten alive by cocaine. It can take a company at the top of its market and send it down in flames in six months." He was more fortunate. When he was out with a client one night, Weiss nearly flipped his BMW swerving for an interstate on-ramp. He was more than a little drunk. Stopped by the police, he broke down in tears at the side of the road. As a newspaper reporter, he'd seen plenty of auto wrecks and written stories about innocent victims of drunk drivers. Weiss realized how dangerous his behavior had become. The police sergeant, as it turned out, remembered him from his newspaper days, and instead of booking him called him a cab.

Weiss also got a helping hand from the woman who would become his second wife. At her house one evening, a deck of cards spread out before him, he sat playing Fish with her daughter. And suddenly it struck him: "A dog, cat, the television was on. We were eating popcorn, and I was having a good time."

Having a good time? Now when was the last time that had happened? When Weiss attended the University of Illinois, he used to hop onto his motorcycle and ride around in the farm country near school. Now his own boss and ostensibly in control of his own time, he sadly realized he hadn't felt the wind in his hair in years. "I'd lost my sense of smell, my sense of compassion," he says. "I was drowning in a barrel of money."

He briefly considered a return to newspapering (and $25,000 wages). No, he'd best keep the business but change his manic style of work. He realized that he was the business. Others were returning phone calls and writing press releases, but he had his fingers on everything of importance, and that was how he wanted it, at least then, still only 27 years old. So simply delegating a huge chunk of his workload was not the answer.