The guerrilla theater continued in June and July when Ohlson twice showed up at sales meetings in which he berated Berst, who had since been elected ICC's new president, for betraying him. In July Ohlson swept past the receptionist and into Berst's office, demanding they settle their dispute. When Berst told Ohlson the attorneys were working on just that, Ohlson summarily vowed that Berst's fortunes, like Dote's, would fall with ICC's. Berst recalls him saying: "John, one day I'll live in your house and play with your toys."
Attrition
Ohlson's outbursts were surface flares signaling deeper tensions at ICC, where in the spring of 1987 an eerie and exhausted calm prevailed. In May and June John Berst started losing employees one by one. The office manager left. The inventory supervisor, a quality-control supervisor, a production manager, and a couple of production people followed. The attrition made Berst edgy. He wondered if this were Ohlson's doing.
Berst's suspicion deepened at the beginning of July when ICC's purchasing agent came into Berst's office and handed him his resignation. This was an employee Berst had courted for months. Berst considered himself the younger man's mentor. Now, he too was leaving. Berst looked him in the eye and said, "Just be man enough to tell me this: does this have anything to do with Bob Ohlson?" The employee took offense at the inference and angrily denied it.
In June an abnormally large amount of inventory came in the door at ICC and a lot of product went out. Commission checks would go out on July 15 for product shipped in June. In the meantime, Berst got notice from more people who said they were leaving, not in two weeks, but on July 15, the same day his salespeople drew their hefty June commission checks. Ohlson was after Berst to settle their case by July 15 and was willing to accept substantially less money than first offered. July 15. Berst kept hearing the date as though he was Caesar and a voice in his head was urging him to beware. He called up ICC's lawyer: "Tell Bob Ohlson we've got a deal -- but not till after the 15 of July."
The Coup
The deal was blown away by the mass resignation that greeted Berst on Monday, July 20, 1987, an event that he labels simply "the coup." After getting the news from Eme, Berst closed his office door and stared at the wall. He had been in business 25 years, and now all of that had been destroyed by a single act. "Everything I had done in my professional career was about to come crashing down," he recalls. "This was the end of the world.'
The self-pity soon passed, hardening into anger. Berst knew that with his experience and education, he would survive. But what about the others? "I have 65 people working for me. A lot of them are not worried about paying for college educations. They're worried about next week's paycheck."
First he called his banker and gave him the news. Then he sat down with Eme and Dote and agreed that ICC had to get back to its core business in order to survive. Ohlson had been trying to move them away from selling cable over the phone to mere comprehensive "systems solutions" peddled by high-priced salesmen on the road. The three men agreed to promote a number of customer-ser-vice people to sales. Berst next stepped onto the factory floor.
What he felt in the room was fear. "We had a number of husband-and-wife combinations on the floor, single parents, people who had been with the company four of five years," recalls Berst. "These people don't make a lot of money; they've always relied on their paychecks." Tension had been growing for months among the partners, and they had done their best to build an emotional firewall between their disputes and the rest of the company. In a small shop like ICC, that didn't work. Rumors inevitably started, fed by the high-profile, high-energy persona of Bob Ohlson. Berst spoke.
"We've had a lot of resignations, and we're angry about it," Berst said to his workers. "But we're not going to lie down and die. If you have confidence in us, and if we stay angry enough, we'll pull this out."
In the coup's aftermath the plot began to come to light. In July one of ICC's salespeople, working on deals that would close in the future, had said he worked for Cable Comm, Ohlson's company-to-be, but claimed it was a subsidiary of ICC. Hence he could offer customers the usual comfort level provided by an established company, but future payment would go to Cable Comm, not ICC. Another salesman, again claiming to represent ICC, had subcontracted with another cable manufacturer to supply cable to an ICC customer, thus pocketing the profit. This was revealed one day in July when Berst got a call from a customer wanting to know where the cable was that he had ordered. Berst had no record of it.
The large amount of product shipped in June -- for which the salesmen were compensated on July 15 -- now also made sense. Some of it had originally been promised for the future. Some of it had never even been ordered. In the latter part of July, a lot of it came back. That month John Berst wrote $60,000 worth of credits to customers for product they had not ordered. That month he also received calls from headhunters who had heard from former ICC employees that the company was going into Chapter 11.
Bob Ohlson's shadow company was indeed hungry for start-up money. He had lured many people from ICC with the promise of equity ownership in the company, provided they were willing to invest. This issue came to be fraught with symbolism, evidence of how enlightened the new company would be in contrast to ICC. Bruce Swoboda, ICC's systems manager, calls Bob Ohlson "the world's greatest salesperson. He could talk you into anything. It's very scary." Swoboda asserts that a lot of these salespeople were not unduly unhappy at ICC, but they fell under Bob Ohlson's persuasive power. Swoboda points to the Cable Comm business card one salesman left behind. "I take that as a sign that he feels guilty about what he did."
