The Heart of a Company
The birth of a seriously ill child set Kenny Kramm on a course from ordinary guy to extraordinary entrepreneur.
Published June 2003
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEOf all the motivations for launching a business, love and fear may be the most powerful.
Kenny Kramm, a slight, gentle-spoken man of almost preternatural calm, is the founder and CEO of $5.7 million FlavorX Inc., a fast-growing company based in Bethesda, Md. But not so long ago, the only thing Kramm wanted to start was a family. By 1992 he was married to his college sweetheart, with a three-year-old daughter and a second child on the way. After a stint on the creative side of advertising had left him feeling dissatisfied and vaguely unclean, Kramm had sought refuge in the family business, a cozy, old-fashioned pharmacy that he expected one day to inherit. There he labored comfortably alongside his parents, working the counter and passing the time of day with the store's mostly elderly clientele, much as he had done growing up.
At age 29, Kramm had never so much as toyed with the idea of starting a company. What's more, he possessed a trait incompatible with entrepreneurship: He was perfectly content with his life the way it was. "It wasn't the kind of life you would read about in Inc.," says Kramm. "But it was good."
Back then, the only thing troubling Kramm was his unborn child. Though she was now healthy, his first child, Sarah, had been born two months early, blue and not breathing. During her second pregnancy his wife, Shelley, developed toxemia; the couple awaited the new baby's birth with trepidation. On February 6, 1992, Hadley Kramm was born at 28 weeks, weighing 3 pounds, 10 ounces. Still, "she was fine," says Kramm. "She had an Apgar score of 10. We were so relieved. We thought it would be okay."
But when she was 10 days old, Hadley -- still in the hospital because of her weight -- stopped eating. Her skin mottled. The Kramms haunted the hospital corridors by day, spending fretful evenings at home with Sarah. They alternately summoned hope and dismissed it as a dangerous luxury. Then "we got the call," says Kramm.
Obeying the summons, the Kramms rushed to the hospital. There "the resident led us into the NICU carrying a flashlight because it was the middle of the night," recalls Kramm. "He shined it on Hadley, and her eyes were rolled back in her head." The resident insisted it wasn't a seizure, and so did other residents who attended Kramm's daughter during that long President's Day weekend. "They said it was just 'seizurelike activity,' and it went on for three days. Three days," says Kramm. Finally, on Tuesday, a physician confirmed that yes, Hadley was experiencing seizures and needed immediate treatment. She should have had it days earlier.
Kramm believes his daughter's seizures may have resulted from a massive brain hemorrhage caused when she was given asthma medicine by mistake. (The hospital denied responsibility, the Kramms say. They also say they were too exhausted and demoralized to sue.) Whatever the culprit, the damage was extensive and irreparable. Hadley's life would thereafter be defined by a long list of debilitating ailments, the most serious of which were continual seizures, a blood-clotting disorder, and cerebral palsy. She would need help with some of the most basic functions for the rest of her life: She might never live on her own. "When you have a baby you have boundless hopes for them," says Kramm. "All we could do was ask, what is the best we can hope for? Will she be able to walk? Will she talk?"
For many families the introduction of a child so disabled is not a single shattering event but rather the beginning of a lifetime of fraying relationships, periodic despair, and shuttered possibilities. It could have gone that way for the Kramms. Instead, Kenny Kramm mustered the energy -- even at his life's emotional ebb -- to begin a venture that far exceeded his earlier ambitions. Driven to take back some control of his family's future, he launched a company that is both inspired by and intended to financially secure his daughter Hadley.
FlavorX Inc., which flavors liquid medicines for children, is a family business because it leverages the diverse talents of Hadley's extended clan. But it is also a family business because it helped save a family.
As a pharmacy technician, Kramm knew young children hated swallowing medicine, but it had never seemed like an earth-shaking problem. Hadley made it one. Home from the hospital, his infant daughter balked at the four daily doses of phenobarbital she needed to prevent grand mal seizures that deprived her brain of oxygen. "She would clamp her mouth shut and you couldn't get it open," says Kramm. "If you did get it open, she'd hold the medicine in her mouth for half an hour until she'd start crying and it would come out all over her. That was worse because we didn't know how much she'd gotten, and we were afraid of giving her more in case she got too much." The Kramms erred on the side of undermedication, and as a result Hadley's seizures continued, sending her to the emergency room over and over again. "After two or three months we decided we couldn't function like that," says Kramm.
