Not surprisingly, Tom was finding it more and more difficult to make it home for dinner. He spent at least three nights a week away. "Tom had always been a hard worker," says Margo, "but now it was 24 hours a day."
No matter what. For John's 11th birthday, in 1987, the family had planned a trip to Disney World to celebrate, but at the last moment Tom decided he couldn't go. "I couldn't take the time off, not then," he recalls, citing that HCIT was barely two months old. Traveling with his mother and grandmother, John secretly thought his dad would show up, even if just for the cake. But the party came and went. Tom still remembers the heart-wrenching call from his son that night. "He kept saying, 'I don't understand why you couldn't leave for one day," Tom recalls.
More holidays came and went, with Tom always absent -- or sometimes there but not quite present. "He worked through every holiday," Margo recalls. There was Thanksgiving. Then Christmas. Then his next three wedding anniversaries.
By 1990 the company had plowed through almost the entire initial investment and, despite revenues of $6.5 million, profits were barely $8,000. "I was having to cut my margins to the bone to get customers in the door," Tom explains. In a business in which gross margins typically hover around 5%, Tom was slashing his margins to 3%.
He projected losses the first year, breakeven the second, and profits the third, but here he was in his third year, not doing much better than breaking even. The rumblings from his investors were clear: get this on track -- and fast. Not only did Tom worry that his investors might abandon him, but his family's entire savings were in jeopardy.
But in late 1989 Tom had first glimpsed a way out. R.R. Donnelley & Sons, the country's largest printer, was looking for an alternative to the U.S. postal system for hauling catalogs -- like J.C. Penney Co.'s and Sears Roebuck & Co.'s -- from its plants to the bulk-mail centers. Getting this contract, he figured, would make company revenues vault from $6 million to $15 million a year. "This was the moment I'd been waiting for," Tom says.
Or so it seemed.
* * *
For the next year Tom locked his sights on Donnelley. For three months he even camped out at the Days Inn next to Donnelley's offices in Crawfordsville, Ind. Headquartered in Donnelley's lunchroom, Tom pecked away at his laptop while employees munched around him. At night he returned to his hotel room to continue working -- often until the first streaks of dawn. The logistics were extraordinarily complex: he had to calculate 3,500 different rates in his bid.
At home, John kept asking about his dad -- and Margo tried to cover for her husband. She called Tom, suggesting that she and John drive up an hour to Crawfordsville and meet him for dinner. Tom's quick response: no way. "It sounds callous, but I couldn't afford to be distracted. I just kept thinking, 'If I can get this account, we'll be over the hump," he says.
Indeed, Tom did win the account, but it didn't make things all that much easier. That year he faced $70,000 in unexpected debt, thanks to customers unable to pay their bills. At the same time, keeping up with Donnelley's volume was pushing Tom to his limit. "We went from handling 100 loads a month of Donnelley cargo to 900," he points out. "I was hiring employees as fast as I could; temporary phones were hanging from the ceiling; people were working around the clock."
While his father's business was exploding, John was excelling in soccer. But years of switching schools seemed to have caught up with him. He'd slipped from being an A student to getting C's and D's. But Tom didn't worry. "Kids have ups and downs," he reasoned. "Besides, I certainly wasn't an academic star."
Margo, however, was concerned. John was becoming reclusive. She'd caught him smoking marijuana, and she suspected it was fast becoming a habit. He'd also fallen in with a group of "fringe" kids -- though strangely enough, most of them also had absent, entrepreneurial fathers. Clearly, John was not pleased about having a dad who fit into that category. "In the heat of an argument he'd tell me his dad didn't care about him -- his dad couldn't love him," Margo says. "If he did, he'd make time for us." She adds, "It was clear John was mad at his dad for being gone when he needed him most."
Even when Tom did make time for his family, everyone's patience got sorely tested. As the decision maker 12 hours a day at HCIT, Tom couldn't stop when he came home. "He'd walk in and act like he was still the boss and we were his employees," recalls Margo. "You could see him mentally taking inventory. Why isn't that lightbulb changed? Did you call the plumber? Has John finished his homework?"
John, for one, turned livid. "What right do you have to tell us what to do?" he demanded. "You're never around."
Of course Tom wasn't. He was fighting to keep up with sales that were doubling every year. "We weren't computerized yet," he explains. In a business that depends on huge volume to offset slim margins, Tom's staff was still scribbling each order on paper. And by 1991, the focus on Donnelley was, ironically, hurting HCIT. "Now that 50% of our business came from one customer, we quickly realized we had to turn equal attention to building our non-Donnelley business," he says. Taking to the road, he clocked 40,000 extra miles on his odometer that year, scouring the state for customers.
Margo tried to hold things together at home. She'd left her job at HCIT in 1989. Still, she well remembered the pressure of the business and kept trying to explain it to her son. But after four years she had trouble explaining it even to herself. "There wasn't anything but the business for Tom," she says.
Tom did see his son play soccer, sort of. "I'd be there on the sidelines, but I was thinking about accounts," he admits. "I was gone mentally. If John had asked me about any of the plays, I couldn't have told him what happened." Fortunately for them both, John never did ask.
