Boss Life Page 7
I set up the product page so that you see a picture of the four tables arranged in a U configuration, with pricing per table of $1,594. If you read the body text, it’s clear that I am talking about the per-table price in what will be a multiple-table order. I like the idea of featuring a low number, as I figure it will grab the shopper’s attention. We’ll sort out the particulars when a potential buyer calls us.
We now have 182 tables on the site, sorted by shape, features, and price. This makes it easier for buyers to find the kind of table they are looking for, and easier for Google to serve an exact match when people search for specific terms. We run different ads for a wide variety of table types: large, small, round, custom, boardroom, and so on. We haven’t been pushing modular tables, so I write a new ad intended to drive traffic to that page. I check to see what kind of traffic the keyword “modular tables” will generate, and Google assures me that this is a heavily searched term, but without a huge amount of competition from other table sellers. I write a catchy headline, set an amount I’m willing to pay each time a viewer clicks on the ad ($3.50), and set a schedule. It will appear from seven a.m. to ten p.m. every weekday. This ad is just one of 126 we’re running. Each is tightly targeted, so no single ad generates a huge response. In aggregate, they produce a steady stream of calls.
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IN THE THIRD WEEK of March, I get a call from Nigel at Eurofurn. He has spoken to his superiors at the home factory, and they have agreed to host me for a couple of days. I have to buy the plane ticket, but they will pay all other expenses. The trip will cost me about fourteen hundred dollars. I’m happy to lay out that cash if I get a peek into their factory. I have never had such an opportunity before—my domestic competitors have no reason to let me see their operations, so I haven’t tried to set up any visits. And, frankly, I’d think long and hard about letting any of them into my shop.
We settle on the last week of April. I’ll fly on Monday and return on Friday. Also, he wants me to start design work on a table to be placed in their New York showroom. It’s to be an upgraded version of their current table, which doesn’t have up-to-date wiring capabilities. They won’t pay me for my design time, but do agree on a reasonable price for the table itself: $6,523. This will be our first attempt at combining the Eurofurn look with our own design details. The table will be challenging: the top will be an equilateral triangle with radius corners, made in three identical pieces. We will be integrating power/data lids into the top, and the wood grain needs to run across the top and lids without disruption. I have a good idea how we will produce it, but I want to get a better sense of how Eurofurn would approach a project like this first, just in case they have some special tricks that will work better than our methods.
The next Wednesday, I get a call from my contact at Company S. My stomach drops. If we don’t hear from a client after an installation, all is well. But if they do call, it can be good news, or bad. Sure enough, they’re unhappy. After the board meeting, they found scratches on the table. Not big ones, the executive assistant tells me, but she could see them from a certain angle. She is convinced that there is something wrong with the finish. That seems unlikely; I carefully examined the top before it shipped and everything looked good. Sometimes clients scratch a table, but they almost always take responsibility for it. Anything other than laminates (commonly called Formica) and granite—including glass, marble, metals, and wood—can be easily scratched if a sharp object is dragged across the surface. Every wood table eventually picks up a lot of tiny scratches, mostly from users’ jewelry and laptop bottoms. It’s an unavoidable consequence of normal use.
I ask her to e-mail me photos of the damage. They arrive the next day. They’re terrible, taken at very close range with a shaky cell phone, but I think I can see something. In the universe of scratches, they rank about 1.5 on a scale of 1 (undamaged) to 10 (chewed by wolves). In other words, marks that are normal for any table in actual use. Meanwhile, I asked Dave Violi: did anything go wrong? Not as far as he knew. He built up a very thick layer of finish to get the look the client wanted, but the process had gone well.
It looks as though the client is overreacting to something that they did, but they don’t see it that way. They still owe me more than $7,500. Blaming them isn’t going to make them happy or get me paid. But it’s impossible to repair a finish like this on-site. The chemicals in the sprayed finish are noxious, residue would end up all over the room, and if you don’t recoat the entire top, the newly sprayed section will look different. If I am going to respray it, we will have to ship the top segments back here. Despite the logistical headache, I’m leaning toward agreeing to respray. Any alternative is likely to turn into a Stalingrad—an endless, damaging battle, most likely ending with bad feelings from the customer and an unpaid balance. A respray will cost a little bit less than the balance due, but at least I will have satisfied the customer. Unless, that is, they damage the table again. I really need to figure out what happened out there.
