Out of Thin Air

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The three things were: one, close the woodworking shop--which was near and dear to my heart, but which also was out of control and was taking away our focus; two, only take jobs we're sure we can make money on, and get our clients to pay up front on some work; and three, don't tell anybody.

That was the beginning of one of the hardest years I had ever had. I felt that shame again. I mean, here was this banker who had become my friend and who trusted me, and now his career was on the line for me. I'm thinking, "Maybe I'm not infallible. Maybe I'm not so smart." And I had these really dedicated people working for me, and I didn't want to let them down.

So we listened to Feeley and we dug in. We closed the woodworking shop, as painful as that was. I convinced Joey Crugnale to start paying us up front in exchange for a discount. I didn't tell him what was going on, but he trusted me. He was a raving fan at that point and he was very loyal. (That's another story, because I lost that loyalty--I pissed it away.) But after six months, by our year-end on May 31, 1986, we had made back about half the money. We'd never made a profit before. After that, we just made more and more money.

What happened to me was a transformation. I grew up a lot in terms of the business. I started worrying about making money. I started realizing what was at stake, not just for myself but for everybody else--that there was a living to be made and I had a responsibility to make money.

We developed a discipline in the company about margins--we would have weekly cost meetings on every job, where we'd tear every job apart. And since that year, except for a small slip in the first part of the recession, we've made more money every year.

The Boston-area restaurant business was on the upswing in 1987 and 1988, with Ansara getting his share of jobs. Crugnale was aggressively expanding Bertucci's and giving Shawmut lots of work. Ansara's revenues topped $13 million by the end of 1988, and he employed 120 people full-time.

By now Ansara was developing the niche he discovered on his first restaurant job, the S&S in Cambridge. Shawmut was good at the hard jobs no one else wanted. Shawmut was fast. Shawmut did restaurants. But the management problems Ansara faced were growing, too. Only now the problems weren't so much technical--"How do you fit that duct through that small space?"--as they were about people, including Ansara himself.

Personally, Ansara was burning out. He now calls that period his "first midlife crisis." He was totally consumed with work and was finding that the problems were too overwhelming to be solved by just the force of his personality. Karen was in graduate school in a Boston suburb, yet Jim felt such a need to separate himself physically and mentally from work that the couple bought a farmhouse in New Hampshire, more than 100 miles away from the city. He got up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning to commute. And he got his first competitor in local restaurant work, a fact he barely noticed.

When I was first starting out, there was confidence, even bravado--"I can do it, I can do it." But now I began to develop a certain arrogance.

We were still doing Bertucci's work, but I had stopped paying attention to Joey. And that was really symptomatic of what was going on. We were doing work at Harvard, we were doing work for the telephone company. And we were doing other fancy restaurants, not just pizza joints. Bertucci's just didn't have, in my mind, quite the cachet that it had before. And I stopped paying attention to him. You understand, Joey Crugnale, as a client, was what we call in Shawmut terms today a 9 or a 10. That's an apostle, someone who has rated your work for them a 9 or a 10 and is really going to bat for you, someone who's picking up the phone and calling everybody they know, trying to help you get new business. And Joey was doing that. He was like our sales force.

I don't remember exactly what the straw was that broke the camel's back, but I think it was when Joey hadn't paid us a particular bill in 45 days. And we filed a lien on the building. And Joey called me up and said something like, "You know you filed a lien?" And I said, Well, Joey, you haven't paid us. "Have I ever not paid you?" No, you've always paid us. "Well, do you think I'm not going to pay you now?" And I started backpedaling--we did remove the lien--but it was that kind of conversation.

And then, a few months after that, he called me to his office and said, "Look, I've really enjoyed working with you. I'm going to try this other company, and I wanted to tell you that." He was very nice about it, very cordial. "Anytime I can help you guys, great," he said. And I thought, "Well, he'll find out that the new company will really screw up. Because we're the restaurant builders, we're the experts in restaurants." But they didn't screw up. And probably three or four months later, I went back to see Joey (we'd probably done 14 or 15 Bertucci's restaurants at this point). And I said, "Gee, Joey, we'd really like to do work with you." We were seeing the first signs of a recession. And Joey said, "Look, I was loyal to you for years; now I'm loyal to this guy. This guy does a great job for me, I'm going to give him all my work." And it was like getting a giant spear right in the middle of my forehead. It kind of went into my brain.

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