Читать книгу Small is Possible - Lyle Estill - Страница 12
ОглавлениеI HAVEN’T ALWAYS been enmeshed in the local economy. Quite the opposite. For many years I bought into the “you must be global to survive” concept. And I took the global economy bait, hook, line, and sinker.
I was stopped at the light by The Manor when I heard the newscast on the CBC. The Manor was a strip club in an old stone turreted building that I passed on my way to and from work. Researchers had identified a new medical syndrome they were calling Seasonal Affective Disorder. I peered through the sloshing windshield wipers at the grey sky and realized I had suffered from it all of my life. They had a given a name to the winter blues. The marquis at the Manor said that Sugar and Spice were in town. And I promised myself that it was time to permanently move to a sunny, warm, faraway place.
At the time I was in my brother’s technology business. I was a traveling salesman responsible for distant markets. We were head quartered in Guelph, Ontario, and I spent most of my days in Vancouver, or Winnipeg, or Halifax. For a time it felt as if I awoke in Guelph and commuted to Montreal.
The alleged cure for Seasonal Affective Disorder was to spend some time beneath bright lights. It sounded crackpot to me. In my view we had a bright light, it was the sun, and all I had to do was move to a part of the world where there was more of it. My brothers indicated it would be fine for me to move to the United States, as long as we were fully engaged in every large market opportunity in Canada.
Canada is a big place. In order to get us positioned in all Canadian markets I opened branch offices. And I lived on airplanes. When I finally managed to move to the south I left behind enough frequent flyer points to go to Hong Kong and back. For two.
I moved to the United States in search of blue sky and sunshine, to follow the shifting technology markets which were feeling the sharp elbow of the newly enacted North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA). In one sense I was our emissary to the global economy — sent from afar to internationalize the family business.
Since I merely set out to create a living for one, I had my choice of all the sunshiny markets America had to offer. California was expensive. And at the time it was suffering from drought. Texas would have been a good choice, but moving from Canada to the United States was enough culture shock, and I was afraid I could not handle moving to Texas, which appeared to be its own separate country. So I settled on the Research Triangle Park (RTP) of North Carolina, where things were cheap, and there was plenty of water and a growing technology market.
There was a time when I would start each day at my new home in the woods before first light. I would put on my coat and tie and head to my office on the edge of RTP. It was a long drive on a two-lane road, and there was a good chance of getting stuck behind a tractor pulling a load of tobacco or cotton during the harvest times. I spent my days running from the boardroom to the plant floor, and from factories to retailers, selling technology from Canada.
I would return home each night after dark, to my wood-stove, and my outhouse, and to a rickety kitchen table full of friends who liked to sit around and talk about forming “community.” We read books by Scott Peck, and went to weekend conferences with the likes of Thomas Berry, and we speculated long into many nights about theoretical constructs on how humans might better live together.
Each morning I would leave the woods and rush back to my little enterprise, where I would import goods from Japan, and flip them into Montreal. I would bring down a load from Ontario, and distribute it all over the United States. I was an entrepreneur with my toe in the global economy. I read books on time management, and I read Tom Peters, who promised everyone that if we didn’t have a percentage of our businesses in the international markets, we were certainly doomed.
To this day the brothers in my family hold different opinions. My brother Jim, who started the company, is now a technology mogul with business tentacles all over the globe. He likes to jokingly describe me as a nepotistic charity case that was writing poetry prior to getting a real job with his company. I like to assure him that my tireless effort made him the man he is today.
We all were captains of industry, with big plans and big deals, which is why I was surprised when I overheard my father refer to the collective effort of his sons as a “little computer sales and service company.” We were conquering the world, yet he described us as if we were a local lawnmower shop.
He spent his career in the manufacture and distribution of control valves for customers around the planet. Part of his task was to right size the factories to the markets. And to keep the unions happy. Part of his success came from figuring out how to think like a Canadian. As an immigrant to Canada, he aced that part, and he subsequently delivered the Canadian market to his global masters.
