There must have been some juicy gossip among the parents on the school playground, but I unloaded only to my closest and most tightlipped friend and then clammed up. Another friend mentioned that she was helping Doug in his job search. I suggested that she get Bill's side of the story, but she said, "I don't want to know the details. The guy has to support a family and I just want to help." It was a good reminder that there was more to Doug than just our recent experience. I focused on adopting the same open-minded attitude and wished her well.
Ever moving forward, Bill turned to his biggest challenge yet. The company was once again running out of capital, and a Texas investment firm that had promised $1.5 million had delivered only $800,000. By now he was familiar with how to eke out operations with no cash--factor the receivables, pay only production and payroll expenses, and string out everything else. I began to realize why it was that the most successful CEOs I had profiled had come from sales backgrounds. I had always thought it was because a CEO can sell the product like nobody else. But it's so much more than that.
As I watched Bill set off on another fundraising search, I realized that a CEO sells everyone. When he asks for money, he's selling potential investors on the product. He told me once about a VC breakfast he went to early on. He described the other CEOs who were there and the companies for which they wanted funding. Some had great ideas, Bill said, but out of a half dozen who presented, salesman Bill was the only one who came right out and asked for the money. And the only one who got it, he learned later.
He sells distributors, obviously. But when he asks suppliers for better terms he's also selling them on why they should do it. When he convinces a new hire to join a super-risky venture that might not be paying salaries in six months, he's selling her on the potential the job offers. When he convinces me to stay married to him, he's selling me on the better future we will have together.
By the same token, Bill fits another classic CEO profile: He has weak people-managing skills. When he's driving that start-up train at top speed, all he sees is the urgency of reaching the depot. He expects his teammates to put their heads down and shovel coal, not slow things down with questions, discussions, or arguments. He is impatient with many personnel issues and doesn't take the time to apply his sales skills to those situations.
A successful CEO uses sales tactics to figure out what the other person wants, how to make him or her feel comfortable, and then ask for the moon. Not everyone has the chutzpah to do this, but it's something I've always admired in Bill. Admittedly, he can be pushy. At work he never takes no for an answer; he's always trying to figure out how to get what he wants. There are no boxes to think out of; he simply doesn't see them in the first place. And he has zero respect for authority. He is the man who meets a famous author and blithely proceeds to tell him what he dislikes about his latest book. These traits are not always valued, not in friendships and not in corporate America. In a way, I realized, it was by starting his own company that Bill finally found a place to fit in.
Bill found money once again in the fall of 2005, bringing a $6 million investment deal to the board. It would have given the new investors a 51 percent stake in the company. Not only did the board members turn it down, but they fired Bill two weeks later.
The Final Switch
He wasn't surprised. He and the board had spent those two weeks butting heads. Foreseeing the fight, two of the five board members had quit. The company's CFO cornered Bill outside the office one afternoon, asking, "It's going to get ugly, isn't it?" "Yep," Bill said.
"What should I do, resign?" he asked.
"Do what you need to do," Bill said. The CFO resigned from The Switch that day. Bill and the remaining two board members argued in a series of meetings and via e-mail about what was best for the company, but he was outnumbered.
The issues peaked when Bill went to New York to meet with a large soft drink company interested in acquiring The Switch. You'd think the remaining board members would be happy about a potential sale, but Bill said they didn't sound pleased. The board members spent the weekend before his meeting trying to reach him. They called our house every few hours, and one of them even came and knocked on the door, asking me where he was. I felt like we were being stalked. He found out later that they had wanted to go with him.
Bill was let go on a Saturday morning shortly thereafter. That night we attended a black-tie gala at the Library of Virginia to celebrate an award that my nonprofit group had sponsored. Just as when we went anywhere, people came up to Bill and asked, "So, how's it going with The Switch?" Through it all, I squeezed Bill's arm while he smiled and managed to come up with sidestepping answers. I could see this wasn't going to be easy. He had been Mr. Switch far too long to suddenly and painlessly shake it off.
He came home and lay on the couch for a week, confused and a little lost. With the long overdue luxury of time and hindsight (and bed rest dictated by a bad case of bronchitis), he analyzed the past year's activity. He believed that the two board members and the slow-paying investment group were planning to bankrupt the company in order to buy it cheaply out the back end.
I mentioned the situation to a few friends, figuring word was going to get out pretty soon anyway. Now that our glamorous adventure had taken a bad turn, many backed away. One was the friend who had helped Doug with his job search. She had always been eager to talk about The Switch and on the playground one day she asked the usual, "How's it going?" question. I filled her in briefly before we rounded up the kids to leave. In the months following, as articles about Bill and the company appeared in the paper and he looked for work, we never heard from her again.
Happily, there were many supportive friends, neighbors, and investors, and adversity pushed our family closer together. Lily confided to me that she was glad that "those men stole Daddy's company," because now he was home more. I was delighted that Bill immediately started cooking again, something he finds relaxing. While Lily was in school, Bill and I took long walks with the dog and discussed his options--our first in-depth conversations in months, maybe years. He still had his shares, which would be worthless after a bankruptcy. Should he fight to regain control of the company and eke out some value for his shareholders? Or should he just walk away and chalk it all up to a learning experience?
