Very cute, the sound man said, but it would be annoying if the dogs were heard on the tape.
"Could we turn them off?" he asked.
It was then that you truly saw what it means to be a celebrity. Watching Leonard's face, you could see he wanted to be gracious. But you also saw him thinking about the effect the lack of the performing dogs would have on the people -- especially kids -- wandering through the store downstairs. He hated the idea of silence.
The sound man and the rest of the film crew, though, never saw any hesitation. Leonard picked up a phone, and the dogs hushed.
And the second the interview was over, Leonard had them howling again.
Leonard looks slightly embarrassed when a visitor asks about this later. "You do what you can to make the interview go well. There are trade-offs [to all this attention], but you can minimize them."
And as Carl Sewell is quick to point out, you can also use them to your advantage.
Sewell was discovered by the ubiquitous Tom Peters. After listening to Peters talk to a business group in Dallas, Sewell, a second-generation car dealer, invited the co-author of In Search of Excellence to come by for a tour of Sewell Village Cadillac. What Peters found was a deep-carpeted showroom decorated with dark woods and chandeliers. But as impressive as the front room is, it's the back shop that captures your attention. Everything -- including the floor -- is immaculate. And Sewell works hard to keep it that way. In his body-welding shop, for example, sanders are attached to a vacuum hose so that the dust they produce is immediately captured.
"We are proud of what we do," says Sewell, 45. "This is one way to show it."
The pride also shows up in the work. Sewell's dealership has ranked at the top, or near there, in every customer-satisfaction survey Cadillac has taken.
When Peters's syndicated article was published in 1985, Sewell and his staff went from anonymous to famous virtually overnight. People who had never noticed them started coming by and asking for tours. Tours of a car dealership! The place has become almost as popular with Dallas visitors as Southfork Ranch.
Now all that is pretty flattering, but when you are leading folks around and explaining for the 158th time why you keep your repair shop so clean, you're not selling cars. And in a local economy in which your two biggest industries -- oil and real estate -- are flatter than an armadillo leveled by a semi, the last thing you need is something that distracts from the business. But Sewell doesn't see it that way.
"First off, all this attention helps sell cars," he says. "More people in Dallas know us now than before the article." And that attention has also helped Sewell expand. When the folks who make Sterling and Toyota were looking for dealers to sell their new luxury cars, they came a-courtin'.
"Second, when people come to see us, I have access to the best minds in business," Sewell says. "Sure, they ask us questions, but I get to ask them questions about how they do things, too." Executives from Procter & Gamble, major banks, and even Ford have come by for a tour, and every one of them has been questioned by Sewell -- as was a writer who came to call.
After patiently answering questions for two hours, Sewell turns the tables. "When was the last time you drove a Cadillac?" he asks.
"Probably 1971."
"Well, that is about to change," says Sewell, handing over the keys to his car, a 1988 Cadillac Allante, GM's attempt at a high-priced sports car.
The gesture is, of course, one any good host might make. Sewell understands that reporters, even those who work for business magazines, are unlikely to spend much time driving $56,000 sports cars. But he had an ulterior motive. The reporter could serve as another form of market research.
"Tell me what you like and don't like," he says as soon as his guest is behind the wheel. "Is the seat comfortable? Is the ride too soft?" The questions keep coming through the entire tour of suburban Dallas.
The car handles better than anticipated, but doesn't accelerate as quickly as expected. It doesn't feel like you're really driving. It's more like steering a couch.
"Do you think it ought to come in a five-speed?" Sewell asks.
"Yep."
"Me too. You know, I have some folks from Cadillac coming down here tomorrow. That's what I'm going to tell them."
That is what being a celebrity can mean. You can get GM to come to you. And GM will listen.
Being in the public eye, says Sewell, also raises expectations and puts more pressure on you. That, he says, is good.
"If we stub our toes, a lot of people will notice, but that just gives us one more reason not to stub our toes. I want us to be constantly improving."
But the pressure of knowing -- or at least thinking -- that the whole world is watching, paralyzed Springfield Remanufacturing for three months, after the company was profiled in INC.
For the first week after the article came out, everything was fine. The only noticeable change was that company managers -- who typically have little chance of gracing the pages of GQ -- started coming to work with shined shoes. Some were even spotted wearing ties in the company offices in southwestern Missouri. The officers were pleased that their open-management style had been heralded in a national magazine and singled out as key to the company's turnaround.
Then things got worse. "We got all these letters praising us," Stack remembers. "Business-school professors said they wanted to write us up, and we started living in this fantasyland, thinking how great we were."
Euphoria quickly led to paranoia. "We began thinking that the whole world was watching everything we did," says Stack. "The article triggered requests for more interviews, people were asking me to make speeches, and suddenly we started worrying about how our decisions would look to outsiders.
"I'll give you an example. The article praised the fact that we were able to share information and get everyone involved without having a union. Well, we had one guy who was on the brink of being fired. Normally, his supervisor would have handled it. But this guy started talking about how he was going to bring the union in, and we just panicked. We spent two months worrying about what would happen if we became unionized. How would that look to the outside world? We had meeting after meeting worrying about unions, instead of spending 20 minutes dealing with a guy who would have been happier elsewhere."
The union never arrived, and the worker finally left on his own, but Stack had had enough. He called a meeting of his top managers and said, "We can't let this publicity control us. We have to control it. We're becoming afraid of doing anything, because we might fail. But if we don't do anything, we will fail. It's time to move on."