We grew up with visitors at the dining room table, from Mexico, and South Africa, and from parts unknown. As children we had a grasp of McLuhan’s “global village,” even though the highlight of our week was the family trip to our local farmer’s market.
When I immigrated to the United States, I was intent on delivering profits back to our Canadian headquarters. I was taught to check my anti-business bias in favor of black ink.
My brother Mark, a former union organizer, also managed to reconcile his management-labor beliefs in the name of the family business, and he eventually joined me in our international efforts.
Tami jumped into the game and joined us with relish. She would land a deal in Turkey, and fulfill it from Canada, and she would fly to California on the promise of more leads.
It wasn’t long before Tami and I became an item, and when she joined me in the woods of Chatham County, she was suspicious of ecovillages and co-counseling and all such talk of radical changes to the way people should live.
And while she kept her distance from the long, complex arguments that were ongoing at the kitchen table, her presence didn’t change our love for theoretical conversations about “community.” While activists and organizers talked late into the night, the unincorporated village of Moncure, where we lived, was in the throes of a bruising battle over whether or not it should become a town. We were oblivious to the actual life in our community. We missed the meetings in the fire hall, and missed the petition drives at Ray’s Supermarket.
We were newcomers, and outsiders who simply lived here. Our concept of community was abstract. Instead of putting our names on a petition, we were reading books about societal change. Instead of voting, were debating the concept of democracy.
Some worked on the farm to produce food. Some worked at micro-enterprise to produce products we would need.
While we explored structures that would permit us to vote for the inclusion of prospective neighbors, our actual neighbors were actively involved in the life of the community. In our make-believe world, different people assumed different tasks. The process and the people intrigued me, and I loved the fantasy. I think everyone assumed that I would simply be the person responsible for “cash inputs” since I spent far too much time in airports to be actively engaged in the creation of community.
I was wedded to the global economy. My outpost of the family business had grown substantially, and I found myself traveling the globe to do deals on behalf of our vendors. I spent considerable time in the “Technology from Canada” booths in Germany, and Las Vegas, and Budapest. I found myself at parties in embassies, and consulates around the world, and with my selling skills in high demand; I was routinely flown to Caribbean countries for conversations on how to close the next big deal.
Mine is not a John Perkins story. He’s the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man who knowingly checked his conscience in exchange for riches. I thought I was on the right path. I worked in concert with my brothers, on a quest for a billion dollar empire. I genuinely didn’t know any better.
I was running a profitable, ethical corporation. I was creating jobs. I was generating wealth. I stabbed no one in the back, saw no need to crush anyone below me, and if business is to be described as a “dog eat dog” activity, I had no occasion to “eat dog.”
My employees tended to stay with me for many years; I won awards for workplace culture, for family friendly environments, and for waste reduction. I had a disciplined program of charitable giving, and donated a percentage of my profits to local charities in the markets where the profits were produced. We all did. The family business was simply a good thing.
I gave money to our local National Public Radio affiliate, and to Family Violence and Rape Crisis, and to the Carnivore Preservation Trust, and to the Chatham Arts Council, and to the Education Foundation, and to a host of other local causes that I believed in. My company’s name was on the rolls of pretty much every charity in Chatham County.
On one of the rare occasions when I was in town long enough to participate in civic life, I went to a town hall meeting only to hear one of my activist buddies proclaim that it was “transnational corporations that are the problem.”
I was a transnational. I didn’t see a problem, exactly. In the ancient world Hermes was the god of travel. He’s the fellow with the wings on his boots. It was business people who tended to be the travelers, so Hermes was the god of business. Thieves also traveled. So Hermes was the god of thieves. I spent a couple of decades traveling on business, and never had to participate in the thieving part.
Although I did have a sense that something was wrong.
