Although ultimate victory over the mercurial buffer still lay in the future, Wilson's persistence was repaid more quickly in other, unexpected ways. As he pondered the higher mysteries of the machine's engineering, he noticed that certain commercial floor finished responded to the increased RPMs with a much higher gloss than others. It must be possible, he reasoned, to brew a blend all his own that could capture the best features of various name brand. With this thought in mind, Wilson set out on another line of investigation, parallel to his buffing machine experiments, which had him blending all kinds of liquid acrylic polymers, polyethylenes, plasticizers, coalescents, and preservatives.
All of Wilson's tinkering and concocting, occurring as they did within the narrow confines of a small cinder-block building on Sparta's Highway 21, created a sight to behold. Charles M. Drum, Pioneer's outside accountant, remembers vividly the day Wilson asked him to drop by. "It was very hot in there," he says, "and the trucks were roaring up the hill outside so you could hardly hear to talk. Machines and big 55-gallon drums of chemicals were everywhere. Bill himself was stirring something furiously in one of those 250-gallon stainless-steel vats that are used for milk. He was sweating and stirring and sweating. I looked at him, and I thought he was some kind of mad scientist in there, and I sure didn't know whether I wanted to do business with him."
Drum was quickly won over by Wilson's irresistible salesmanship, but the business he saw that day bears little resemblance to the Pioneer of today. Although the raw concept of shineology was present, that is, that high-speed machines should be intentionally combined with specially formulated high-speed cleaners, polishes, and finishes, Wilson could not yet articulate what was to become his marketing masterstroke. Instead, he was off on a tangent trying to organize himself as a supply house with a full line of cleaning supplies and equipment including mops, brooms, buckets, and carpet-care products. At the same time, he continued to offer contract-cleaning service as well.
Even so, Wilson, by virtue of his enormous energy and constant personal attention to every detail, was not doing badly. By 1977, Wilson's latest business venture, now called Pioneer Sanitation Supply Inc., claimed revenues of $270,000 and a payroll of 10 employees. He was doing do well, in fact, that his father, Charles C. Wilson, quit the milk route he had driven for 25 years and signed on as part owner, vice-president, and floor buffer. Nor were Wilson's spiritual initiatives any less impressive. That year, Sparta's 20 Jehovah's Witnesses were recognized as an official congregation even as Wilson helped lay the stone foundation of the town's first Kingdom Hall. It soon became clear, however, that Wilson's business had taken a futile detour. "I was buying from 20 different manufacturers," Wilson says, "and still I couldn't satisfy everybody. If I carried an 8-inch mop, somebody wanted a 12-inch mop. You just couldn't win." When the evidence could no longer be denied, Wilson dumped his supply-house idea and cast about for something better. It was the kind of quick, decisive action that Wilson prided himself on. Later, when his company had grown much larger and required a more deliberate kind of planning, Wilson would feel estranged from this basic component of his personality. "I can't shoot from the hip like that anymore," he says. "I have to be more cautious because there's so much at stake."
In 1978, as if to atone for its earlier indecisiveness, shineology revealed itself with a sudden flourish of breakthroughs. That year, the Honda Motor Co. unveiled a new 11-horsepower engine that finally solved Wilson's engineering problems. When he bolted one of them to the frame of a buffer and fired it up, the engine simply would not quit. What's more, it turned the buffing pad at an amazing 2,000 revolutions per minute. Simultaneously, Wilson at last formulated Total Eclipse, a long-lasting, thermoplastic floor finish that, under the friction of the pads, produces such a high gloss that the floor appears to shimmer several inches below the vinyl surface. In addition, the finish could be laid down quickly in one continuous application and then buffed at high speed in a separate continuous operation. The laborious, stop-and-go approach of spray-buffing was instantly outclassed.
It was at this point that Wilson achieved an insight that some observers have since called genius. He had not invented high-speed buffing, but what he had discovered was something he took to calling shineology, a discipline that presented the interdependency between machine and finish as a highly marketable integrated system. "It wasn't accidental," he says. "I knew if I had a system, I could sell the system once, not each product separately, just one sale and I've sold it all. And this is what most people wanted because there were too many different products around and they didn't have any real experience at cleaning. They were at the mercy of salespeople who were primarily order takers. But I could be the one to tell them how it all fit together." Wilson, in a fragmented industry characterized by machine makers on the one side and finish formulaters on the other, could offer one-stop shopping, superior results, a preprogrammed method of application that maximized customer convenience and, at the same time, cut labor costs. "Yes, you could call his system revolutionary," says Jack Ramaley, former president of the 3,400-member International Sanitary Supply Association Inc., an industry trade group. "He removed all the guesswork with a compatible system. Bill offers the Rolls-Royce of floor maintenance and there he's the undisputed industry leader." In recognition of this singular achievement, Wilson changed his company's name from Pioneer Sanitation Supply ("too stodgy") to Pioneer/Eclipse ("a real contender") and placed his first ads in the trade press.
