Lavelle was inclined to let McConnell in. "To anyone else, the companies would have looked absolutely identical, but I thought John shouldn't necessarily be a threat to Bill, because Bill didn't specialize in building exhibits; he specialized in design and marketing and service. So I went down the hall and said, 'Bill, I think you ought to talk to this guy. Perhaps he could be useful to you.' 'Yeah,' Bill said, 'I really don't want to have my men building those things. It's conceivable we could exist together.' Then," Lavelle continues, "Pat Spatz came along, and I saw he was no competition to Bill and John because he was in a different market niche -- manufacturing modular trade-show exhibits. So I said, 'Pat, meet Bill and John.' "
Still housed at the center, the trio remain interrelated today. Beyond that, they helped spawn a fourth company, a marketer who represents each of the three. And beyond even that, their needs encouraged the joining of yet a fifth, a silk screener who purchased part of a failing company out of Chapter 11 and now supplies the three exhibitors. Lavelle encouraged his entry even though to do so would violate one of her strictest tenant tenets -- that taking a risk on an out-and-out start-up is better than trying to nurse a marginally extant operation back to life.
At Fulton-Carroll, there isn't even one posted sign, save that on the men's room door requesting that cigarette butts be kept out of the urinals. Very little of the data is computerized. The salient details -- which individuals among the companies are skilled at what; which founder needs what; who needs more working capital; who owes what; who's making a profit; who's about to go under, who isn't; who's having production problems; who needs more space, who less; whose key employee got mugged on his way home last night -- are filed inside Lavelle's brain, which they must enter and leave through a ubiquitous screen of cigarette smoke.
Visitors who snake around the gerrymandered interior, where old elevator shafts and too-wide corridors are being patched together to make more productive floor space, invariably ask Lavelle if she requires her would-be entrepreneurs to submit a business plan. "Well, of course not!" she snaps. "What's it going to tell me? I have a tenant who makes microwave plasma detectors. I don't know what a microwave plasma detector does, and even if I did, I wouldn't know if anyone would want to buy it. But this guy thought someone would be willing to buy microwave plasma detectors, and he was willing to bet his whole life on it. That was good enough for me. If you sit down and talk to people about what their business concept is, you can get a good idea about what they know about the industry they're going into. You can get a good idea about how much they have thought about it, and you can get a very good sense of their personal commitment to it."
All this she usually determines in an interview of two hours; some last only half an hour and some not even that long. Screening the dreamers from the doers boils down to a matter of faith, inasmuch as any business plan at that pre-everything stage is bound to come no closer to real life than the Wizard of Oz. "I can tell those who are basically crazy," Lavelle says, thus dismissing a significant percentage of hopefuls. "But I'm somewhat crazy, too, so who knows? There has to be a certain degree of madness to all of this.
"The lack of capital is relative," Lavelle continues, in confirmation of her own conclusion. "I could say to somebody like Keith Kendall, who created a line of fashion clothing, 'Are you crazy, you idiot? You're going to start in this cutthroat clothing business with a thousand dollars?' " Admitted to the incubator, Kendall borrowed Lavelle's home sewing machine for eight months and stitched $10,000 worth of product by himself. "If that poor SOB is willing to sit there day and night sewing, what do you say to someone like that? 'No, I'm not going to let you try'?" Kendall now employs 13 people, owns his own industrial sewing machines, and has his volume up to $400,000 a year.
In view of Lavelle's informal entrance exam, calculated to allow her to exercise favoritism "in order to attract businesses that contribute to the better good," rotten apples inevitably slip through. She gets rid of them, however, simply by not renewing their leases -- kept ultrashort especially to provide for the weeding-out process. "In this situation," she explains, "people must share the freight elevator, the loading dock, the bathrooms, the hallways. Sharing is not natural; it requires giving up convenience. There are those who can share well and those who don't, and there's no way to forecast from a personality standpoint who's going to be a decent neighbor and who's not." She relies on the community to exact the penalties. "This place has all the attributes of a very small town, a thousand-population community," says Lavelle, "and there's a special manner by which people relate. Part of it is an understanding that there are rules, even if they're unwritten. Those who hog the elevator or who don't watch over their employees or who leave garbage everywhere will be isolated by the rest and won't be offered help. Of the 77, we're going to have 3 or 4 like that at any given time."
Other kinds of contributors to the "common good" are also sought. After the experience with the vanishing alarm system, for example, Lavelle enticed a start-up security company to locate in her building by bartering free rent for a few months. Its shiny armed-camp-looking cars parked out front, she reasoned (so far correctly), would discourage would-be plunderers.
One consequence of getting to know one another so intimately is that over the past two years some of the companies in the Fulton-Carroll Center have been investing risk capital in one another. "This little community is starting to get richer," Lavelle beams in justified self-admiration. Now that the center's bursting to the rafters, which could still use some repair, space jockeying has become as complex as a game of three-dimensional chess.
This summer, for example, Lavelle was besieged by no fewer than eight growing tenants who demanded more space. The considerations went something like this: "Joe Agati, the furniture maker, was suited for us, but all of a sudden he's gotten bigger than I thought he was going to get. It's a delicate dilemma, because the cost of a move out of here could kill him. Ron Damper, the tea guy, is putting raw tea in the computer guy's space, because he's out of space. Anne Bergl over in Modulus has to leave all her shit in the hall. Hopefully, no one will steal it. At SRAM, the company that makes bicycle gearshifts, there are 23 employees, and they can't hear each other now that the company has gone into that high-pitched sonic welding. The office portion isn't separated from production, and they can't wear earplugs because they have to talk on the telephone. Nand Kumar's machine shop needs 12,000 square feet more. I'm not renewing CMAP's lease, so Ron Damper can take that space, and Buhai is going, too; that's where the 12,000 will come from on the third floor. Now, Murphy wants a portion of that. So does Agati, so does Ameriscan, so does JBM Design, so does Alex Atevich, and they're traipsing through here daily complaining that they can't expand any more because they don't have any space. And Agati can't expand next to the tea company because the furniture spray would spoil the tea. None of them can afford another building around here, and all their labor is local. We need another building badly!"