I saw the pure wastage of international business. And I started worrying about life on the planet. In an effort to remember my days as a “global producer,” I delved back into my journal entries. Before pouring my heart out on Energy Blog, I used to journal occasionally, and I found an entry that was penned in a sidewalk café on Avenida Libarado in Lisbon, Portugal on May 8, 1995. I had just paid sixty thousand escudos for a night in a hotel, and I reflected:
As I walk past restaurants and prostitutes and night clubs familiar from the prior evenings, it occurs to me that in my four days here I have spent close to two thousand US dollars, or roughly twenty percent of the average Portuguese wage earner’s yearly take.
Pondering the energy required to come by two thousand dollars is a daunting task. With an equal sum I could spare one thousand hectares of Amazon rainforest. Or I could adopt a kinkajou in Pittsboro and provide it with sustenance and habitat for three years. Two thousand dollars is more than a Cabloco family will spend in a generation, and yet, it’s been a delightful four days in Lisbon.
It was starting to dawn on me that I did more environmental destruction with my commuting than several generations of Cabloco farmers in the Amazon. I once canoed a portion of the Amazon and I saw multiple families sharing a single machete. At the time it was fashionable to knock Brazil for the “burning of the rainforest,” and traveling through the fires made me wonder about my own business travel.
Waste worried me. When I left my home and native land, the City of Guelph was ticketing people at the curb for failure to properly sort their recyclables. When I arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, they were still tossing everything into the landfill. There was no recycling. I’m not sure I even was an environmentalist at the time. But when you’re in the recycling habit, it’s hard to throw an aluminum can in the trash.
I had an ingrained sense that the failure to recycle items into new products was wrong-headed. When I was in high school in the late seventies, my father and I would tote tin cans down to ARC Industries to be resold into the metal markets. He grew up in the Depression, and wasted virtually nothing.
Moving to a culture that had no sense of recycling jarred me. It awoke the desire for change. When I decided to use recycled cardboard boxes for our shipments, we gobbled up all of the cardboard of two neighboring office buildings. I started shredding fine paper for use as packaging materials, and I pushed several vendors on design changes for their product packaging. We implemented a “buy green” purchasing policy back in the late 1980s.
We were “greening” our operation before the term had been invented. And we weren’t doing it to gain market share. We were doing it because it felt like the right thing to do.
Although we were not running foundries, or locomotives, we were producing. We were kicking out a lot of wealth. Ayn Rand would have been impressed. Our names appeared on a bunch of donor lists. And we employed a lot of people.
We were simply utilizing our skills to exploit markets and opportunities that happened to be global in nature. There was a nagging sense that something was wrong with the trajectory of our lives, as we shuttled back and forth from the airport to our piece of paradise in the woods, but we were not sure what that something was.
We were deep in what David Korten refers to as the “Imperial Consciousness.” We were building an empire.
There was a time when “casual Fridays” meant less starch in our button-down collars. We used to sit around our lunchroom table, in our coats and our ties, discussing the new trend in corporate apparel that we had heard about.
We mused about the local economy, and speculated about our role within it, but we were so immersed in our corporate endeavors, it was a mere topic of conversation — sort of like new trends in office apparel.
That was until I bought BLAST, and moved it to Pitts–boro.
Before it came to Pittsboro, BLAST was a slick little communications tool that Dan and Polly Henderson and their company had developed in Baton Rouge. It would be nice to say it came from the swamps of Louisiana, but a more accurate description would be to say that it came from the petrochemical soup and smog that is Baton Rouge.
BLAST was an acronym for Blocked Asynchronous Transmission, which was a sliding-window protocol that was exceedingly helpful for moving files around — especially well-suited for noisy phone lines.
Dan and Polly had created a remarkable software company.
Their little business suited our burgeoning distribution efforts perfectly. They shoveled out the new features, we sold their software all over Canada and the United States, and they helped us every way they could. This was the time of the nascent Internet, which meant we were also selling modems at an amazing clip. The tired cliché from the business literature of the day was about the Internet gold rush, in which we were the ones selling shovels and pans.
