By now, Heyman was rarely in touch with the company. Some weeks, Fusco wouldn't send his weekly e-mails (when that happened, he would send two the next week), and Heyman never complained. "It's almost so easy that it scares me," Heyman told me. "I worry a little that I'm missing something." He was surprised that Fusco was spending money much more freely than he ever did, but he was even more surprised by his own reaction: He really didn't care. "Carl will get the praise if these turn out to be good decisions—and the blame if they turn out to have been mistakes," he said.
Heyman celebrated New Year's Eve on the beach, partying with "tens of thousands of Brazilians," he told me, until 6 o'clock in the morning. By early February, he was installed in the small Brazilian beach town of Jericoacoara. We talked on Valentine's Day, and Heyman was in an expansive mood. "It was my best day of kite surfing," he said, talking about an outing a few days earlier. "The wind was great. I was in a freshwater lagoon surrounded by ocean on one side and beautiful sand dunes on the other. This was the first day I could get up on the board and be in control of the kite. I feel like I am proficient in this new lifestyle I'm adopting. The novelty has worn off, but I'm in a groove; I'm really enjoying it, and I'm very unstressed. It is almost too much."
Life wasn't so bad in Atlanta, either. Fusco was clearly loving his work. But he had concerns about the future. With his daughter heading off to college the following fall, he had some big expenses looming. He had begun telling himself that if he was going to stay on, he would want more money, and possibly an equity stake in the company. (Fusco had what is known as synthetic equity, which comes with various restrictions; he wanted a real ownership stake.) He wanted to know with greater certainty what Heyman was planning and how it would affect him. "I'm going to start pressing him on what his plans are so I can make mine," he told me in late December. And he wondered aloud how everyone at the company could possibly go back to their old roles if Heyman decided to return to the CEO post. "That would be difficult for me," he said.
Fusco and Burnam couldn't help noticing how much morale had improved as the year wore on. With the company now being run by four familiar managers, rather than an aloof CEO, employees felt their voices mattered more. "The overall vibe is more relaxed," said Burnam. "It's like when you were in high school and your parents went away. You still got stuff done, but it gave you a sense of freedom."
In March, I took a trip to Atlanta to visit the Infosurv offices. Heyman had been gone for nine months. He and Fusco had not talked since January. The mood was upbeat and kicked back as the managers met in the conference room. The adjacent office, Heyman's, sat empty, the lights out. There was some discussion of the company's relaunched website, on which Heyman was not listed as part of the leadership team. Fusco said the omission was intentional: The team didn't want customers trying to contact someone who was no longer at the company.
Later, over tacos at a nearby Mexican restaurant, there was talk of the Atlanta Braves and Charlie Sheen's latest antics, along with discussion of a recent client meeting. The only mention of Heyman was when Burnam recalled traveling with him on a business trip to Nashville and discovering Heyman was not a stellar driver. "I told him on the way back, 'Hey, you have a lot of work to do, so why don't I drive this round?' " Burnam said.
In the weeks ahead, the road got a little bumpy for Infosurv. One of the company's project managers had quit in January, and a subsequent hire didn't work out. That meant Fusco had been handling a good bit of project work himself, duties that took time away from his regular work. iCE, the new product, hadn't taken off as rapidly as the team had hoped. "It's frustrating," Burnam said. "It's profitable, but we haven't hit it out of the park." Nonetheless, Fusco insisted the company was still on track for its 2011 revenue and earnings targets.
And he was irked when Heyman sent an e-mail in late April that implicitly criticized him by pointing out that it is always harder to predict revenue than to control costs. "It was my perception of him being passive-aggressive," Fusco said. He shot back an e-mail detailing a series of cost-cutting steps the company had taken since Heyman's departure, including Web hosting and software changes that shaved $10,500 off annual expenses. "I wanted to be sure he understood where we were on costs."
That was probably just wasted energy on Fusco's part. With every passing day, Heyman was ever more removed from Fusco's world. Over the previous two months, he had been constantly on the go. First he traveled down the Amazon, far more concerned with the perils of snakebites than costs versus revenues. ("If you don't get help, you're a goner in eight hours," he told me.) Next, he trekked, biked, and bused his way through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, sometimes back in the company of Goldstein. "Stunning and exhausting 30km bike ride along the lakes of Bariloche, in the foothills of the Andes," he tweeted on April 4. The next day's tweet was: "Paragliding today over the mountains and lakes of Bariloche. I'm thankful for blue skies, calm air, and a safe landing!"
Heyman had the occasional down day, too. When he arrived in Medellín, Colombia, the usual attractions seemed unappealing. "I'm getting to the point where I get to a new city, and I see all the things to do—museums, biking, paragliding—I think to myself, I've done that," he told me by phone. "It starts to feel like more of the same. Maybe I'm just tired of South America."
In recent weeks, friends had begun e-mailing Heyman press clips on start-ups, and he found his old entrepreneurial drive stirring. But he knew full well the time commitment of running a start-up, and he wasn't sure he was ready to do that again. He wondered about investing in a new venture with a young entrepreneur whom he could mentor, just to help get the company off the ground. He toyed with the idea of writing a book about his sabbatical, but he didn't seem all that committed to the idea.
