No Way Out

Four times Mary Lou Fox has tried to let go of the innovative, fast-growing company that her instincts created -- and four times she has failed. Has she finally found a strategy that will let her business thrive without her?

In the last two hours, Mary Lou Fox has smoked her way through nearly a dozen cigarettes. She shifts in her seat, her whale-shaped earrings dipping and diving. After all these years and all those failed attempts -- to acquire or promote or hire or invent a management team that could ease her burdens and carry forward what she had begun -- it has finally come to this: a showdown. She can feel it about to arrive.

If only Fox's business strategy drew less from a rich well of "childhood and life experiences" and more from dry textbooks, she might not feel so restless today. Despite a singularly unpromising start and a seemingly irrelevant background, she has guided Westhaven Services Co., an institutional pharmacy based in Perrysburg, Ohio, from zero to $18 million during her 15-year tenure as president and chief executive officer. The fast growth has resulted largely from what she describes as "dumb marketing," and her own quirky definition of customer service. Like most entrepreneurs, "the lady has gut instincts that no one else has," says Greg Lawless, vice-president of marketing.

He means it as a compliment, of course. But Fox, after all she's endured, may not see it that way. In fact, she probably feels as if the windows in her office -- the ones she wanted so she could peer into the plant or watch every move her marketing reps make -- might as well have bars on them. "If you pulled Mary Lou out of that company, it would fail," claims Lawrence Cryan, who served as controller for most of 1990.

The transition Fox has been trying -- struggling -- to make is hardly ever easy. Instead of taking pride in doing it all, she needs to gain satisfaction in finding and training others to manage the business. Intellectually, she knows that. But over the years, Mary Lou Fox has made four distinct attempts to let go, bringing in outsiders and boosting insiders, resting her hopes on poised professional managers and then on eager trainees. They come and they go, collateral damage of the battle she has been waging within herself. "To some degree, Westhaven is still a one-man show," confirms Rolf Schrader, who left in April 1991, after serving as executive vice-president. "But Mary Lou hasn't been sticking her head in the sand about the whole thing. She's really tried."

These days the wreckage of all those disastrous efforts, and the disappointment that has welled up inside her, bear heavily upon Mary Lou Fox. "I've spent years saying, How hard would it be to clone me?" she says. "I keep thinking, If I can do this, a high school graduate from an idiot town, why can't you?"

Somebody can. And somebody finally will. By facing up to the biggest, and hardest, obstacle in her way, Fox is convinced she will soon break free. "I've got to get out of here," pleads the 60-year-old. "I'm stuck."

Mary Lou Fox, CEO, is definitely living out a dream. Unfortunately, it is somebody else's. "I never meant to be in business," she claims. She has adapted admirably. Charging into her office at 10 a.m. -- fresh from four or so hours of "private thinking time" in her basement bunker at home -- Fox lugs a white wicker basket overflowing with mail she has "processed," affixing yellow sticky notes to each piece. "By the time she comes in, you want to be done with whatever you were going to do for the day," recalls Bob Westphal, who served as director of marketing and client development for about four years. "She arrives with legal pads flying and Post-it notes spraying everywhere, and you are hers."

Westhaven became hers almost by default. In 1976 Fox encouraged her husband to expand beyond his five pharmacies by serving nursing homes, a market she knew through her work as a paid staffer at the Red Cross. He hated the new niche. Nursing homes required a vast array of ancillary services: from special carts to medical-records systems to specialized consultant pharmacists who could review all drug regimens. One evening William Fox interrupted his usual tirade about the nursing-home market with an unusual invitation: If you think this is such a great business, he asked his wife, why don't you do it? "I told him I wanted absolute control," recalls Mary Lou Fox. "I knew I'd make instinctive decisions, and I didn't want to argue every point. He said OK."

What the "big Junior Leaguer" endured her first year alone would have transformed Mother Teresa into Leona Helmsley. After just three months a giant competitor sued her for $1.5 million, claiming she had hired an employee who was bound by a noncompete agreement. The suit eventually was dropped. Shortly thereafter Fox spent $70,000 on a computer system that landed her back in court when the manufacturer went belly-up and refused to service it. That time she prevailed. But there wasn't much of a victory party. On the morning of April 6, 1977 -- her 46th birthday -- Fox came in to find investigators from the state licensing board rifling through her files. Later she found out the group was acting on an anonymous complaint that Westhaven had been mislabeling generic drugs. It was cleared, but not before customers got edgy. "It was all harassment and politics," says Fox. "I was not a pharmacist, and the pharmacists hated me for it."

She was also not, by anyone's loosest definition, a businessperson. "I didn't even know what revenues were," she says. But though it took an accountant to walk her through cash-flow statements -- she didn't need to learn about actual profits themselves until year three -- Fox intuitively understood how to attract customers. For her first direct-mail piece, she handwrote 25 letters, a personal touch she had used in fund-raising. Inside, she stuffed a 50¢ lottery ticket, playing off the phrase "Do You Want to Be a Winner?" "That way," says Fox, "I could make a follow-up call and ask, Did you win?" Nobody did, but quite a few nursing-home administrators came to the phone.