Managing for Fox, as Tebay and others would find, meant dealing with problem after problem but never having the time to prevent them from happening again. The opposite of most entrepreneurs, Fox remained glued to the little picture, reacting to everything as it crossed her desk. She was, remarkably enough, too detail-oriented. "Big projects don't get done," recalls Herzog. "You get too wrapped up in day-to-day problems. There's a fire, and Mary Lou needs to throw a liquid on it right away -- even though it might be gasoline."
By 1990, with Westhaven's sales at nearly $14 million, Fox was fielding an all-star lineup of fire fighters, including Cryan, who had jumped from a Big Six accounting firm to serve as CFO; a vice-president of business development who had moved over from Baxter Travenol; and a new vice-president of operations, Rolf Schrader, hailed in Westhaven's newsletter as a nationally recognized expert in the institutional-pharmacy industry. "Mary Lou had built that business from nothing, and she was still used to having everybody come to her to make the decisions," recalls Schrader. "I knew that wasn't going to change overnight, but that's not to say it didn't drive me nuts at times."
Something drove them all nuts, sooner or later. And the arguments over what went wrong echoed Fox's earlier fiasco. "Mary Lou has a tendency to give a fair amount of responsibility without any authority," observes Westphal. Fox complains that the professional managers just weren't enough like her. "They should have had common sense -- because that's all I had -- and I expected them to have innate problem-solving skills," she charges.
Their weaknesses didn't hobble Westhaven's top line, though Cryan asserts that Westhaven, because of high turnover and capricious pricing, "was not nearly as profitable as it should have been." Fox, for her part, "worked harder and harder to keep it moving so that at least it wasn't a disaster," she says.
Of the four topflight professional managers Fox had brought in, there was one survivor, Nancy Bucci. Bucci had actually joined Westhaven in 1988, founding its Division of Quality Assurance. But she didn't move up to vice-president of quality assurance until January 1990. "Mary Lou comes across as dizzy and going in a million directions," says Bucci, 41. "Men come in thinking they are going to run this company. They just want to take care of the little lady. But Mary Lou is not going to turn the company over to someone from the outside whom she doesn't really know."
After her experience with bringing in professional managers, Fox had just about had it with outsiders. And with so-called managers, for that matter. Why not have the people who actually do the work, and who don't tend to turn over as much, uphold Westhaven's closeness to its customers? she figured. So last year Fox became inspired -- by what, as usual, she can't exactly identify -- to split Westhaven's key people into four teams, each led by a marketing rep. The teams would each pay special attention to 35 or so nursing homes, making sure each one got the feeling "that we know who they are and we care about them," she says.
The teams met monthly for nearly a year, and then -- oh, do we really need the grisly details? Suffice it to say that half of the four team captains, and all the teams, disappeared. "We had little authority," recalls vice-president Greg Lawless, who left Westhaven last April, when he was a team captain, but has since returned. If a team member, for instance, failed to carry out an assigned chore, there was little a captain could do about it. "At best," says Lawless, "we could just report to Mary Lou that so-and-so wasn't contributing."
If Fox ever meant to share any of that authority -- and she claims she did and always has -- she wasn't inspired to do so once she saw the teams in action. The difficulty was, she says, nobody solved problems the way she would have solved them. No one understood, for instance, that when a nurse prefers the original copy of a certain form, you don't just send it to her. "You send it to her with a note that says, I know you want to see this," explains Fox, rolling her eyes.
It all seems so clear to her. When a nurse complains that the medical cart Westhaven provides needs to have a bigger section for liquids, it ought to occur to somebody that the home might be ordering the wrong size bottles. And the fact that Westhaven is getting similar complaints about billing Medicaid patients as private paying customers seems like enough to inspire a Westhaven employee to create a better system for updating billing changes. "I just don't feel the teams 'got it,' that they understood how we wrap ourselves around our customers," says Fox. "The frustration is how to take something that's emotional and make it a permanent part of the business -- that's what 'it' really is."
By last May Mary Lou Fox was back in a familiar, frustrating position: alone again, unnaturally. "I've had people say, 'Why bother making a decision? She'll just change it. She'll have a better idea,' " says Fox. "I take what they say seriously. I watch myself. But all I see is that I want everyone to be pleased with what we do.
"This business is a reflection of me, and I personally care about what our customers think," she adds. "I'm not a businessman, and I'm not a pharmacist. What I know isn't hard to identify. But it takes time to mold it into something I can give away. Maybe it's just too tough. Maybe I just can't leave. Maybe I'll die here."
* * *
Or maybe, just maybe, she'll face up to that showdown at last. "I know what I have to do," she says.
