Blaine Wieland's own sense of what went wrong with Wieland Transportation is that it was largely a management issue. He blames Stoller, Fischer's successor, for failing to make tough decisions on personnel when he had to. "He didn't have the force of will," says Wieland. Consequently, nonproducers lingered on the payroll, and revenues fell. But even as he's telling the story Blaine Wieland eventually comes around to blaming himself. It had been up to him, after all, to make sure Stoller was doing his job. The fact that Wieland let things get out of hand speaks to the first of several costs exacted on his company by the whole episode: loss of control by the CEO.
"The furniture business that we started here, we were bred to it," Blaine Wieland says. "We think about it during our sleep at night. That's been easy for us to do. We have such passion for it. But even early on in our trucking business, I thought, 'Man, if I'm honest with myself, I don't really like the industry. I'm not comfortable with the people. I don't know what kind of relationship I'm going to have with those drivers. Can I manage something that I don't have a passion for?' "
It took hard times to expose Blaine Wieland's vulnerability, but once it had been exposed, it seemed obvious. Trucking problems arose that were outside his orbit as a furniture man, and he would leave them to others to solve. "Because I couldn't step in and do it," he explains. "I'm confident in furniture -- if a manager is having trouble, it's 'Let's just relieve him of his duties, and we'll cover it.' If trucking has trouble, I don't know whom to call. I don't know the brokers. I don't know the customers. I don't know how to coordinate."
And because of that? "I'm dependent. It's a scary position for an entrepreneur-owner to be in. Dependent."
The second cost was interdepartmental conflict. The accounting department, accustomed to orderly billing and collection procedures, was thrown off balance by the motley crowd of customers that trucking brought in. Accounting has fought an ongoing battle with the dispatchers, who, in their zeal to get the freight, don't worry as much as they should about the company's prospects for eventually getting paid. In the worst example, the trucking operation somehow let one customer's debt climb to $90,000 before Blaine Wieland finally stepped in. "Unbelievable carelessness, just incredible carelessness," says Wieland. "It happened because I trusted someone who trusted someone who trusted someone, with everybody assuming we weren't booking any more freight from that customer. But we were."
As far as Ogden, the CFO, is concerned, collection isn't even the half of it. To him, the whole trucking operation seems at times like a nest of unruly expenses he can never hope to clean out. That results in a third kind of price the company pays for moving outside its core business: loss of focus. "It's horrible," he says, launching into a litany on $50 truck washes ("We want the trucks to look good, but maybe they could be washed twice a month, not every week"); $500 towing fees; obscenely high cellular-phone bills ("Drivers get lonely on the road"); and the proclivity of some drivers to jump from their cabs rather than descend the ladders ("Breaking ankles and legs, messing up knees"). Then there are the phone calls in the middle of the night, like the one from the driver who had pulled up to a guard booth on a college campus at 3 a.m., left the cab to ask directions without first setting the brake, and seconds later watched his $140,000 rig roll down a hill and through a parking lot. ("The first car it hit was a 1994 Eagle Talon. Got rolled up underneath the trailer, kicked out the other side.") Afterward, Ogden comforted himself with the knowledge that no one was hurt and that he had recently taken out a $10-million liability policy. But it galls him, still, that he should be spending so much time and energy "trying to control the bleeding" in an arena so far removed from Wieland Furniture's turf.
It was partly to isolate the problem and partly to impose some discipline that Ogden had broken out Wieland Transportation as an independent corporation in October 1993. Headquarters moved to a dedicated facility in New Haven, Ind., 15 miles from Grabill. Separation eased some difficulties in the relationship but exaggerated others -- namely, the trucking operation's tendency to neglect the needs of the furniture operation in its own internally driven pursuit of profit. The percentage of Wieland Transportation's non-Wieland customers rose from around 50% (mainly back hauls) to 80% and beyond. Even before the move, there were Wieland drivers who spent much of their time hauling other people's freight -- everything from garbanzo beans to furniture made by competitors. Still, says Ogden, "they knew where the plant was, they probably helped load the furniture, they knew the people that built the furniture, and they knew the people that helped process the order -- 'OK, Fred, you built it, now I'm gonna go deliver this!' 'All right, have a great trip!' " But after the move to New Haven, there were those among the company's 18 drivers, says Ogden, who had never carried a load of Wieland freight. "They didn't have a clue where the furniture plant was located. They didn't even know what we made."
Distance, in this case, has bred antipathy -- yet another price paid for diversification. The furniture operation feels abandoned. Internal freight managers, who have always been free to choose other haulers, are doing so. And it isn't always because of price or convenience. Often, it's simply that people in the two companies don't like one another. Over time the wall between the trucking and the furniture operations has risen so high that one day not long ago a furniture employee approached Blair Wieland and suggested the company might want to rent a few trucks so that it could deliver its own products. Evidently, he was serious.
* * *
Blaine Wieland got through the April meeting at the bank -- the one Ogden was so worried about -- as he expected, without too much difficulty. There was a new loan officer present, sent out from Norwest, Grabill Bank's partner on the Wieland account. He was not yet familiar with the details of the company's story and seemed to take Blaine Wieland's explanations at face value. Not even the violation of the loan covenant fazed him. Afterward, the bank agreed to write a temporary exemption, keeping the credit lines open.
