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INC.: Let's go back to your point about the danger of falling in love with the business. Some people would argue that a company's greatest strength is the passion and love an owner feels for it.
BOSTIC: They may be talking about something different. I agree that you should be in love with what you're doing. That's the real part of the business -- the people who are in it, the fun you have while you're doing it. I love that part of the business, too. I'm way beyond doing things I don't enjoy. If I don't have fun, I don't want to do it. But you shouldn't confuse what you do, and the people around you, with the business as a corporate entity. The business per se is a commodity, represented by certain pieces of paper called stock. The value of this business when I started it was zero. We're about to sell 30% of it for $25 million. So now the market value of the company is about $80 million. Here's my point: when the value of those pieces of paper reaches a certain level, I am more than happy to hand them over to someone else in exchange for compensation in kind. Because I'm not in love with the paper.
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INC.: So the danger of falling in love with the business is that. . . .
BOSTIC: You'll lose your objectivity. You won't be able to make the decisions that are in your best long-term interests. I've seen it happen. One of my last acts at Berkey was to shut down the New York City plant Ben had built in the company's early days. It was losing $1.7 million a year, and everybody agreed it had to be closed. Ben was in Europe then. The board signed off on the plan, but Ben hated it. When he came back, he went to visit the empty plant. I was told by one guy who walked through with him that he cried. He'd built this thing, and I'd closed it. We had our showdown soon afterward. He'd lost his objectivity. Eventually he lost his company.
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INC.: And that's what you didn't do with American Photo Group.
BOSTIC: That's right. I didn't fall in love with it. So I was able to grab the opportunity to sell the business, which was completely unexpected and came up overnight.
INC.: What happened?
BOSTIC: Kodak bought a competitor of ours, Fox Photo. Over the course of the next year, we were approached by four other firms who'd bid on Fox and lost. One of them made an offer for American Photo Group. I sized up the situation and decided to approach Kodak. Kodak didn't want us to be sold to these other people. So it bought us out instead. I could have said, "I really like this business, and I'm going to keep it and build it into a $1-billion company." We'd been planning to do that. We'd already begun to develop the technology we're building this new company around. But I kept my objectivity. What I really wanted was financial security. So I sold American Photo, and I was able to hold on to the technology in the negotiations. The irony is that, by selling the other company, I got the freedom and the cash I needed to do this one. I might not have been able to do it otherwise.
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INC.: How's that?
BOSTIC: A venture capitalist told me recently, "If you hadn't sold American Photo and made enough money to finance this thing, it would never have seen the light of day. In a corporate environment, nobody would have been single-minded enough to invest the time and the energy required to make it happen. If you'd been dealing with a VC, we would have owned you a long time ago, and we would never have allowed you to spend all the money it took to get this far."
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INC.: I take it you're spending a lot of money on this new venture.
BOSTIC: More than I should, I suppose. But because I had the freedom and the cash, we now own 100% of the company. Meanwhile, our shares -- 1 million of them -- are worth $80 a share. That's adding incredible value. That's more than I got out out of American Photo. And so far we've only completed a market test. Now it's true that you can't bank that valuation, and you can't sell it. If we found out tomorrow afternoon that our technology doesn't work, we'd be out of luck. But I don't think that will happen. I think we'll sell it in three or four years, just as we sold American Photo Group. In that sense, this is déjà vu.
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INC.: So you don't have any notions of building a monument here, of building something that is going to outlast you.
BOSTIC: I'm very keen on that, but it's not this business.
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INC.: What is it?
BOSTIC: It's the home I'm building, because that's my family, and my family is what my life is all about. It's the group of people we have here, and their futures, and their families. It's also Delphi Health & Science, which is a company I've started to deal with some of the tremendous learning problems we have in this country. You know, people with learning disabilities may constitute as much as 20% of the population. The implications of that are staggering. I'm working with Mogens Jensen, a clinical psychologist, to come up with a new technology that could revolutionize the way we handle these problems.
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INC.: So I guess you won't have to worry about running out of things to do.
BOSTIC: That's for sure. I'm keenly aware of where I want to go in the long term. This business is just a way to get there.
