Partners on the Edge

Brett Cosor and Jeff Studley, co-owners of CPR MultiMedia Solutions, came to dislike each other so much they brought in a marriage counselor to help them through their differences.

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It took an imminent catastrophe to get the cofounders of CPR to treat their partnership the way experts say you should--like a marriage

Here's how bad a partnership can get: Tom brought aboard Kevin (not their real names) as his 40% partner when his business needed more capital. It was a mistake: Kevin proved a duplicitous sort, and soon began an affair with a female employee. Tom, worried about exposure to a sexual-discrimination suit, brought in a labor lawyer to read his partner the riot act. Kevin took umbrage. Friction ensued.

At a city-council meeting several months later, Tom was tapped on the shoulder and led into the office of the chief of police. As the chief spoke Tom's jaw dropped: Kevin, he was told, had hired a hit man--not to kill Tom but to fake an attempt on his own life and frame Tom for attempted murder (only the "hit man" Kevin had hired was an undercover state trooper). As part of his act, or maybe as part of a more lethal backup plan, Kevin had started carrying a gun and telling acquaintances, "Tom's trying to kill me."

While Tom packed his kids off to his parents' house and then fled town himself, the police arrived at the company's premises, handcuffed Kevin, and stuffed him into a police cruiser as astonished employees looked on. "I was sorry I had made him a partner," says Tom.

By comparison, the business partnership of Brett Cosor and Jeff Studley would seem all champagne and roses. The two first cousins are co-owners of CPR MultiMedia Solutions, a Gaithersburg, Md., company that puts together War Games-like command centers and big-screen projections for public events. Neither wears a firearm to the office. Nor, to this reporter's knowledge, has either taken out a death contract on the other.

But just because there aren't any cartoonishly evil characters here doesn't mean there isn't conflict. The fact is, Cosor and Studley--two decent, intelligent, hardworking individuals--came to hate each other. Intensely.

Their story is a reminder that even the most functional personalities can create a most dysfunctional partnership. What's oddest about their case, though, is how Cosor and Studley chose to handle their difficulties. A business partnership is like a marriage, all the experts say; Cosor and Studley decided to push that clichÉd metaphor to its logical extreme. They took a step that's usually reserved for feuding husbands and wives. They went to see a marriage counselor.

It was the "little murders," not any big ones, that drove the two men to that recourse. The episode at the Canadian Embassy was one of them.

Cosor had stayed up two nights straight to put together a presentation there, emerging an unshowered, baggy-eyed wretch. When it was over, he told Studley that he'd like an objective "postmortem." He was lying. What Cosor really wanted, but wouldn't admit he wanted, was a pat on the back.

Studley didn't mince words. The equipment, he said, had required last-minute tweaking. There had been catering for 600 when the turnout was only 200. In sum, he said, the presentation had suffered from poor planning.

Cosor reacted as if he'd been stabbed. A colleague, Garrett Moore, would say later that Studley's criticisms were valid but that the timing "was just wrong. Brett was at a point where he didn't want to hear any of it. It was like, 'Where were you last night at midnight?" Studley defends how he handled himself in the exchange: "I don't in retrospect think I could have done things very much differently." Cosor left the meeting in a huff.

That was in October 1995, but it's a scene that's been played out a thousand times during the cousins' decade in business together.

Cosor, a pudgy 45-year-old, is the self-styled "visionary," which is to say he's crummy with details. (At a recent meeting he was wearing two mismatched socks.) He averages five hours of sleep a night and six cups of coffee a morning, and talks in such hyperactive torrents that he doesn't leave much space for the voices of others. That volubility can verge on impulsiveness: while serving as a local spokesperson for Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign, Cosor answered a reporter's question with the memorable sound bite "Bush and Clinton are boneheads."

Studley, by contrast, wears a measured, phlegmatic exterior. He's the "manager," known for leaving employees tiny Post-It notes with minutely lettered instructions. At a breakfast buffet, he methodically lifts the lid of every tray to inspect his food options before selecting. Tall and grave, one month Cosor's junior, he bears his partner's windy rantings with a glassy-eyed impassiveness. Pushed too far, however, that inscrutable quiet can erupt into volcanic fury, as it did the time he inquired of an employee--at the top of his lungs-- "How fucking stupid can you be?" Admits Studley: "I am explosive. I am unrelenting. I am unforgiving about mistakes."

Studley sums up the two personality types succinctly: "Brett is a goal-oriented guy; I'm a task-oriented guy."

It was those very differences, ironically but typically, that drew the partners together in the first place. In 1988, when Cosor quit his job at the Emco Group, a now-defunct high-tech government contractor, and formulated the business plan for CPR, he figured he needed an operational yin to his "visionary" yang. His first cousin Jeff, a graduate of Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, fit the bill. The pair went to work in Cosor's two-car garage, Studley leaving behind a restaurant-consulting gig in New York City to live in Cosor's spare bedroom. Like many upstarts, they struggled to foster the illusion of size and experience, which once prompted Studley to give Cosor a rubber Pinocchio nose. (Though Cosor protests, "We didn't actually lie. We just, you know, let people draw their own conclusions.")

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