She almost drove off. In the fall of 1988 Taggares plowed her profits into a new heap of problems, in the form of a company that made pizza crusts. "In hindsight, it didn't make any sense, but I felt compelled to do it," she admits.
Given her knowledge of the pizza industry and the market research she had dug up -- namely, in both cases, none -- she had every reason to expect there would be some synergy between her two product lines. There wasn't. Though pizza and salad dressing may be consumed similarly or even simultaneously, they're distributed through very different channels.
She ended up building an entire pizza factory from scratch. Then she managed to wangle her way into some very rewarding niches, such as warehouse stores. The company now produces 40 kinds of pies, and 10 times as many varieties of problems. There's plenty of machinery that can malfunction, and employees are always a reliable source of grief. Should the commotion die down, Taggares says, she'll buy another company.
"I think this will stay the most stimulating thing in my life until I grow too old to do much of anything," she says. "We have days when it's kind of smooth, and those are not my greatest days. I need the pain."
* * *
Here's something else you might try the next time you need an emotional jump-start: a hot bath.
In 24 hours, you might very well crave another energizing dunk. But frankly, most of the motivational strategies entrepreneurs use -- variations of the approaches outlined above -- are about as long-lasting. Taggares needs constant infusions of pain, just as Ward's ears must absorb a fresh blast of tape with every sunrise. Dunn is good for as long as the current crisis lasts. And what will Gary Cino do if he can't open stores next year? Ask him. "I want to continue the aggressive growth pattern of the past," he says sternly.
Entrepreneurs, it seems, manage their emotional resources just as Wall Street CEOs mind their conglomerates: it's largely a quarter-to-quarter proposition, with barely a thought toward the long term. "I just might pop one day," notes Taggares rather cavalierly.
To be fair, everyone is probably guilty of relying on some pick-me-up, be it crisis or coffee. Caught up in the adrena-line rush of this moment and wired for the next one, it's easy to lose sight of the shortcomings of those tactics. Unless, of course, you find yourself coping with a shortage of your stimulant of choice. Faced with a lull in crises and restaurant openings lately, Keith Dunn has come toe-to-toe with the realization that "all these games don't work after a while."
Dunn has tried just about everything he can think of to revive his energies. He's changed his hours and worn loud Hawaiian shirts. Like Cino, he's looked deep inside his P&L for new challenges; the company has cut turnover in half among its hourly employees. He has set monthly and yearly goals and has devised contests, even entering a Best Legs competition himself. Experimenting in the kitchen, he concocted a new appetizer called fried pickles. It flopped. He has taken on causes, such as recycling, and he now gives about two speeches a month. He even tried a vacation. Don't ask. "I came back feeling both unpsyched and unrested," he offers.
Lately he's begun to think that the only way out may lie in setting goals for himself beyond McGuffey's. Politics, perhaps. "I'm not sure exactly what my path will be," Dunn admits.
If Dunn's search sounds awfully desperate, it's a good measure of the magnitude of the distress that he -- and other entrepreneurs -- try so hard to dodge. It doesn't take a psychologist to hypothesize that Taggares (like Dunn) is masking some greater pain by creating painful situations that enable her to come out on top; and Ward seems to believe that he's virtually nothing without his cassettes. Perhaps all three fear their energy will dissipate, leaving their enterprises to crumble. "For many entrepreneurs," notes Berglas, "stopping, psychologically, is death."
Where does that equation come from? Celebrated as the ultimate people of action, entrepreneurs tend to think of themselves as the sum total of their accomplishments -- and nothing more. If I can build a big enough company, or make enough money, goes the reasoning, then my family/friends/colleagues will accept me, and they'll even put up with some of my eccentricities. "I believed I had to do things to be lovable," admits Leon Pyle. "Then I got to thinking, Who cares whether there's one more building company doing $75 million versus $50 million?"
Exactly what got the 50-year-old Pyle to thinking was -- as is so often the case -- a tragedy in his personal life. A traumatic divorce began to change his view. "It tuned me in to what was real," he says. "Every two weeks I'd visit my children, and when I'd leave, they'd stand there crying. The pain is a real shocker, and it opens the door to your head."
It took some time before Pyle peeked all the way inside. Starting his own company in 1986, he set out to build sales of $25 million a year. Then he convinced himself that $50 million sounded better. As that figure came into view, he doubled his dreams, to $100 million.
Working with a therapist, though, helped Pyle catch hold of himself. He talked more about what else he wanted out of life, and he glimpsed the fears that his insatiable drive was masking. "I realized that people don't think about what size company they've built as they're dying," he says. "They think about their relationships." So Pyle has set to work improving his unsatisfying ties with people. "I'm getting to know different parts of me," he says.
The journey has led him far afield from his company. (One of his goals has served him well: he has far more than the $2 million he wanted to sock away in the bank.) Pyle found artistic endeavors such as studying German, drawing, and making pottery so fulfilling that he cut his workweek down to three days. His disengagement didn't happen all at once. "A couple of years ago I started to let go," he admits. "It took me six months to come to terms with my need to be the driving force of everything at the company." First, he started coming in at 8:30 a.m. instead of the customary 8. "I feared everybody would start coming in at 8:30, but nobody did," he says. Similarly, when he reduced his days -- handing off daily operations to a partner who is the company's president -- he was surprised to find that "the company didn't need me as much as I thought."
