From Fred's point of view, Gail was coming into the business to protect him from the tasks that he enjoyed least, leaving him time for such activities as looking over items submitted by freelance inventors for the company's science-and-nature-oriented wholesale catalog. She would be there, as he put it, "to shape up company systems."
That was hardly the ideal job description for someone who wanted to spend less time at work. "I thought I would be working two or three days a week as a consultant," Gail says. Fred failed -- in part because he was so grateful Gail was willing to help -- to reveal the full magnitude of the task she would be undertaking. "I needed somebody to bring order to this zany, crazy world I had created," he says. "I knew it needed stuff like budgets, but I didn't have time to take a class in budgetology. I had to keep focused on product development and talking with customers."
Given her high-powered career at Lockheed, not to mention her hard-earned Ph.D. in astronomy, Gail might have done well to figure out whether she could actually be satisfied assuming the kind of part-time role she thought she was accepting. "I didn't think about it all," she admits. "All I cared about was having the flexibility to see my children more."
Both saw the arrangement as a chance to get something each of them wanted -- badly. It might have become that, eventually. But not from day one. Ultimately, they paid a price for not preparing themselves to be patient. "It's the same mistake that men and women make when they marry each other without asking questions such as 'How important is it to save money versus spend money?' and how they feel about living for the present compared to the future," says Mardy Grothe, a psychologist in Bedford, Mass., whose practice includes many business partners. "Since they didn't do that to sufficient depth or breadth, every situation became an opportunity to clarify things."
When a married couple goes into business together, warns psychologist Peter Wylie of Washington, D.C., they'd best think of it as taking on an additional relationship with struggles of its own. "The amount of negative energy isn't doubled," says Wylie, "it increases logarithmically."
The DaMerts know that now.
* * *
2. Thinking It Through
How Well Will This Serve the Business?
Before the DaMerts jumped into business together -- and after they coordinated their personal agendas -- they would have done well to carefully consider the ramifications of their intended actions on a third party: the company itself.
Looked at from a useful distance, Gail's hiring as general manager made less than perfect sense. For starters, she knew nothing about the toy industry, including such basics as navigating the rigors of a Christmas selling season. Nor did she have experience managing cash flow -- a critical skill in a company experiencing a growth spurt. Not that she or Fred really knew what she was headed for. "I didn't know what bad shape the company was in, because I had never worked anywhere else," Fred contends.
Gail, of course, had worked at Lockheed, where she took for granted such luxuries as eager secretaries and line engineers ready to do her bidding; the presence of intelligent colleagues with whom she could schmooze; and the mentor who guided her through unknown territory. "I thought I would be dealing with people who were used to taking direction," she says. "'Get me a list of our top 10 customers' would draw blank looks and responses like 'We don't have the list,' 'We don't know how to get the list,' and 'Why do you need something like that?"
It didn't help that Fred had hardly prepared the 11 employees for what Gail would be doing, only casually mentioning that she would be joining the company to "take care of the money."
It sounded simple. But Gail quickly deduced that there were no controls on company operations, nothing to "smooth out" in the way she had planned. So she began creating controls, collecting, for instance, 838 sales orders awaiting credit checks that had been stuffed into drawers and in-boxes throughout the company.
Over the course of her first 18 months, Gail logged 60-hour workweeks. According to Fred, she had shifted into "fire-drill mode," and it was easier for him to let her wear herself out than to try to slow her down. He needed to stay focused on product development, he reasoned, or they'd have a crisis on that front. He had high hopes for the unusual Triazzle puzzles the company was about to bring out.
After creating a sales order form, Gail spent months turning over dusty shoe boxes stuffed with sales receipts and developed a three-year sales history of the company. She then used the sales data to tackle inventory management, a task that meant spending hours doing tedious algebraic equations by hand because the company wasn't automated. "I never imagined myself doing nitty-gritty work," says Gail. Often she worked well into the evening, even as Fred was reading bedtime stories to the kids. She began to have dizzy spells.
She also began to feel that Fred had bamboozled her. "I resented the fact that I was working so hard and seeing our children less than I had planned," she says. Counters Fred, "She is admittedly type A and was overreacting and overachieving." But Gail's sense of urgency wasn't entirely a function of her adrenaline level. In 1990 the cash-strapped business's sales leaped 40%, to $2.7 million, creating enough pressure to make even an experienced entrepreneur nervous.
