Fred responded by throwing himself into the development of an elaborate weathervane, ignoring everything Gail had advocated in her presentation and subsequent memo. "The weathervane didn't fit into Gail's system at all," he concedes.
Less than three years after she had joined the business, it now seemed clear that Gail was tangled in a not so subtle power struggle with her husband for control of the company he still owned.
"If you are in the fight mode, you find an ally, as Gail did," says Grothe, who has never met the couple. "It sounds like Fred was in the flight mode."
* * *
5. Exit Strategy
What if It Doesn't Work Out?
In the spring of 1993, Gail ratcheted up the controls on Fred's department with a "new-product matrix" that boiled his job down to a dull, fill-in-the-blanks exercise: what we need now, the system would dictate, is a glow-in-the-dark item with an outdoor nature theme. "When I first came here, Fred said, 'I'm going to do this until it's no fun anymore," Hanlon recalls. "When Gail introduced the new-product matrix, it stopped being fun for Fred." Or, as Fred himself puts it, "My heart just wasn't in it anymore."
Neither was Gail's. She still wasn't seeing their children as much as she wanted. Then in July 1993, the DaMerts went to San Francisco for a business breakfast and listened to a lecture about the joys of planning. As they traveled back to the office, they began to explore a radical idea: what could they do to eliminate themselves from daily operations at the DaMert Co. and participate only on a strategic level? "We said, 'Let's get a plan together so we can get off this treadmill," Gail says.
It was a worthwhile effort. But for Fred, at least, it was probably too late.
Still, the two did manage to hammer out a five-year exit plan for themselves. Basically, it involved getting a management team in place and growing sales from $6 million in 1993 to $15 million by 1998. Gail took the title of CEO and put McVey in the slot of director of sales, marketing, and product development. After his rebellious weathervane flopped, Fred pursued the idea of reviving his trusty prisms.
Then in the fall of 1994, after six months of daily negotiations with a supplier, his prism deal fell through. Soon after, the official word went out: Fred had left on a four-month sabbatical. "I needed a break," he says. Adds Gail: "I understood why he needed to do it. But I resented the fact that I was still working 40-hour weeks."
For four months, Fred read psyche-soothing philosophy such as Carl Jung's theory of how a person spends the first half of his or her life accumulating an ego -- and the second half shedding it. "Over the years I've had to wear a lot of different hats," he explains. "I went from wearing a manufacturing hat to wearing a wholesaler's hat to wearing a salesman's hat to wearing a product developer's hat. Those weren't easy changes for me to make. I realized I was in a hat-changing period again and needed to find a new hat to wear at the company."
On January 4, 1995, Fred reappeared. "Fortunately," says Gail, "I had a couple of substantial projects for him to keep him out of Greg's way." Fred took charge of moving the company to a fancy warehouse/shopping district near the Marina in Berkeley. He drew up plans for their impressive 34,000-square-foot warehouse and office complex and oversaw its construction during the summer. Instead of following the predictable 90-degree angles of the walls, he divided the space along diagonal lines and kept the 22-foot-high ceilings. Smack in the middle of the company's entrance, he put Hanlon's vintage Ford woody station wagon. McVey designed the furniture for the office, sprinkling triangles on the carpet and conference table as an ode to the company's best-selling Triazzle line.
After he finished moving the company in August, Fred proceeded to move the family. The house the DaMerts found was a 25-minute drive from the office in an area graced with natural vistas and waterfalls.
Meanwhile, Gail had a mandate of her own to follow. At a team-building seminar in late 1994, she had been given the word by employees: lighten up, this isn't Lockheed. "I can't believe how severe I was," she says, leafing through some of her old, dictatorial memos. "Now I'm trying to be a softer, more fun-loving manager." It helps that with some key managers in place, she is also now able to spend more time with her children, who are 8 and 10 years old. She even works in their school's computer lab once a month.
Fred, however, has yet to recover his balance. He noses around the hallways, looking for more to do at the company he founded back when he was a 26-year-old driving a truck by night so he could mold prisms during the day. Will the DaMert Co. ever be a place where he and Gail can both have satisfying roles? He's not sure, but he does know this: "Perhaps in the beginning we should have been working according to some grand plan." Not that he's complaining about where he's ended up. "I'm the company's chief spokesperson, and I like to meet with important customers and attend major trade shows," he says. "I want to play more of a key role in mapping out the company's future and making major financial decisions.
"I'm still trying to find a new hat to wear," Fred DaMert adds. "But believe me, I'm not after Gail's job."
