The Education of a Big-Company Man

Jim Kilmer's years at H.J. Heinz didn't prepare him for company-building as well as he had expected.

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Slowly but surely, day by day, Jim Kilmer is learning about the world of company building. His years as a manager at the H.J. Heinz Co. were by no means in vain. They just hadn't prepared him as well as he had expected

Jim Kilmer spent 13 and a half years building a career and a set of skills at the H.J. Heinz Co. For nearly all that time, he pictured himself staying there happily -- perhaps even for his whole working life. Kilmer had joined the Pittsburgh-based food giant, famous for its ketchup and pickles, as an accountant just three years out of college. At the time, he and his wife, Vickie, had a two-year-old son. And with the help of the bank, they had recently bought their first house, a compact brick colonial about 10 miles from Jim's office.

One of the great things about working for a multibillion-dollar company like Heinz, Kilmer found, was the freedom and the mobility to learn new things. Whenever he lost enthusiasm for his current job, he'd nose around within the company for something new. After a couple of years of doing internal audits as part of the corporate staff, for instance, he moved into manufacturing, where he was part of a group that helped Heinz's factories with scheduling problems and product launches. Then he did a brief stint in management information systems. Going into it, he told Vickie he hoped the job might be a launching pad for where he wanted to go next -- marketing and sales. And sure enough, it was. Seven years into his tenure at Heinz, Kilmer, who by his own count was about 60 pounds overweight, got to repackage himself as an associate product manager working on Heinz's expanding line of Weight Watchers products, a label that spans everything from salad dressings to a diet Snickers bar.

The Weight Watchers sales-and-marketing job was full of excitement. Not only was the product line getting bigger all the time, but everywhere Kilmer looked there were opportunities to make an impact: tasting new recipes, shaping decisions about packaging and pricing. It wasn't unusual, he says, to get involved in a handful of projects in the course of a day.

For two or three years Kilmer was as happy as could be: the job was satisfying and demanding. "The ability to make decisions and the sense of control," he says, "were almost narcotic." He'd leave home by 7:30 a.m. and return at 7 or 8 p.m. to a family that, in many ways, functioned without him. Heinz liked him, too, promoting him to brand manager in charge of a new line of frozen novelties.

But before long, a feeling of frustration began to set in. A new boss took over as vice-president of marketing, and Kilmer could feel his own power to make decisions slipping away. Now every suggestion or proposal he made had to undergo a formal review. Little things that needed quick attention -- like a purchasing decision on new packaging equipment -- were held up for weeks or longer. The adjustment was more than Kilmer could stand. At home he became dark and withdrawn. A couple of times he rushed off to the local emergency room with chest pains. "Every week," he says, "I'd go through a bottle or two of Mylanta." He knew that something had to change when, early one morning in 1990, while gathering up the gumption to tell an assistant she was being laid off, he realized he was, in fact, envious of her. He remembers thinking, "Why her? Why couldn't Heinz be laying me off?"

Back home, Vickie reminded her husband of the simple pleasures of employment: a salary that was brushing up to $80,000, for instance; health insurance; the bigger house they'd been talking about. "My dad worked in the same steel mill for 40 years," she pleaded. "He hated it, yet he kept going back." But it was in vain. On the last day of February in 1991, Kilmer (who, following the guidelines of Weight Watchers, had recently shed more than 50 pounds) packed up his office and drove home. At 38, with an at-home wife and two growing boys, he had no job and no specific plans. What he did have was six months of severance pay; some savings, totaling around $50,000; the assets of his 401(k) plan, which he prayed he wouldn't have to touch; and a belief that there had to be a better way.

For a few weeks Kilmer sifted through a hodgepodge of possibilities. Maybe he'd relocate the family and go to work at another big company. Or maybe he'd stay put and hook up with some people he knew -- or didn't know -- and buy part of a local business. But none of the ideas really grabbed him. At some companies he checked into, like Kellogg, brand managers had even less control than he'd had in his last months at Heinz. Eliminating one option after another, Kilmer focused more and more on the thought of starting a business.

"Given all the things I did at Heinz," he says, "I knew I had the ability to run a business." By now he was considering three or four possibilities. The big question was, Which one would it be?

Casting about for direction, Kilmer set up a meeting with Dwight Baumann, the director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Development, affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University. (Vickie had found the center while flipping through the local phone book.) Baumann, a rumpled engineering professor in his late fifties, listened carefully as Kilmer ran through his list of possibilities. Sipping coffee in a dimly lit meeting room, Baumann tried to react as constructively as he could.

Kilmer's first idea, a gourmet-snack-food business, didn't impress Baumann at all. For starters, he noted, the snack-food category was saturated. What did Kilmer know that would make him successful in that industry? Kilmer's second idea, a low-fat vegetable cookbook, didn't strike much of a chord with Baumann, either. Pursue it in your spare time, he advised. But when Kilmer mentioned his third prospect, based on a little-known vegetable called spaghetti squash, Baumann listened. Kilmer talked about how he'd become a spaghetti-squash devotee when he was losing weight; the vegetable, while filling, was low in calories. His idea: buy raw squash, peel it, chop it, and package it for the convenience of supermarket shoppers.

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