Glickman thought of a scheme to make them care. He called Pacific Bell and bought all the phone numbers that had a certain area code and three-digit exchange and then distributed those new numbers to his customers. The phone company quickly moved to block all calls to the new exchange--and then promptly removed the blocking the next day. The exchange was the same one used by the Argentine consulate in L.A.
If Glickman and Richter had had any doubts about being in the right business before then, they didn't anymore. What could be more fun? They were renegades, locked in a game of cat and mouse with the hidebound, greedy establishment powers that be. And they were winning. Lesson number three: There is no problem in the phone business that can't be solved with technology and a little flair.
If the two were doing so well in Argentina, why couldn't they clean up in other countries? Glickman decided to head back to the United States to set the company up as a multinational business. But first, he and Richter needed a name. Ultimately, they agreed on Justice Technology. (See " The Game of the Name.") They didn't actually have much technology in their company at the time, but they might as well make it sound as if they did.
Back in the United States, Glickman rented an office above a liquor store in Santa Monica, hired a marketing manager, summoned Richter, and geared up to go global. There was just one question: now that they were shooting for the big time, how would they modify their renegade, freewheeling style to suit the buttoned-down telecommunications industry? Their conclusion: they wouldn't. They decided to modify the industry to suit their style.
You see that dent there? There? On the light? That's from basketballs hitting it." Matt Jarvis is explaining how a warehouse, until recently the post-liquor-store Justice headquarters, also doubled as a basketball court until the company's tsunamic growth forced it into new digs. Now Jarvis, in charge of retail services, along with Glickman and most of the rest of the company's 115 employees, works in a building in L.A.'s Culver City that's been gutted and remodeled to look something like a colorful, ultramodern version of...the company's old warehouse.
That's typical of Justice. Glickman and Richter have worked mightily to establish and maintain a countercultural culture, in the belief that it translates into outrageous performance. The company offers free dog care, will subsidize anyone who bicycles or skateboards to work, and treats the entire company to lunch the day before payday. Pranks are legend; a group of managers once hid high-powered speakers in the ceiling of one employee's exceptionally junk-strewn office and rigged his computer so that the arrival of E-mail was announced by an earsplitting, ultra-high-fidelity performance of the theme from Sanford & Son. At trade shows, when competitors showed up in spiffy matching golf shirts and hats, Justice's people marched in sporting matching mechanics' jumpsuits.
More important, the company tries to hire people who have an affinity for the offbeat challenge and then puts them straight to the test. Take Jarvis, the 27-year-old, California-surfer-handsome fellow who joined Justice two years ago. He was planning to leave his job as an account executive at Leo Burnett Advertising in Chicago to travel around the world, when his old friend from Brown, Leon Richter, got wind of the scheme and gave him a call. "What do you want to travel for?" asked Richter. "Adventure," replied Jarvis. "You want adventure?" said Richter. "Come to L.A. I'll give you adventure."
Jarvis visited the company and signed on, figuring Justice for a fun place. When he walked in at 8 a.m. on his first day, an employee was waiting for him at the door in a highly agitated state. "Thank God you're here," said the employee. "You've got a really important decision to make. Quick, follow me."
A disoriented Jarvis was pulled into a roomful of anxious faces and handed a sheaf of printed pages. It was copy for a new set of brochures that were being rushed out, he was told, written by Glickman and due at the printer within a few hours. Final approval was Jarvis's. Reeling, Jarvis hunkered down in a corner and started rewriting. "I did what I could," he recalls, shrugging. The pages were sent out. Two days later Glickman marched into Jarvis's office clutching the new brochures and demanding to know why he had changed a key line of copy. Jarvis, assuming he was toast, gave Glickman his reasoning. "Oh," said Glickman. "OK." And he walked out.
That's the essence of Glickman's management style. "I don't tell people what to do," he says. "I just want things to get done." Jarvis says that works for him. "As long as you can explain why you did what you did, he's OK," he says. "He just wants to make sure you're thinking." Many hires find the lack of structure disconcerting and leave within a few weeks.
Alan Sandler, the vice-president of sales Glickman hired when he opened Justice's first office in the United States, is one employee who thrives on the freedom. He had been selling real estate and then medical services when his girlfriend, Brooke Sklar--now his wife--answered an ad to share an apartment and became Glickman's roommate and then the head of Justice's MIS department. Intrigued by what he heard about the company, Sandler met with Glickman, who offered him a job. But Sandler wasn't sure. "Callback seemed pretty shady," he says. The next day, he happened to mention to his grandmother his indecision about this strange new opportunity. "Oh, go for it, sweetie," she told him.
He joined Justice and immediately embarked on an ambitious worldwide marketing campaign. Its approximate budget: zero dollars. All the company's profits were being invested in building its infrastructure, including its tracking and billing systems and its network capacity. Sandler, working on commission, would not see any cash for more than a year.
He went off to the library and scoured the U.S. Department of Commerce database of foreign companies for multinationals that had anything to do with phone systems and sent them each a letter soliciting them as customers and, more important, as agents for that country. "We wanted people on the ground who spoke the language and understood the customs," he explains. Each letter listed Sandler's title as the coordinator for the recipient's country, as if Justice had a massive multinational marketing department.