Then US Robotics purchased BLAST, and crushed it, and we were all taken for a bruising ride through the public markets. They were an up and coming manufacturer of industrial modems who had an eye on conquering the world. Stock market analysts told them that before they could go public, they needed to be both a hardware and a software vendor, and so they plucked BLAST out of Louisiana, moved it to Skokie, Illinois and positioned it as window dressing for what would become one of the most spectacular stock offerings in history.
Their clunky modems were replaced by a consumer product which they produced every minute and a half. They went on to see their names on the Fortune magazine list of wealthy individuals, and BLAST was forgotten like the child’s toy that breaks on Christmas morning.
We took the punishment from an install base of loyal customers who had been abandoned.
When we called US Robotics for bug fixes, they informed us that product had been discontinued. When we made a sale that was significant for us, they informed us they could no longer manufacture for that platform. And when the loyal BLAST users called for relief, all we could offer was consolation instead of new revisions.
I used to sit around the office after hours with our core staff, and we would frequently migrate toward a speculative conversation on “What would you do if you owned BLAST?”
“I’d pick up the phone when it rang,” said one.
“I’d call people back when they left messages,” said another.
“I think I’d develop a product for Windows,” said another.
I would leave these conversations, and return to my shack, where I would warm water on the woodstove for a shave, and rejoin the constant prattle of grants and fellowships and gardens that were largely imaginary in nature.
We all knew that BLAST was on its way to extinction, and we mourned the opportunity that we knew would be lost.
I distinctly remember the morning when I was walking to my Honda Accord to begin my usual massive commute, when I was overtaken by a moment of clarity. This was before I had started practicing with John, yet it was a study in manifestation.
It struck me in one moment that I actually could buy the company.
Which is what I did. I met my brothers in Skokie, we did the negotiations, US Robotics shuttled me around in a limousine, and within months we had a deal.
It was the eve of my first acquisition, and it was a heady time. I needed a place to locate the new company, and I needed staff to run it. Instead of inking some space in the go-go action of Research Triangle Park, I decided to gamble on putting the project in Pittsboro. It was a sleepy little farm town five miles from my house, and one of its many abandoned spaces was a bankrupt Mediterranean restaurant that was about the right size.
Industry pundits advised me that I would not be able to attract the necessary talent in a place like Pittsboro, and that I needed to locate closer to the action. I wondered about that. I thought that perhaps the woods of Chatham County was full of talent that was doing the same thing I was — which was hustling around the Park all day and returning to the “paradise” which we seldom had time to enjoy.
The only thing I knew about Pittsboro was that it was close. I turned to my friend Barbara Lorie for guidance and advice, and she took time off from the formation of her co-housing–community to help me out.
She pointed me to Sandy, the Zen priest who did renovation work, and he transformed the Mediterranean restaurant into office space. The space was barely ready when the deal closed and two eighteen-wheelers embarked from Skokie for Pittsboro.
The manager of the Town of Pittsboro did not know how to grant a business license to a software company. He was a creative and flexible man, and after enough conversation we concurred that it would probably be okay if we were permitted to open under the category of “Small Appliance Repair.”
When the trucks arrived they blocked traffic in front of the Post Office, and I went on a hiring spree. I had space which was almost completed — we left the Mediterranean palm trees painted on the wall — I had truckloads of computers and source code and boxes of product, and I had phones that were ringing with the fifteen-year-old vanity phone number that I had insisted be included with the deal.
What I needed was staff. My sales manager, Steve, left my side in RTP and took up with BLAST. As did Tami. As did my brother Mark, who parachuted in from Canada. But I needed more help than that. Barbara patiently directed me to all available talent.
