She looked like such an unlikely techie that I asked her how she'd gotten into this kind of work. She used to be a teacher, she told me, till she took early retirement because of arthritis. She spent six months doing crossword puzzles and other busywork. One day she sent for a do-it-yourself radio kit--and then for another and another. Suddenly, it hit her that she could do a much better job of designing the kits, and so she developed a business for which there is more demand than she can fill. A thoroughly competent and conscientious designer, she did an excellent job for us.
While I was waiting for her layout, I wrote a patent application. Then I started to apply for a trademark. A lawyer recommended a professional search to find out whether our provisional name for the invention was available. The search, at $600, showed that it wasn't. Because we couldn't afford to spend that much searching for every other word we might come up with, I went the Lexis-Nexis route myself. A made-up word, Visivox, appeared to be available, and we applied for it as a trademark.
All that took much longer than we'd thought, even though we'd expected delays in the development process. One factor was that unlike the engineers of Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, Obie and I couldn't devote body and soul to our project. Each of us had families, family crises, obligations, and other priorities with stronger claims on our time.
Still, we got the first five sample chassis built and painted, with the legends on right and all the parts put in. We agonized over the costs--sample building is expensive but essential to forestall potentially large errors.
Now we were ready to order our first run of 100 units, but we were not done yet. Every day there was some unexpected problem. The spray painter--24 miles to the south--would get on the phone, saying that all 100 chassis delivered for painting were faulty. The manufacturer had miscalculated the hinge clearance; after the paint was applied, the chassis lids wouldn't close. The 100 chassis had to go back to the manufacturer, who took each one of them apart to fix the problem. He wanted me to inspect the finished work, and the painter wanted me to inspect his work. Some days I would drive up to 200 miles just making the rounds.
I also had to think about marketing tools. Ideally, we would have had the brochures produced professionally, the copy as well as the graphics. But we were operating on a shoestring, and so we tried to do as much as we could with the help of family and friends. One of them reviewed the text I'd composed and remarked, "You'll never make it as a copywriter for Campbell Soup." I shrugged--what did soup have to do with it? I ordered a photograph of a Visivox from a professional photographer and looked for somebody to lay out and print our brochures. The first designer, who had come highly recommended, reproached me for waking her with a 9 a.m. call--she needed her beauty sleep, she said. I struck her off; I needed somebody with more get-up-and-go. Number two did beautiful work--I wished we could have afforded him. Number three, an all-woman outfit, was competent; we assigned our work to it.
So they'd stand out among all the direct mail, we had the brochures printed on orange-yellow stock. Envelopes of the same color cost a mint. In the yellow pages I found a manufacturer located in what I knew was a scary neighborhood. Unexpectedly, his was a modern building, and I bought 1,000 envelopes at one-fifth the price asked by a local retailer.
The next foray was to the post office to get a permit for the return-postage-paid postcards that were to be attached to the brochures. The local post office and that of the neighboring community quoted widely divergent prices. I drove to the one with the lower quote, only to find out that the one person authorized to issue the permits had already left for the day. At 2 p.m.? Sure, he worked from 4 a.m. to noon. The next morning at 9, I went to yet another post office, where, I had been assured, the permit issuer would be on duty. That was misinformation: it was two days before Christmas, and the man had gone home at 8. The fourth trip, however, was successful: the post office accepted a check for $100 in return for the permit.
There were still a few minor things to attend to, such as buying shipping cartons, bubble wrap, shipping labels, and sealing tape, but U-Haul and the discounters were glad to oblige.
Now we face another challenge: to introduce and sell a new product. Our initial efforts made the product look like a success. Whenever I have demonstrated the product, I've made a sale: to corporations that use Visivox for their internal seminars; to colleges, churches, and debating societies; and to well-known professional speakers. But now I have to organize national distribution.
My husband, the management guru, has watched all this with astonishment. People ask, understandably, if being the wife of the fellow who all but created management science has affected how I think about starting and growing a company--and they're a little disbelieving when I tell them it hasn't. He does my taxes (and I bless him for that; I hate doing them). But otherwise, he has no idea about start-ups. "I wouldn't know the first thing about a small enterprise like yours," he says to me. All the practical steps that consume so much time--they have nothing to do with him.
When Obie and I stand back now, we ask ourselves whether we would have started the venture two years ago if we'd known how difficult it was going to be. The sleepless nights. The worries about how to get around the next roadblock.
And the answer is yes. I got to know and work with a lot of people I would never have met otherwise--people my own age and people 40 or 50 years younger. When I talk electronics to a supplier--when I talk about the negative tip orientation of a charger cable or the type of pot (that is, potentiometer in the lingo)--I'm just another professional customer, not an old lady. I'm not just the standard figure expected by our ageist society.
Yes, I'd start a business again. Of course, I still have a long way to go with this one.
Doris Drucker is the CEO and founder of RSQ, in Claremont, Calif.