I make the trip on March 27. My journey begins at four-thirty a.m. For the convenience of nobody, Philadelphia TSA has decided that all travelers from four terminals will have to go through one security line. That’s an extra forty-five minutes that I didn’t plan for. I end up jumping to the head of the line and sprinting to make my plane. Two flights and a long drive later, I walk into the boardroom, the executive assistant at my side. From the doorway, the table looks perfect. “You have to look from a certain angle,” she says. I look from a certain angle: nothing. “You have to get up close.” I get up close. When my head is inches off the tabletop, I can see some fine scratches. Normal wear. But I make sympathetic noises. “Do you think the finish is defective?” she asks. The honest answer is “No, you did this and it’s your fault.” Instead, I ask her what had been on the table. She goes through the inventory: glassware, placemats, folders with notepads. She’s been very careful. I ask about unglazed mug bottoms—common culprits—and she tells me she thought of that and sent their mugs to a local potter to be reglazed. At this point, the CEO comes in. He says he’s disappointed that this happened. He really loves the table; in fact, one of his board members even asked who made it because he’s interested in having us make him one. And as soon as we fix this, he will tell me who it was. (CEOs of billion-dollar companies don’t get there by being stupid.) I surrender. I agree to retrieve the pieces in mid-April and return them three weeks later, before their next board meeting. The boss offers to pay for a rental truck, but we have to fly out my shipping manager to manage the packing and loading process and drive the truck back ourselves. It will be a huge, expensive pain.
I am still mystified as to what caused the scratches. We take out all the dishes and identify the culprit: it’s the mugs, after all. The local potter didn’t reglaze the bottoms, only painted them with varnish. I dragged one of the mugs around on the table, and voilà! Tiny scratches.
I’m back by midnight, exhausted. I feel like a chump for knuckling under, but arguing would have resulted in a much bigger mess. When I get home, I find a surprise. On our front door, my wife has taped up one of her drawings—a cartoon showing me with my arms raised in triumph over a kneeling businessman, who is handing me a large stack of dollar bills. It didn’t turn out that way, but it’s nice to have some family support.
This is a business book, but you can’t understand a boss without knowing what he goes home to. I have been blessed with a happy family life. I met my wife, Nancy, in college, when she was eighteen and I was nineteen. Immediately after graduation, we moved into our first apartment together and I opened my shop. Nancy has been my bedrock during many turbulent years. She grew up in a family with intermittent income and she can deal with a life of financial uncertainty. And she has proven equal to the challenge of raising a child with special needs.
We have three sons: eighteen-year-old fraternal twins, Peter and Henry, and a younger boy, Hugh, who is sixteen. Hugh and Peter are typical kids an
d attend the local high school. Henry is severely autistic. We knew something was wrong quite early, as his twin brother developed normally. Henry lagged behind in every way. He received an official diagnosis at the age of two. After that came years of therapy, special classrooms, speech therapists, and behavior experts. Nothing cured him.
At age eighteen, Henry still has the mental development of an infant. He cannot speak—he tries, but the brain development that allows the tongue and lips to form a full range of words never happened. He cannot read. He has little interest in other people. He won’t watch TV. He likes only a few things: to be driven around in a car, to listen to a particular Beatles CD over and over (turned up as loud as the boom box will go), and to eat. He is 6-foot-3, 205 pounds, and still growing fast.
Henry is volatile. Since he can’t talk, he has great difficulty communicating what he wants. We’ve learned to anticipate his needs, but sometimes he weeps with frustration, or slaps his own head repeatedly, or jumps up and down bellowing at the top of his lungs. And if someone gets too close while all this is happening, he will attack them—grab them around the neck and try to throw them to the ground.
Before age twelve, Henry was usually very calm and cooperative. When he started puberty, the violent behavior appeared. By age fifteen, he would attack my wife out of the blue, once or more a week. Now, at eighteen, the hormonal surges are abating and the tantrums becoming less frequent. But he is much, much larger. The episodes are harder to handle. Nancy is wary about being alone with him, but even so she’ll take him with her in the car as she does errands, and he behaves well. He likes driving and going to the grocery store—it’s like a food museum for him.
