If their noses grew rapidly, so did their business: payroll would climb to 47 people and sales to nearly $10 million by 1998. In the process the company had splintered into two very distinct halves: the rentals division, which stages onetime public events, and the systems division, which builds permanent facilities for such customers as Motorola, TRW, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Studley took over rentals, Cosor systems.
Then, sometime in 1995, things started getting sticky. Swamped by the double-digit growth of their respective divisions, the partners communicated ever more sporadically. "We stopped pulling in the same direction in the same harness," says Studley. "All of a sudden there were two moons pushing tides in different directions, and that creates a lot of turbulence."
To wit: when Cosor, working in overdrive to finish a system for a customer, absconded with three key pieces of equipment--equipment that Studley needed for a rental job just a few hours later--Studley took it as a personal affront. "I had a huge problem with that," he says. "Don't my customers matter?"
Cosor, in turn, felt terrorized by Studley's hot-and-cold act: "Jeff would say nothing and nothing and nothing until he would explode in outrage. I couldn't correlate it to what had just happened." (And it was all the more galling, he adds, because "CPR was my idea.") Once friendly outside the office, the two didn't set foot in each other's homes for more than a year. Increasingly, they used their junior partner, Nancy Eller, as a go-between.
Employees sensed the discord. "Watercooler conversations were tense," says Studley's wife, Elaine, who is a consultant to CPR. "I had people ask me, 'Are they going to break up? Is the company going to survive?"
Then, in March 1997, the simmering hostilities exploded. One of the company's freelance contractors had failed to perform his job, and the partners agreed not to extend his contract. But the freelancer made a poignant appeal to Cosor, who relented and agreed to give him another month--and another $6,000. That unilateral decision, undertaken without consulting Studley, "was enough to send Jeff through the ceiling," says Cosor. No way, Studley decreed, was the company coughing up that six grand.
Teeth clenched, sweat pouring down his face, Cosor roared back, "I'll pay him personally, dammit, but this is the end of our partnership."
"Fine," responded Studley.
At this juncture in the story, most partnership disputes follow an all-too-familiar pattern. Partner A leaves to start his own business and steals the company's customers. Partner B sues. Partner A calls in an air strike on Partner B's home.
This particular story may well have taken that route, too. The difference was Elaine Studley.
Jeff's wife of 14 years was a manager and then an independent contractor at Philip Morris until 1994, when she left to raise the couple's first child and set up CPR's information systems as a contractor. She has penetrating blue eyes, an intellect to match, and an air of corporate professionalism that's lacking in certain people around her. Her husband describes her as "maddeningly objective." Concurs Cosor, "She could tell us both we were buttheads."
In late 1995, tired of her husband's nightly fulminations about Cosor and having witnessed the destructiveness of internecine warfare at Philip Morris, Elaine began to search for consultant types who might help Studley and Cosor get along. After months of research, up came the name Peter Wylie.
Wylie, a spindly 54-year-old with a white mustache and an uncommonly mellow demeanor, is a Columbia UniversityÂtrained psychologist. In the early 1980s he and his then collaborator, a marriage counselor named Mardy Grothe, began offering their services to troubled business partners. At first there weren't many takers. "When we cracked into this business," says Wylie, "the World World II generation was still running the show. The whole notion of sitting down to talk about touchy, sensitive topics, especially if you're a guy--the whole notion of a therapist--wasn't well accepted." But then came the feel-my-pain era, and with it a flourishing practice.
Wylie describes his job as bringing partners to a "fork in the road": either repairing the relationship or, if its continuation no longer makes sense, ending it amicably. It's a fork partners have difficulty navigating on their own, claims Grothe: "They reach out for help, but they reach out to people who aren't well suited to providing it--the company attorney or a banker. The problem is, partners are looking for someone to side with them. A marriage counselor knows how to handle situations like that."
Intrigued, Elaine Studley pitched the idea to her husband. "I'd go in a minute, honey," Jeff replied, "but I don't think Brett would." So for six months, Jeff never broached the subject. It was only when the partnership's dissolution looked imminent--when, several days after the blowup over the $6,000, Cosor asked CPR's lawyer and accountant about chainsawing the company in two--that Studley broke down and told Cosor about his wife's discovery.
"You knew about this guy all this time and didn't tell me?" Cosor sputtered. "What the hell's the matter with you?"
In April 1997, in their junior partner's living room, the two partners sat down with Peter Wylie for the first time. The tension was palpable. "My role," says Wylie, "was to make sure they played by the rules of good talking and good listening." Among those rules: Each would have to "read back" what the other said by paraphrasing what he'd just heard. Also, no emotionally loaded statements, no eyeball rolling, no arm crossing. If those tenets weren't adhered to, says Cosor, Wylie "would, like, rip your arms apart and smack you." Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but Wylie did physically intercede until both partners were listening correctly: leaning forward, receptive expressions on their faces. "It seemed a little ridiculous," says Cosor, who nevertheless admits, "We were not really hearing what the other person was saying. We were hearing just enough to know which one of our bullets to put in the gun to shoot."
