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Small Is the New Big

He remembered a story he'd heard about a girl throwing starfish into the ocean. "An old man comes along and says to her, 'Don't bother. You can't save them. What you're doing won't make a difference.' She looks at the starfish in her hand and says, 'It makes a difference to this one.' And she throws it into the ocean. Lily was one of my starfish."

Afterward, he began to notice others. There was the framer who looked for every opportunity to work overtime. It turned out he was sending the money home to his family in Tibet. And there was Luan Le, who had been a captain in the South Vietnamese navy. After the fall of Saigon, he was arrested and sent to prison for more than eight years, moving from one camp to another until his release in 1983. A year later, he took 100 people in a motor boat from Vietnam to Malaysia, a three-day journey, surviving an attack by pirates from Thailand en route. He eventually made his way to the Philippines, where he learned English, and then to Chicago, where Artists' Frame Service hired him through an agency that places Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees. "He's a champion framer," Goltz says, "and he's one of my starfish."

But it still took another few years and a major failure to make Goltz see his real problem. In 2001, he launched an Internet business called FramerSelect. The concept was simple: The company would advertise to people looking for custom framing, who would then go to its website and get a referral. In theory, the business would make money by charging the framers a monthly fee for the service. But signing up framers proved to be much more expensive than Goltz had imagined, and many of those he did sign up dropped out after a few months. By the time he pulled the plug in early 2004, he had squandered several hundred thousand dollars and been forced to face an uncomfortable reality. "I realized I'd been delusional," he says. "I'd been reckless with the money, and I didn't need to be. My other businesses were slowly but surely coming along and doing just fine. I thought, You know what? Having calm, controlled growth is good. I would never have said that before. Never. I'd actually heard someone say it when I was in my twenties, and I'd thought, You're a wimp."

The FramerSelect debacle turned out to be a watershed. "I'd always thought that, for me to be happy, I had to have phenomenal growth and turn this into a giant company. It didn't occur to me that there are a lot of really happy people with very nice $10 million companies making good profits, and that those guys are often way happier than guys with companies 10 times their size. That's what it comes down to. Happiness is not who's got the biggest company. Happiness is a whole lot of other things."

For Goltz, that was a revelation. His biggest problem, he realized, was in his head. There was nothing about entrepreneurship, or success, that required him to build his business as fast as he could. He had created a great company, rooted in its community, that was the best at what it did, with excellent service, grateful customers, and employees who looked forward to coming to work each day. That was an accomplishment. Getting as big as possible, as fast as possible simply wasn't a necessity.

He had a choice.

It has been about two and a half years since his epiphany, and Jay Goltz says he's happier than ever. His company's annual sales have grown to about $13 million, but he's not pushing it. "I'm a recovering entrepreneuraholic," he says.

Certain things haven't changed. He is still as intense as ever. He still talks fast. He still has more ideas than he knows what to do with. You can find them everywhere you look in the framing facility, located about a mile from his stores on North Clybourn. The building is part of an old sheep-shearing plant. He bought a 30,000-square-foot piece of it in 2002, when he realized he couldn't stay in the former furniture factory where he'd been leasing space.

As you walk through the place, you can't help noticing all of the signs on the walls. They read like ersatz fortune cookies: "One who sails by on excuses will drown in a sea of mediocrity." "We're only as good as our last frame job." "A happy customer is the best job security you can get." The sayings are from Goltz. "I'm telling people about business," he says. "I think it's a big failure of management, not getting people to understand what they're doing here. I suppose you could say what I do is a kind of indoctrination. Every couple of months I get new employees together and tell them the history of the company, why we're here, what to do if a problem arises. I say, 'Call me on it if I'm full of it, if anything turns out to be different from what I'm telling you.'"

He picks up a completed frame and points to a blue screw on the back. "Everyone has his or her own color," he says. "It creates pride of ownership. When the wire on a frame falls off and it comes back, we know who did it. The quality improved significantly when we started doing it."

Just off the shop floor is the lunch room, called the Webster Café, where Goltz and his production manager, Dale Zeimen, hold weekly meetings with the entire staff. "Small businesses don't have enough meetings," says Goltz. "I believe everyone in the company should meet at least once a week. You need that direct contact." There's a stack of eight microwave ovens against one wall, alongside three refrigerators and several vending machines. "That's one of my things. If you only have one or two microwaves, people have to sit and wait for their turn. By the time they eat, their break is over. Why do that? Appliances are so cheap now there's no reason not to get enough."