As for the start-up team he assembled, well, an optimist would say that they made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in relevant experience. Braendel's friend Jack Dunsmoor, 42, gave up a marketing job at Republic Pictures to become Thrislington's vice-president. Dunsmoor's half-brother, Tim Haase, only 26, became manager of production, and a young actor named Bo Rostrom, 27, became marketing coordinator. Jo Strate, 63, a friend who was training director for General Nutrition Center, managed the office and kept track of the cash.
Thus was Braendel & Associates Inc., doing business as Thrislington Cubicles, born. Fortunately, this green and unlikely crew discovered it didn't have to struggle alone.
Any new business depends on multiple networks of support. Entrepreneurs need sources of capital, of professional services, of supplies and materials. They need marketing channels, and they need customers willing to gamble on a new product. What kept the start-up rate low for most of the postwar era was the weakness of such networks. Sure, you could start a company back in 1958 or 1968. But unless the word "computer" was in your business plan, you'd have to get your money from Aunt Susie and you'd have to operate on the fringes of the marketplace.
On the face of it, that situation is dramatically different today. You need money? New York City's giant Chemical Bank puts full-page ads in The New York Times trumpeting its eagerness to work with small businesses. Professional services are no sweat -- just call the Big Eight. "Eighty percent of our clients are small companies," boasts Daniel O'Brien, a partner with Coopers & Lybrand, "and our small-business unit has been growing 15% a year." If you're looking for some kind of marketing or joint-venture deal with a Fortune 500 corporation, now's the time. Campbell Soup, for example, has "several kinds of partnerships with small companies," according to its vice-president of corporate development. And if you want to sell to the big guys, they're buying. "Over the past five years, our list of suppliers has shrunk, but the proportion of small companies on the list continues to grow," says the man in charge of materials management for Eastman Kodak's apparatus division.
It's a rosy scenario for entrepreneurship, to be sure. But what's the reality? We've all seen analogous figures about the explosion of the venture capital industry, for instance -- from $3.5 billion under management in 1978 to over $30 billion in 1988. As far as most entrepreneurs are concerned, however, that money might as well be locked away in Fort Knox: only the tiniest fraction of start-ups get any of it. Similarly, it's hard to escape the suspicion that only a chosen few get access to the Chemical Banks, the Coopers & Lybrands, and the Campbell Soups of the world. All that eagerness to work with entrepreneurs? A boon to the properly credentialed and well connected. Not so helpful in the seat-of-the-pants, scratching-for-nickels situation of the typical start-up.
Or so you might think, until you heard Greg Braendel's story. In the beginning, it was only too typical.
The Thrislington concept was simple enough. About 25 companies, none large, sell ordinary painted-metal bathroom stalls, usually for $150 to $200 apiece. As rest-room users can testify, the stalls are easily etched, scratched, dented, gouged, and marked up -- and when a teenage boy decides to swing on a door the whole thing is likely to come apart. Thrislington's high-design cubicles, by contrast, would occupy a top-of-the-line niche, selling for $650 or $700 each. Their appeal would lie partly in aesthetics (multiple colors and patterns, for example) and partly in their near-indestructibility. Thrislington's fiberglass or plastic-laminate panels can't easily be damaged. Graffiti are easily washed off. The stalls' floor supports and other construction features bear as much relation to their painted-metal counterparts as a tank to a car.
With a product like that -- hey, it would walk out of the factory -- Braendel was not one to consult a map before hitting the accelerator. He quickly lined up W. H. Steele Co., the Los Angeles manufacturer's rep he had originally talked with, then jetted to England to negotiate operational details. Back home in L.A. he found a subcontractor to assemble the partitions, then flew to Pennsylvania to talk his parents into a modest investment. Working out of a makeshift office in Braendel's home, his associates manned the phones, prepared marketing materials, sought out names of vendors, wrote letters giving quotes. By July 1987 they had their first order: seven cubicles for a Palm Springs, Calif., convention center, owned at the time by Hilton Hotels Corp.
Then the so-far-typical disorder threatened to degenerate into chaos. Monitoring the quality of the assembler's work, Braendel began noticing flaws. Edges didn't fit right. Screws protruded. At the prices he was charging, he knew, he couldn't afford sloppy workmanship. But when he complained, he was given an ultimatum: give us a contract for all your manufacturing or get your stuff out of here in 24 hours. "I had a truck there the next morning," Braendel remembers. With no time to track down another subcontractor, he quickly rented some space, bought $1,500 worth of tools, and put in a desperate call to England for someone to come over and help. Sorry, was the reply, we're too busy. You'll have to assemble them yourself.
After a few 12-hour days the incipient panic subsided: making the cubicles wasn't as hard as it seemed. You cut the laminated panels to size. You edged them with a custom-designed aluminum extrusion, then fit them into a patented foot, or floor support, obtained from England. You added the stylish door latches, complete with red-and-green occupied/vacant indicator -- an essential convenience because the cubicles have no gaps between door and paneling. Tim Haase and Bo Rostrom found they had a flair for the work, and at the end of a week the group had all seven finished. They were shipped out to Palm Springs only a day behind schedule.
