Lawyers, for example, constitute a sort of third rail in Amish business: get near one and you're toast, excommunicated from the church and shunned by all. So when a customer stiffed Sam Stoltzfus for $12,000, Sam chose the obvious alternative to hiring a lawyer or a collection agency.
He baked him a loaf of bread.
"He gave it as a symbol of love," Michael explains matter-of-factly, as if that were standard procedure for collecting outstanding accounts receivable. "Then he called him a couple of times and said, 'You're still a friend, but I would appreciate having that money."
The Amish call that debt-collection method "heaping coals of fire on his head" (rough translation: The Mother of All Guilt Trips). "It doesn't mean you're trying to scorch his head," Michael says, "but that you continue living an example until he sees the error of his ways." Don't mistake that generosity for naïveté, though: the Amish run credit checks whenever possible. Says Sam, whose baked offerings have yet to produce $12,000 worth of gratitude: "After a bad experience, you develop a sixth sense."
Like litigation, company size is a highly charged issue. "Basically, the bishops like to keep a business to four to five employees," says Michael. His father relates that when he started making gazebos, "we had customers piling up to our necks, screaming and hollering. But I didn't want a big business. My neighbor, he got bigger and bigger, and now he rents a building with 12 employees. Once he's up there in the factory, he's just like an outsider--a factory worker." So Sam Stoltzfus merely takes on what his business can handle and lets "the rest float by."
By now, however, there's no shortage of entrepreneurs who have devised strategies for growing without igniting the church's wrath. One, reports Kraybill, the sociologist, is to scatter operations, thereby avoiding the conspicuous sight of so many bearded workers under one roof. "Another would be to keep things almost dilapidated," he says. "It's an issue of impression management--of giving the image that the business is less formidable than it actually is. If the owner is quiet and humble about it, and doesn't have three fancy personal carriages, he can get away with quite a bit."
Several businesses manage to gross more than $10 million a year.
In trading their plows for production lines, are the Amish turning away from their traditions? Quite the opposite. "That's the irony of the whole thing," notes Kraybill. "They are going into business to maintain their traditions and their farming way of life."
Since the early 1980s, the price of farmland in the county has roughly quadrupled. "It takes $600,000 to $700,000 to go out and buy a farm and put cows on it, let alone have a decent house," laments Sam. "It's not possible for the average Amish anymore." To understand the plight of the Amish, it helps to know that the typical Amish family has seven children (Michael is the oldest of nine), and that Amish farmers can't accept government subsidies. Worse still, most of the alternatives--such as migrating elsewhere or working for non-Amish employers--would undermine the central goal of maintaining an insular, family-centered community.
But by starting their own small businesses, the Amish could stay close to their kin and keep their work environment reassuringly plain. "It's a cultural compromise," says Kraybill, "a negotiated outcome."
Steeped as it is in compromise, though, it's tough to imagine that Amish-style capitalism could be a recipe for much more than day-to-day survival. But in a survey he conducted, Kraybill calculated a business-failure rate of just 5% in the first five years. Even allowing for a substantial margin of error, that's an astonishingly low figure, especially since the national average hovers at about 65%.
Not only are the cultural constraints surmountable, but they often, in a roundabout way, help.
Take the restriction on higher education: by blocking the route to the professions or higher management, it ends up funneling the keenest minds into small business through a strong system of apprenticeships. Or take the taboos on technology: they cultivate a bare-bones approach that, for some businesses, ultimately saves money.
"We hooked this up ourselves," Michael Stoltzfus shouts over the whirring machinery--a labyrinthine agglomeration of pipes, gauges, and spinning fan belts. "That way we know how to fix it if it breaks." In the basement of his minifactory, he stands proudly beside the diesel tractor engine that puts 2,200 pounds of pressure on a drum of hydraulic oil. It's his "own little Pennsylvania Power & Electric": the oil is pumped through hoses to power the shop's various machines, which have been jury-rigged with hydraulic equipment. (The Amish don't use public power lines.) Upstairs, Elam Lapp, an employee who is also Michael's cousin, is bent over a power-sanding station, wearing a protective mask with his standard Amish outfit.
"A strong point in our business success is that we use machinery that is basically obsolete in the world market," Michael continues, "because we have to strip it of electronics anyway." Nearby sits an automatic machining center just unloaded from a flatbed truck. "I got this for less than $10,000," Michael says with satisfaction. Machinery like this would cost about $150,000 new, he points out, but this one is 1977 vintage. "I'll detach these parts," he says, tapping a couple of components, "and sell off the other parts. That will lower the price enough to make it worthwhile."
Restriction often becomes the wellspring of innovation, and the constant tinkering to reconcile modern contraptions with religious tenets produces an unparalleled bootstrapping ingenuity. A friend of Sam Stoltzfus's, for instance, contrived a way to use the excess heat from his diesel motor to heat a water tank and then circulated the water to heat his shop. "Right there you gain $80 to $100 a month," Sam says. His son chimes in: "A lot of engineers would never even attempt to build half the machines the Amish build. We're too dumb to know better, so we blindly go ahead and generally finish up quicker and less expensively than they would." Sam claims that two Amish business partners who left the faith and then rejoined it found they could operate at least as cheaply with diesel and hydraulics as they had with 110-volt electricity.
The community's disapproval of anything remotely extravagant (wearing buttons is considered vaguely ostentatious) further serves to cut costs. Michael Stoltzfus's office is a picture of plainness: barren floor, unpainted walls of compressed wood. For seating, he uses a green-vinyl bench apparently uprooted from a van. Carpeting? Expense accounts? All hochmut--German for "proud," practically a four-letter word to the Amish. Paid vacation is an oxymoron.
