"My Name Is Dave, and I'm a Growthaholic"

David Pitassi, former CEO of the 1993 number one Inc. 500 company, Drypers Corp., describes the inescapable allure of running a fast-growing .

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Afterlife

Three years after founder David Pitassi quit what was once the nation's fastest-growing private company, he's still struggling to understand: Why is it so hard for him to stay away?

It has been nearly a decade since David M. Pitassi, while on a business trip to New Mexico, stumbled across a sculpture in an outdoor park that seemed to capture "what my whole life is about." Called Dreams of Freedom, it depicts a creature--half man, half eagle--whose attempts to take flight are thwarted by a heavy bronze base anchoring it to the ground. "Here's a man trying to reach for the sky," Pitassi explains, "who hasn't yet left the ground."

Back then Pitassi was "scraping, clawing, and scratching" his way toward building a business by wresting market share from the nation's top two consumer-products giants: Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark. Along with former college buddy Wally Klemp, Pitassi had launched Drypers Corp. in 1987, hoping the company would make a place for itself in a $3-billion disposable-diaper market by pricing its product a strategic dollar below premium brands Pampers and Huggies. Survival required incessant innovation, from adding aloe to slapping Sesame Street characters onto the product.

For the founders, the stakes were clearly personal. Drypers was the pair's second attempt at taking on the giants: earlier they had launched a similar company, only to lose it to their team of investors (see "The Enemy Within," April 1987). Drypers was to be their instrument of sweet revenge. "I had to get back on the horse and prove that this could be done," says Pitassi.

That meant logging 90-hour workweeks, keeping a day-to-day schedule that was so hectic that he scarcely made time for physical necessities like drinking enough water. "I never saw my family whether I was in town or not," he says. Like the creature sculpted in bronze, "I was driven, hard, almost ruthless about the goal. You couldn't get me away from that focus," he says. Not that he didn't love it. Confronting a crisis--a competitor's price-cutting move, say--Pitassi routinely responded with relish. "This is the best thing that ever happened to us," he'd declare. Though Pitassi never fancied himself an art connoisseur, and he had no idea where he would stash the three-foot-tall statue, he purchased it on the spot. "It became my symbol," he recalls. It still is. "But I look at it very differently," Pitassi admits.

As well he should, given how much his circumstances have changed. Today the company he cofounded is the nation's fourth-largest diaper maker, with $270 million in sales and a nearly 7% share of the grocery-store disposable-diaper market. A year after reaching the top spot on the Inc. 500 in 1993--with sales of $140 million and a five-year growth rate of nearly 50,000%--Drypers went public. Then, in 1995, 35-year-old Pitassi made a very private decision: he stepped down as co-CEO and moved from Houston to Vancouver, Wash., keeping a vow to himself to "raise a family when I'm not too old, and do it the way I'd like to do it." Having "far exceeded" his personal financial goals, he exited the entrepreneurial arena having proved all he needed to prove.

But after liberating himself from what he thought was weighing him down, Pitassi didn't feel much lighter. Plucked from his natural habitat--making split-second decisions at a company where the stakes grew improbably high--he confronted the sobering issues that his former life had obscured. While building Drypers, he had told himself that he was working hard for the sake of achieving financial freedom. Now he wasn't so sure. "It's all stuff," he says. "You buy something because it's nice and comes from an expensive store, but it's really just one more thing off the production line." And as for his image of the company being a heavy block that held him down--well, that could just as easily describe an anchor as it does a ball and chain. "When you are building a business, your whole life is that business, and it has to be," he says. "But then what is your life after that business?"

So engaged is he by such questions that Pitassi sounds as if he had relinquished his post just in the past week or so. The three-year span of his search only makes itself felt by the breadth of his references, from reciting stanzas of poetry to rehashing "the Hierarchy of Needs," psychologist Abraham Maslow's theory of human motivation. "What are your values? Who are you? What drives you every day?" he asks. "A business," he says, "can be enslaving and take away your freedoms."

He issues the warning for the same reason that he hangs on to the statue: to remind himself why he's refusing to spend his days building a fast-growing business. He may someday go back to that world, as he readily admits. But before he does, what Pitassi wants to understand most is this: why is it so hard for him to stay away?

This is how Dave Pitassi--now 39, a free man and the father of three children, ages 2, 5, and 6--spends his time. He starts in his home office at 5:30 a.m., making calls, "working my way across the country." He looks at spreadsheets or checks his E-mail on one of his three computers; he speaks at Young Entrepreneurs' Organization (YEO) gatherings, conducts interviews with aspiring entrepreneurs, and travels to do due diligence on or attend board meetings of any of the 15 companies he's currently involved with. Oh, yes, for three hours a week he also visits Drypers' nearby facility, where he still retains an office, scopes out new opportunities, and advises the company on strategy. He rarely sees Klemp but speaks to him by phone periodically.

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