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Until Death, or Some Other Sticky Problem, Do Us Part

In the early years of D'Artagnan, Faison and Daguin, underpaid and subsisting on sample products, took a tag-team approach. When one was begging farms to produce free-range poultry, the other was frantically sorting 12 poussins for this hotel and 16 rabbits for that restaurant and jumping in the truck to make deliveries at dawn. "There was not one day when one of us did not tell the other, 'I'm quitting,' and the other one would say, 'One more day, okay? Just show up tomorrow morning,'" says Daguin, who wears no makeup, a plastic watch, and sensible shoes like clogs; she smiles only when something's actually amusing, and she retains a heavy French accent ("soupairedoupaire," or superduper, is a favorite adjective). Still, "it was an incredibly good feeling. We felt part of a group of people who were changing the food world." As chefs learned about the new products D'Artagnan could provide, it almost seemed as if business was doubling on a daily basis. "When she first arrived in the U.S., Ariane was quick to realize no one was focusing on high-quality terrines and pâtés," says Daniel Boulud, the chef who owns Daniel, a four-star French restaurant in New York City. "She also focused on sourcing excellent game and poultry farmers. Now we take them for granted, but [D'Artagnan] was one of the first to familiarize American consumers with these products at a very high level of quality."

Delivering that quality required crisis management on the back end. Suppliers were sprinkled all over the country, products would expire if they were in transit too long, and chefs wanted extraordinary quality extraordinarily quickly. Faison and Daguin were together so much that arguments erupted frequently, but they had no choice but to solve them immediately. When resentment lingered, "we would go somewhere else and say, 'Okay. When you did this, I really didn't agree. So I did this because I was pissed off,'" says Daguin. Perhaps because they're both straightforward and tough--and they're evenly matched physically at six feet tall--the head-on approach seemed to work.

Their first big argument came after Daguin had a daughter

On Personal Lives

The one thing in life you can't control is life. All of a sudden family life started being different, and you see they're pulling apart. The impact of our human lives on our business lives is grossly underestimated. We assume when we're reading a story that it's all business strategy and planning. Well, everyone goes home at some point and has a personal life and personal issues that may spill over into the business. --The Lawyer in June of 1988. A single mother, Daguin brought little Alix to the office and breastfed her there, but caring for the baby

On Bringing Baby to Work

They don't appear to have had a consultative discussion about resolving that. He presented her with a solution and her response was resentment, and I'm not sure she ever forgave him. --The Marriage Coach distracted her. After a couple of months, Faison, visibly upset, sat her down and said he felt she wasn't pulling her weight--and that he should draw more salary for a while. "I thought, what a shitty thing," says Daguin. "But it's his upbringing. And there is truth to it--I'm not working the way I was working before." She agreed to let Faison take more salary for the next six months--until she had finished breastfeeding and hired a nanny.

Until 1993, Daguin and Faison were still running the company as informally as they had at the start. But then a team of consultants pitched a makeover of the business, and the partners were eager to get a fresh perspective. For one thing, when they'd set up the company as a corporation at the start, they hadn't established clear roles, which meant they were stepping on each other's toes. The consultants suggested dividing the business into two groups. Daguin took sales and marketing, Faison took finance and operations. It seemed sound, and initially Daguin and Faison were relieved. For the first time, it was obvious who was responsible

On the Loss of Chaos

It seems as if their arguing, their bantering, their disagreements got the company pretty darn far. If some of the chaos was the culture, then the loss of the chaos affects the culture. The consultants did the textbook solution, but I'm not sure it was right for the company. I would have done a less severe solution--put in a third-party advisory board, a board of governors, an on-call mediator--and tried that for a while before going to the solution of physical separation. --The Lawyer for what. But it also meant that the partners were now separated physically and that some employees were now dealing with only one of the partners. And the consultants, in trying to diminish interference between the partners, neglected to suggest that they communicate regularly. They'd have big brainstorming talks once a year or so, but their informal interaction decreased dramatically. By the time Larry Needleman was hired as comptroller in 1996, he wasn't even interviewed by Daguin. He prepared an organization chart soon after, and he remembers looking at it and instantly noting what he considered a serious problem: the stark division

On Working Together

(Bush): There's no relationship, they're not playing together. (Park): There were some things lacking here that have been critical to our partnership. At Athenahealth, there's one CEO. You just can't have a scalable enterprise that's structured the way D'Artagnan was structured. One of the co-founders has to be the ultimate person in charge. --The Partners between the partners.