Rewriting the Ending

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Unfortunately, while that was happening, the store's lease ran out. The timing could hardly have been worse. In 1999, the price of real estate in Menlo Park was going through the roof. The new lease Kepler signed pushed his occupancy costs from 9 percent of sales to 14 percent, much higher than the norm. And then the bubble burst. Sales went south, and Kepler couldn't cut costs fast enough to keep up with them. From the summer of 2001 to the summer of 2005, annual revenue declined by 25 percent. The business was barreling toward insolvency, and Kepler didn't know how to stop it. "It was like a death sentence," he says. "Nothing I did was working."

By mid-August, he knew he had to make a decision. Without money to pay down his debt to vendors, he wouldn't be able to get the books he'd need for the fall and the holidays. Even if the vendors did cut him some slack, he'd still be saddled with the expensive lease. Finally, he accepted reality: He'd reached the end of the line. That was when he felt the relief. "Even though it devastated me, my family, my vendors," he says, "at least I knew what I had to do, and what I could ignore. While I'd been struggling with all these big issues, little issues would keep popping up, and I'd had to deal with them. After I made up my mind to close Kepler's, I could let the little decisions go. They didn't matter because the company wasn't going to be around much longer."

For the next two weeks, he put everything aside and worked feverishly with his attorneys to prepare the business for liquidation. Against the attorneys' advice, he told his key managers what was going on and asked that they keep the news to themselves until he'd informed the staff. In the midst of all this, his nephew came to see him before shipping out to Iraq. "It was all very emotional," Kepler says, "but I didn't have time to feel the feeling. I figured I'd have a breakdown afterward." On Tuesday, August 30, he sent out an e-mail to employees asking them to come to a meeting the next morning.

He found the meeting extremely difficult. Looking around the room, he was keenly aware of the impact the closing would have on the employees and their families. Although he couldn't have warned them without creating enormous problems for the business, he felt bad that he was springing the news on them. He felt particularly sorry about two employees he'd hired in July, while he was still resisting the inevitable. With tears in his eyes, he apologized for what had happened.

After the meeting broke up, Kepler stayed at the store for another hour or so before heading to his office in Belmont. It was there, shortly past noon the following day, that he received an e-mail from a customer who was interested in reviving the store--Daniel MĂ©ndez. It read, in part: "I have talked to a number of my friends and neighbors in Atherton and Menlo Park and I can in short order put together a syndicate to purchase all or a portion of the operation from you'¦."

And, at that point, Clark Kepler's world took another turn.

"No more Amazon"

Rick Opaterny had arranged to meet a friend from Los Angeles in the fiction section of Kepler's on the evening of August 31. It was a tradition of theirs. They'd meet at a particular author's books, then go next door to Café Borrone for beer or coffee. That day, they happened to arrive at the same time, about 8 p.m., ran into each other in the underground garage, and then took the elevator together up to the plaza.

As they got out, they saw a group of people standing outside the bookstore, talking excitedly and shaking their heads. Opaterny looked at the sign on the door and the darkened store and realized that Kepler's had gone out of business. Though only 24, he had been a customer for eight years, ever since being introduced to it by a high school English teacher. He credited the store with turning him into a serious reader. The thought that he would never set foot in it again was deeply depressing to him.

The closing was still on his mind the next morning when he showed up for his job in the AdWords department at Google. He felt he had to do something--but what? Hoping to find other people who were sad about Kepler's demise, he decided to start a website. The following day, he went by the store and put up a sign announcing the site. Two days later, The New York Times ran an article about the closing and noted the stirrings of a movement to revive Kepler's, "complete with a website (www.savekeplers.com)." In the first week, the site received more than 20,000 hits. Opaterny began getting as many as 150 e-mails a day, and not only from around the Bay Area. He heard from people in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, even India--people who knew the history of the store, or who had gone to school in the area, or who had worked in Silicon Valley at some point. They all wanted to help save Kepler's.

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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