What we need, the professionals argued, is more room on the package for useful information, such as "Reduces Wetness and Controls Odor with Natural Ingredients."
Chappell resisted. Maybe his managers had a point. Well, so did he, only they were so much better at making theirs. "I was made to feel inadequate," he says, "because I couldn't respond professionally in my own defense. I began to lose confidence in my creative ability." Maybe the pros were right after all. How could he know?
"I was committed," Chappell says, "to professionalizing the business and institutionalizing the discipline that would make it work. But in professionalizing the company, we were saying there was something wrong with the way Tom has been running it, that the entrepreneur was inadequate because he didn't value discipline and control. I spent $20,000 each to recruit these people. But now they were here, and they didn't resonate with the same vision that Kate and I did in approaching products or employees. Everything with them was so objective that I found myself being wholly subjective. They would defer to me when I wanted them to agree."
Then there was the problem of what he spent his time thinking about.
Tom's of Maine was a private company, and Chappell insisted on maintaining equity control. So capital was limited. If this little company, with less than $2 million in sales, was going to take its all-natural products into the mass market without a Procter & Gamble-size promotion budget, every dollar had to count. Chappell and his lieutenants worked out a strategy. They used Portland, Maine, to gather data and test assumptions. Then they began methodically entering markets one at a time, beginning with Boston. Once they had shelf space and sales there, they pushed on -- to Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and New York City.
The strategy worked. They got the shelf space, and first in one market and then in the next, Tom's of Maine's sales crept up. With more capital, they could have moved faster, but the trade-off was control. So Chappell kept close watch on the numbers -- setting goals, measuring performance, then readjusting goals. The numbers, as time went by, looked good. And Chappell grew to despise them.
Dollars, percentages, goals met or missed, and strategies -- digits began to fill his days. The more numbers he consumed, the emptier he felt.
When the company had been just Tom and Kate and a few others, they had had strategies, but mostly they just did what had to be done. Now, everything was quantified, reduced to some number. Numbers ordered Chappell's time, determined his success, expressed his self-worth. And yet they were just numbers. What was the point? Work became exhausting.
Something else bothered him, too, something that he couldn't put his finger on. It had to do with his identity, his fundamental sense of who he was.
Her husband, says Kate Chappell, who is now back at the company full-time managing R&D and regulatory and customer relations, was bound up in his identity with the business. "The company was his baby." Kate, on the other hand, "had other babies." She also had other jobs from time to time. And she had gone back to school for a degree in the late 1970s, after which she spent more time with her painting.
Now, she shows her work and sells it through galleries. "When I asked myself, 'Is there more?' " she says, "the answer was yes. And not just as the kids' mother and Tom's wife. I was also Kate the artist, Kate the communicator. There was still a me. It isn't Tom's and Kate's of Maine. It's Tom's of Maine. I understand that, and I didn't suffer the crisis with Tom."
At the same time, Tom's of Maine was becoming a much more tightly focused company. Chappell didn't have the time -- and the company didn't have the money -- to fool around with problematic product ideas, to fantasize about what else it might be doing. In fact, it didn't even have the luxury of keeping existing products that weren't pulling their weight. It dropped the soap that had gotten Tom's of Maine started. It wasn't generating the higher margins needed to support advertising and promotion. In the new, professionalized Tom's of Maine, there was no place for sentimental favorites.
Tom Chappell's office occupies one end of Kennebunk's old Boston & Maine Railroad passenger depot. Kate's is next to his, and other executives also work in the pleasantly remodeled space. There is a small outlet store for factory seconds and discounted items, and on sunny summer days you can brave the mosquitoes and eat lunch at the picnic table on the small lawn. Production and packaging of the toothpaste, shaving soap, mouthwash, and so on takes place across the railroad tracks in what used to be the freight house. Freight trains, two or three a day, rumble between the two buildings. The Chappells' walk home from the office, through a meadow and small woods, takes 10 minutes or less at a stroll. Small as the company is, Tom's of Maine has been a major employer in Kennebunk.
What should have been an idyllic life wasn't.
It's not unusual for business founders, over time, to drift into a state of ennui or even anomie, without knowing why or how they arrived there.
Those who recognize the crisis for what it is often end up selling the company. Chappell could have. Two potential buyers had already approached him, but he didn't like their plans for his brands, and he wasn't convinced they would meet his price. Besides, if he sold, what was he going to do? "I'd seen too many lonely, empty entrepreneurs who had sold out just going around with their time and money, chasing material things."
Still, if he was going to stay, for the business's sake and his own he had to identify what was bothering him, learn why, and decide what to do about it. He should have been happy; he was not. He should have felt fulfilled; he felt frustrated. Chappell wasn't foolish enough to believe that he could bull his way through the situation, ignoring the symptoms and pressing on. The problem wasn't the company; it wasn't the people he'd hired; it wasn't the products or the market. The problem was him. What, he wondered, was he going to do about himself?
