During that period, employees held their breath. Although they were caught up in the couple's trauma, ultimately they were more concerned about their jobs. Some were nervous that customers close to Price might exit if she lost her bid for the company, since many of them viewed her as ALC's heart and its resident direct-mail expert. Others feared that Rappaport's departure would compromise the company's growth potential. Either way, employees knew they wouldn't have to wait much longer for a resolution.
Tomlinson recalls visiting Price in her office late one night, 10 days before the deadline. Although he was ostensibly neutral, he was excited by Rappaport's visions of continued fast growth and had hitched his star to Rappaport by helping him line up some financing. "I knew that if Liza ended up with ALC, I would wish her well, but I would have to move on. I wanted to be in a bigger organization, and I knew she would continue to grow it but not to the level that, personally, I was looking forward to," he says. He broke the news that Rappaport was putting together a financing package so he could purchase ALC. "I was very direct with her. It was clear which side of the fence I was on. She respected that but also told me that when the closing was done and she ended up with the business, she'd wish me well."
On October 4, 1994, it was over. Donn Rappaport owned ALC. To prevent further damage, Price, Rappaport, and some employees began to share the news with customers they were close to. As an added precaution, the pair had earlier awarded phantom stock to four directors (all of whom had been with ALC for at least 10 years) and asked them to sign 5-year employment contracts. "It did serve to offset some of the trauma of the whole thing," says Rappaport. Miraculously, only one employee, Jordan, left at the news. Although he admits being much more partial to Price, he also had a better offer.
While most employees and customers saw Rappaport as the guy to take ALC to the next level, many were still saddened by Price's departure. One industry colleague, IDG's Deb Goldstein, made her a collage. "It was a thank-you from other women leaders in this industry, because she was a trailblazer," she says. "She was one of the first women to have ultimate power and vision in the direct-marketing community. She's just a great role model."
"The whole thing was hard," Price recalls. "When he came up with the money, I was very bummed. And the day after I sold the company, I was depressed. Basically, I had to tell the employees that I was leaving the company I had founded because we were getting divorced and Donn had bought out my half." After doing a couple of months of intermittent consulting for ALC, Price found herself banished from the industry for seven years. The divorce was finalized in December 1994.
Epilogue
During a routine teeth cleaning, Price's dentist had once described to her the business he'd always dreamed of creating: running golf tournaments for duffers. By June 1995, Price had started Amateur Golf Tournaments, making her dentist a minority partner.
On a spring day three years later, she's navigating a golf cart among the rolling hills of Crumpin-Fox Club, in western Massachusetts. In between photographing golfers--a perk for them and a favor for Player Magazine--she speeds toward a couple she remembers from a previous tournament. She tells the woman how delighted she is to see her again, and isn't it nice the pair has brought along two friends? The sportswoman is gracious but distant, addressing Price more like "the help" than the founder of a four-person, $1-million company that, in addition to running its own tournaments, manages tournaments for other companies and organizations, such as this one for the Golf Society of the United States. In between snapping photos, Price reminds the woman to fill out the customer survey. "As far as these people know, I'm Golf Society staff. And that's fine," says Price, who's dressed in khakis, sneakers, and a salmon polo shirt with a Golf Society staff pin. "They don't know that I don't have to work."
Sitting in his ALC office in the old farmhouse, Rappaport, still slender and handsome at 48, is smartly dressed in dark green slacks and a crisp white shirt that draws attention to his tan. "I think we had a pretty productive partnership for 16 years," he says. "It was successful, and I think it was rewarding in a lot of ways. Who's to say that a marriage or a partnership is supposed to last forever?" With its worn carpet stacked high with management books, and with photos of his children on every available surface, his space looks more like a den than the office of the chairman of an almost 200-person company that has more than doubled in sales (partly owing to acquisitions) since Price's departure and boasts new branches in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Peterborough, N.H. Appreciation plaques cover the walls. A baseball-cap collection circles the upper shelf. An early clip from a magazine, with a photo of the couple, much younger, remains pinned over his computer. "We never in 16 years failed to resolve an issue," he reflects. "Liza is a very strong-willed person, very persuasive, very thoughtful, very smart. I think that the most difficult part of the transition of her moving away was that I didn't really have anybody here to challenge me. If I wanted to expand, she wanted to get better control of what we had. But that actually gave me great freedom. Tremendous freedom to really think aggressively in a very big way, because I knew that I was tethered. Once that tether was cut, who's here to say, 'You're out of your mind'?" His secretary cuts short his reflections, reminding him that he's late for an important meeting. And he's off.
Stephanie Gruner is a staff writer at Inc.