There was Doug, who was writing a chemistry textbook. He abandoned his academic pursuits and joined BLAST to write documentation. After all, writing is writing. There was Sam, who was running a snack truck. Shipping is shipping, after all. Snacks, software — just ship it out on time.
Leon ran the furniture store around the corner. His passion was for elaborate wooden models of transport trucks and fire engines, and he was a remarkable craftsman. I’m not sure how healthy the furniture market in Pittsboro was at the time, but he had hand trucks, and he had a son, Brian, who had a strong back and a good attitude toward work. Brian unloaded our eighteen-wheelers — as his civic duty to help clear traffic congestion — and hired on to work in technical support. Brian worked with us for over a decade before realizing his dream of becoming one of the first professional fire fighters hired by Chatham County.
Barbara found Barbara, a local accountant, who was frustrated by her endeavors for a local CPA and who was delighted to become the Chief Financial Officer of BLAST.
We were in business over night. The phones were ringing, and we were shipping product all over the planet from the heart of downtown Pittsboro. We joked that we didn’t need to lock our doors at night, since we only possessed a million dollars worth of computer gear. Had we been selling farm equipment, we would have needed a fence.
BLAST was a truly global business. It had distributors on every continent, and product installed in almost every country on earth. Faxes rolled in with orders from far away places, and BLAST delivered.
I was still donning a coat and tie and vanishing into my monster commute to RTP and the family business, when Tami started going to work in her blue jeans. She did need to pick up her dry cleaning before her trips to Paris, or Milan, or Mexico City, but she found her Pittsboro days could be spent in her casual clothes.
“None of our customers come to Pittsboro,” she said. “They’ll never see us dressed this way.”
In no time the company lost its business attire, at which point I was instantly jealous.
I watched my colleagues moving on to more meaningful employment, where they could wear what they wanted to wear, and be who they wanted to be. With leftover palm trees on the wall, an expansive deck out back, and a ping-pong table in the basement, they went to work on shipping product.
Tami and I shared a humble farmhouse in the woods, which somehow got electricity and running water shortly after her arrival, but our conduit for communication was through Lisa, our travel agent.
Lisa would say, “You are going to be in Portland, and Tami is going to be in San Francisco for the weekend — would you like me to get you together?” Although Tami had left the family business in favor of small town software, she was still very much on the global stage.
At is peak, BLAST was running a nineteen person payroll, including Dennis Kikendall and Will Raymond, arguably the greatest minds in communication software in the area. We successfully shifted the trajectory of its descent into the Dumpster, and along the way we buried all of its corporate debt, and assembled a pile of cash. My gamble that there would be plenty of talent in the woods paid off handsomely. Many people were delighted to forgo higher salaries to work closer to home.
We had a blast at BLAST. And it introduced us to Pitts-boro, North Carolina, the community on the other end of the Pittsboro-Moncure Rd. upon which we live. Many of the hours I spent working for BLAST was in far away lands, on the floor of a trade show, or sharing exotic meals with distributors. I would pass through town on my way to and from work — always over dressed — but I was finally getting a chance to see things in the light of day.
I opened an account at the local hardware store — to buy the odds and ends necessary to maintain the business. Donnie and Joyce ran the place, and whenever I walked into the store in the early days, I did not look like the other patrons. Nonetheless, they came to accept me over time, and I found myself drawn to their wisdom and advice.
I opened a bank account on the corner, at a place that has never been able to comprehend foreign currency exchange. I moved all of my travel to the local travel agency two doors down from the bank. My introduction to Pittsboro was that of an absentee property owner, occasionally stopping by for meetings or to run errands on behalf of the property. With BLAST, we shifted from absentee members of the community, to identifiable merchants in its midst.
I occasionally went to lunch about town, and sometimes stopped in at Mimi’s General Store. She was selling a slim selection of organic vegetables and a whole bunch of health food supplements. Mimi and I became friends. She had been retailing in Pittsboro for many years, and I was the new guy with a software company.
