Although the initial customer response to shineology was enthusiastic, Pioneer's future was still clouded by one issue that had gone unresolved, namely what to do about the company's contract-cleaning business. Wilson strongly believed that success lay in product sales, not in cleaning contracts. "One day," Wilson recalls, "I sold six machines to a single customer and got a check for $10,000. Nobody had to tell me how many cleaning jobs you'd have to complete to make that kind of money." Wilson's father, Charles, however, believed just as strongly that true profits still lay in cleaning. One of Bill Wilson's characteristic "shoot-from-the-hip" solutions finally settled the dispute. The two men agreed to maintain their books separately for a year -- Bill in sales and Charles in cleaning -- and then, at the end of 1980, compare their results. Whoever made the most money would then determine the future direction of the company; he would also win a half-gallon of Jack Daniel's fine bourbon whiskey. Bill Wilson won the jug. And with that, Pioneer/Eclipse assumed its identity as a specialized manufacturer of high-speed floor-care products.
In October 1984, Bill Wilson attended the annual convention of the World Federation of Building Service Contractors held that year in Sydney, Australia. During the keynote address, he sat in the audience surrounded by some 200 of his peers from various countries and listened as the speaker described recent developments in floor maintenance. Suddenly a picture of the 2100 SuperBuffer appeared on the screen behind the speaker who was about to discuss high-speed buffing. "I couldn't believe it," Wilson says. "I mean, there I was in front of the whole world. I just wanted to jump out of my seat and start hollering, 'That's my baby. That's my baby." For Wilson, that moment represented a powerful validation of Pioneer's extraordinary success. From one man running around in a used station wagon, Wilson's enterprise was approaching $7.4 million in revenues, 65 employees, and 100 distributors. And he himself had been cited several times for "entrepreneurial excellence" by the governor of North Carolina in addition to numerous other awards. By 1985 revenues had reached $13 million.
Imagine Wilson's state of mind, then, as Pioneer began to lose money and continued to lose money in every month during the second half of 1986. And worse yet, nobody knew exactly why.
Pride goeth . . . before a fall." In business, as in life, few things are more dangerous than vanity brought on by sudden success. "If I can pick out any one thing that gave us problems," Wilson said recently, "it was that success had gone to my head. I call it 'successitis.' I got too big of an ego. I thought I could walk on water, and since I'm in charge, I've got to take the blame." To which Ellis F. "Butch" Reeves IV, Wilson's director of administration, responded: "Yeah, but we all had the feeling we could do no wrong. We got carried away by our own growth."
Calendar-year 1986 was supposed to have been Pioneer's most ambitious year yet. Inflamed by international recognition, Wilson orchestrated the introduction of an unprecedented number of new products and initiatives: two buffers, a line of chemicals designed to clean stone and masonry, a buffing pad system, new packaging, a wax applicator, and an electric hand dryer for public restrooms. Then, too, the company had just started advertising in Australia, Japan, and Europe. And, of course, don't forget the big promotion to cut the price of the SuperBuffer by $1,000. That plan was expected to increase profits sharply since more machines in the field meant more sales of higher-margined chemicals.
From afar, this ambitious program looked a sturdy enough monument to the greater glory of Pioneer/Eclipse, but there were cracks in the carapace and the foundation was week. The first rumblings of approaching disaster occurred early one morning in August when, at a hastily called meeting, Wilson was shown the latest month's figures. He had not seen numbers in the loss column for so long that for a moment he could only blink at them in utter disbelief. "Then," Reeves recalls, "things got very tense because no one could really explain what had happened. Bill looked up and said, 'I want to know. Find it. Find it." Wilson then decreed that everyone there assembled would meet every week until answers had been found. These explanations, it would turn out, were varied and several, and, to his profound disappointment, Wilson himself headed the list.
While many entrepreneurs say they are involved in everything, more as a figure of speech than anything else, with Wilson it was quite literally true, almost unbelievably true. "There was a time," says Garry A. Avram, a prominent Winston-Salem, N.C., attorney and Wilson confidante who sits on Pioneer's board of directors, "when you couldn't have a conversation with him that was five minutes long. It was like this: you're talking and a man comes along and says, 'Bill, this screw won't work,' and then Bill stops talking and says to the guy, 'Use another screw.' I mean people were that dependent on him." That was Wilson's style and it had worked wonders when the company was small. Unfortunately, it had not changed even as Pioneer grew larger and more complex. Indeed, Wilson persisted in dealing with his managers in a similar fashion -- one at a time and down to the smallest detail. Although the company was organized around a conventional departmental structure, the individual departments did not meet to discuss Pioneer's overall results and their combined effectiveness. The net result was a serious lack of communication. Thus, in one instance, the sales department ran a promotion without the knowledge of manufacturing and purchasing, which, in turn, could not have inventory on hand. In another, the credit department put the screws to a major account before sales could resolve the misunderstanding more diplomatically. "The left hand," says Reeves, "did not know what the right hand was doing."
