Words from the Wise

Most founders say that their businesses would never have been started had they taken anyone's advice. Joel Benard-Cutler and David Fialkow -- who've turned mentors into a competitive advantage -- wouldn't have started theirs without it

For the two founders of National Leisure Group Inc., it was definitely not a standard business meeting. Missing were some favorite rituals: no windup gorillas clacked across the table, nobody offered a refreshing selection of Tootsie Pops. "They were really down," recalls Samuel Gerson. "I had never seen them like that. They felt as if the world were coming to an end -- and it was."

In just four years Joel Benard-Cutler and David Fialkow, 33 and 32 respectively, had built their discount-travel company into a roughly $35-million entity. Talking about it, they often made success seem inevitable, the appropriate reward for two childhood chums who had made the transition to business partners.

But on that particular evening, last January 17, neither had much to say as they marched -- slouched, really -- into Gerson's office just after 6:30 p.m. The war in the Persian Gulf had started less than 24 hours earlier. Gerson, the chairman and CEO of Filene's Basement Inc., a $400-million chain of off-price retail stores, had nurtured them from the start, financially linking his company with theirs and pounding into their heads the difference between a low price and a bargain.

Now the pair plunked down under the watchful eye sockets of Gerson's prized wall decoration, a cow's skull. For once, it didn't have the longest face in the room. "This is a very humbling experience for us," Fialkow began, his voice uncharacteristically shaky. "We've always come to tell you that our business was off the charts. We're coming here now because we don't know how we can survive this as a company." Sales had been softening since December, and for 1990 National Leisure had registered sales 20% below those of the year before. But as gulf hostilities commenced, so did an even steeper drop. That Tuesday's $160,000 in sales had shrunk to $92,000 by Wednesday and $78,000 by Thursday. That was 60% lower than the year before. And such ugly prospects as chemical weapons, terrorism, and a bloody ground confrontation led Fialkow to conclude that the war "would set us back at least two years."

After sitting quietly, Gerson cranked his voice to disruptive decibels. "Pick your heads up," he ordered. "You've got a great business. Even if you have to do some painful things, what you have done is still extraordinary." Now that he had their attention -- and probably that of everyone else within five blocks of his Wellesley, Mass., office -- Gerson proceeded to hammer a new lesson into their craniums: figure out what you have to do to protect your business, do it now, and "sooner or later, people will start traveling again."

They spent the next hour or so discussing what such a plan might entail -- tactics such as cutting employees, bearing down on vendors, and closing stores. "You guys are survivors," Gerson repeatedly reminded the two founders. When they looked unconvinced, he abandoned his supremely confident demeanor. Two and a half years earlier, he recalled, in the midst of "the most difficult days of my corporate life," as the Basement's parent company was under attack, he and his partner had engineered a leveraged buyout of the Basement. "When you think you are going to lose your business, you can't sit there and let it happen," Gerson said. "You can't."

Fialkow and Benard-Cutler wouldn't. Gerson's suggestions and his faith in his protégés had revived their will. "My job with them was to try and perk up their spirits," says Gerson. "I wanted them to run out of here."

They left that night with enough ideas, and energy, to make responsible decisions. "They felt pretty decent about themselves," says Gerson. He had fulfilled his role as a mentor.

The rest, as always, was up to them.

It has been said, most memorably by former president John F. Kennedy, that "victory has a hundred fathers" -- or about as many as National Leisure does, if you count mentors in the tally.

The resource that Benard-Cutler and Fialkow, National Leisure's president and vice-president, respectively, have created is not as formal as a board of directors nor as balanced as an advisory board. Though the two men have some broad criteria (see "The Art of Being Mentored," page 5), they simply look for people who have something useful to impart. Some, like Gerson, have a clear stake in National Leisure's success. Others are former employers or family contacts. Leo Kahn was just someone Fialkow and Benard-Cutler decided they wanted to know. They had seen a profile of Kahn, cofounder of both a successful supermarket and an office-supplies chain, in a local magazine. So Fialkow wrote to him in November 1987. Now they get together at least twice a year. "I give them my honest opinion," says Kahn, 74. "Free advice doesn't cost you anything unless you take it."

Benard-Cutler and Fialkow traffic only in advice that requires no checkbook. Although some of their dozen or so mentors are consultants who would otherwise be pricey, they are usually glad to help. "I am more likely to create time for them than for a paying client," says one. He and the others do so because the two have a rare trait: an open mind. "If David and Joel tell you they think something is a good idea," says Gerson, "they'll try it."

That doesn't mean that they want others to tell them how to run their business. They don't even seek a consensus; the mentors never convene as a group. "That wouldn't be much fun," warns Leonard Schlesinger, an associate professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Business Administration. "When you are trying to dispense wisdom, you don't want to compete for airtime." His sensitivity underscores the intimacy of these relationships: though these entrepreneurs and their mentors talk about business, the real connection between them is more personal. "Sometimes, I feel as if I have been a father to them," says Jack Rollins, 54, executive assistant to the chairman of Sears Roebuck & Co.