On one occasion we were sitting on the front porch of my ramshackle home and Mimi was discussing a bold move. She was contemplating moving out of the ground floor of the Blair Hotel and into the abandoned car dealership next to the courthouse. More importantly, she was thinking about serving lunch.
I told her that the highly paid people of BLAST would pay a premium for organic lunches, and that the demographic shift in Pittsboro was under way.
Along the way we had befriended Clyde Jones, a legendary “outsider artist” who cuts “critters” out of cedar logs with his chain saw. We provided Clyde with rides, and cedar logs from our place, and he occasionally gave us a sculpture that he usually made on site.
One time I helped Clyde negotiate a royalty deal with the New Orleans Museum of Art. Clyde sat on one side of the kitchen table and listened to my phone conversation. I attempted to represent his best interests on my side of the table — taking visual cues from him. When we finished the deal, they emailed me a form to be signed, and I suggested to Clyde that we get him a copy for his records. To do that, we dropped in at BLAST.
At the time BLAST was right next door to the Post Office, and it boasted a long brick wall. As Clyde and I were entering the building, I suggested the wall was ugly, to which he agreed. We decided on a whim that if I were to get the wall painted blue, and provide some scaffolding, he would paint a mural on it.
Which we did. Tami rounded up school children, the local hardware store’s paint vendor donated the paint, and off we went.
The mural went up in fine fashion. Someone called the police, thinking it was a violation of the local sign ordinance, but when the chief of police came to inspect, he thought it looked fine to him.
I miscalculated the amount of media attention the project would receive. It seemed like every camera crew and newspaper in the state arrived to cover the famous Clyde Jones doing a mural, and BLAST failed to get a single mention.
Later I heard through the small town grapevine that the project had been self-serving, since it made such a big media splash. Before the project I had very little experience with the local media, so I learned from the rumor, and thought, “That was just a big ugly wall — if you want self serving, I’ll show you self serving…”
We tried to capitalize on the event by publishing a “Greetings from Pittsboro” postcard, which we used for correspondence with customers all over the world, but at the end of the day the mural was an object lesson in how not to garner publicity for ourselves.
Today the muralized building is one part government office, and one part hairdressing salon. Both of my sons got Mohawk haircuts there last summer. The Post Office has moved to the edge of town and its old residence is abandoned.
BLAST’s future was wiped out by the Internet, and as a property it is remembered fondly by Information Technology folks everywhere. Tami left to have babies, Mark and I were swept away by our growing distribution enterprise, and those who were left behind never figured out how to retool the company for the current day.
Something I learned along the way is that all business is difficult. One moment you are distributing computer memory in Canada, and you find that you are operating on razor thin margins and that the business is tough. Since you naturally want to be in an “easier” business, you look around at customers and suppliers to see who has it easy.
In the computer business the vendors with the highest margins are in software. It costs them a dollar to print a compact disc worth of software, and they sell it for sixteen hundred bucks. BLAST was my foray into software. What is not included in the compact disc printing cost is the million dollars worth of research and development that goes in to produce un-saleable products that do not go to market. And we did a lot of that at BLAST. We would work for years on products that would miss the market entirely. It turned out that being in the software business was hard.
And I think the same lesson applies to biodiesel. On the surface it is the process of taking waste fat, oil, and grease and converting them to fuel. Easy money. It’s a business where you can sell every drop you produce without trying.
Except it appears to be exceptionally difficult to make any money doing it.
Which has left me with the conclusion that all business is hard.
Which is the opposite message from what John would tell me. And both messages are correct. Business is hard. It takes work. And when you are in business you get everything you want or something better from your endeavors.
I should note that earnings are not the only yardstick I have used to measure whether or not something is a success. Once when Tami and I were riding horseback to the lost Jordanian city of Petra, I was not reflecting on how much money had been lost or wasted along the way.
Rather, I was vigorously celebrating the global economy that had been so kind to us.
