Then Motif's growth machine did falter. During the course of the move, its customer-service operation fell apart; no one knew what actually was in stock or where it was located. Some orders were filled incorrectly; many others missed delivery dates. Meanwhile, absenteeism and high turnover in the warehouse and order department had become a major problem. "You can imagine what a nightmare it was for our customers," Friberg says. "They'd hire their wallpaper hangers, but our product wouldn't arrive, or it would arrive wrong."
What with the move, the expansion, and the difficulties of dealing with hundreds of mills and distributors, Friberg was torn in too many directions to find the time to reorganize and remotivate flagging departments. But since he was the one who had always made all the organizational decisions and had managed the staff, by now he didn't trust anyone else to do it.
So he compensated by wildly overordering everything in his sample books. That caused a new, even more dangerous set of problems, eating up the cash and credit needed to finance the relocation and the Lauren expansion. It was management under panic, the devil take long-term planning, and Friberg knew it. All he hoped was that fast growth would give him enough breathing room to correct the problems down the road.
But problems were mounting fast. Motif's new banker started getting nervous when the company reported its first-ever quarterly loss during the very first quarter of their relationship. Plus, the company's longtime financial officer was proving himself less and less capable, either emotionally or professionally, of keeping up with the business, and neither Friberg nor Peterson could bring themselves to let him go. "We were like a family," Peterson says. "The thought of firing him was devastating to contemplate."
Even more painful for Peterson was watching her husband floundering with problems she feared he didn't know how to solve. "There was some loss of confidence," she admits now. "I had never been involved with the company's management before, but I started trying to micromanage over Karl's shoulder, to second-guess all his decisions. He has always been a cosmic worrier, who stays calm about day-to-day issues and focuses on the bigger things. But I'm the kind of person who can worry about a loose thread forever," she says. Suddenly it seemed as though Motif had nothing but loose threads to worry about.
Meanwhile, Friberg was going through his own form of hell, and it was tough to judge which pressures were worse: the business crisis, which was now leaking into a second quarter, or his wife's growing worries about his competence in what had always been his area of expertise. "I knew what she was thinking," he admits a bit tersely, "and I felt that we just had to get our way through these problems."
Through an enormous act of will, they kept their business problems at the office -- even when, as the months progressed, it seemed the company might disintegrate around them. "We have always said that the most important thing to us was our family and that we would never, ever let anything happen that would put that in jeopardy," Peterson says. "Even if we lost the business and the house, all that mattered to us was that the family survive it." Adds Friberg, "We always told ourselves, even then, when we stood to lose so much, that if we lost the company, we could always go out and get other jobs. We could even move in with our relatives. But we knew we couldn't replace the family."
Help came finally from an unexpected source: Peterson's father, Pete, one of the few nonentrepreneurs in her family. He had recently retired from a career in marketing at IBM and signed on with Motif as a part-time consultant. "Karl had built the company from the beginning, and it was hard for him to see that he couldn't continue to manage it from his desk drawer," the elder Peterson says. "Except for Lyn's design work, this company was still a one-man operation, with no one making any decisions or carrying any responsibilities except Karl. He needed to analyze the business functions in the company and learn how to delegate."
That's a tough lesson to learn, especially when it comes from a father-in-law. And it's tougher still when the father-in-law's style is on the authoritarian side. "I didn't like the big-business bullshit," says Friberg, "so we had to find a middle ground between the IBM vision and the entrepreneurial vision."
What helped him adjust was that, emotions aside, he could see many of Peterson's recommendations made business sense, such as replacing the financial officer. Friberg did finally manage to do it, in what he still thinks of as one of his most painful acts as a CEO. Then there was the issue of a companywide reorganization. "Lyn's father kept hammering away at the idea that we had to put the systems and middle management in place in order to be prepared to grow," Friberg says. "Although that was the biggest area of conflict, I came to realize that every entrepreneurial company has to make that same set of adjustments if it's going to grow beyond a certain point."
For Lyn Peterson, the adjustment was a good bit easier, so much so that she installed a desk for her father in her own office. "We had always had an affectionate, although not intimate, relationship when I was growing up. So I was able to approach this without a lot of excess baggage from the past -- and to say, I hope I'm mature enough to learn from his years of experience." She pauses. "If he criticizes Karl, that can be difficult for me. But I can handle it when he gets a little testy with me." Peterson is still a more wholehearted convert to her father's big-business approach than her husband is. "I'm constantly telling her that just because something worked at IBM, there's no reason to think it's going to be the right solution for us," Friberg says.