At first glance, he’s a tall, handsome teenager. It takes a moment to see that something is off. Fortunately, people are quite tolerant of him. Even if he bellows or bursts into tears, they take their behavior cues from us. If we treat whatever he’s doing as normal and expected, everyone stays calm. It’s embarrassing, though, to be in public when he’s difficult. It doesn’t keep us home all the time—he gets bored, and so do we. Not to mention that two hundred pounds of autistic boy jumping up and down has cracked our plasterwork and loosened our stair treads. So we take him out, and take our chances.
Henry’s twin, Peter, is a direct refutation of both astrology and the notion that Nurture is more important than Nature. Born two minutes ahead of Henry, he couldn’t be more different. He’s been accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on early decision and has inherited his mother’s gregarious nature and easy charm. Our younger boy, Hugh, has different interests, but he is smart and a very diligent worker. Maybe we’ve been compensated for the difficulties of raising Henry with these two.
I’m not a hero for running a business while raising a special-needs kid. Everyone has some kind of trouble in their life. Every boss needs to make a decision as to how to deal with pressure. Work all the time, drink, cheat on your spouse, yell, road rage? Or more benign choices? Take your pick. If you can. High levels of stress drive you to your worst behavior.
I had some tough days before the twins arrived, but in retrospect those years were a lark. The day you have children, you enter a different world. Mix parenthood with the problems of a business that doesn’t actually make money, and stress is a much bigger issue. I’ve tried to keep the work problems at work, but sometimes I’d bring the stress home and would suddenly explode over some stupid thing. It was usually an innocent request made by my wife, assuming that of course I would be able to supply the money or time required. Then the fight would start, with me shouting that she had no idea what was going on at work, and she replying with equal vigor that I was always promising that someday the business would go well and I would have more time and money for the family, and it never happened. Every couple has a fight that just keeps coming back, and this was ours.
When the recession arrived, and I was struggling every day to keep the doors open, the stress returned to unbearable levels. I decided that the only way I could deal with it would be to tell Nancy everything that was happening at work, good or bad, every day. She hated hearing it at first, as it reminded her of difficult times in her childhood. But we ended up getting along much better. Keeping a barrier between my work and home lives was a mistake. When my wife had a clear picture of the situation, she became an ally instead of an adversary.
My kids are old enough to take care of themselves now, and Henry is away from home much of the year. When he comes back, life is harder. But as long as the business does well, I’ll be in decent shape.
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ON THE LAST FRIDAY of the month, I review our sales numbers and they aren’t good. We end up selling just $135,732 in March, drastically undershooting my $200,000 target and leaving us well short of our quarterly target of $600,000. Sales for the first three months are just $543,003. Nick had the worst month, booking only $25,502 in orders. Dan did better than January and February, closing deals worth $49,783. Neither of them sold anything after the eighteenth. I am the champion of the month, with $60,447 in orders. “Best Salesman” is a prize I didn’t want to win. Watching Nick and Dan falter makes me feel very uneasy.
The sales pattern for March is odd. The number of orders hasn’t decreased—it’s actually grown from eleven in January and twelve in February to sixteen in March. More customers should be a good thing, but in this case, the additional orders don’t amount to much. The value of the five smallest orders adds up to $5,854. Peanuts. And the remaining eleven average just $11,807. This is well below our average order for the first two months of the year, which was $17,688.
The size of our orders varies widely. The majority of our jobs fall in the five- to twenty-thousand dollar range, but their aggregate dollar value is less than half of our total. Big jobs are important, and the biggest—more than fifty thousand dollars—have a disproportionate effect on our fiscal health. Land a few whales, all is well. Catch only minnows, and it’s hard to make our target. And March brought us only little fish. Nick and Dan assure me that they are working on some jumbo orders that will arrive soon. We could be back on track any day now.
One thing is undeniable: undershooting our sales target has affected our cash flow. If we’d hit our goal, we’d have another thirty-two thousand in cash right now, from deposit payments. A couple of months of strong sales followed by a weak month is not unusual—I’ve seen that pattern many times. But I have also seen sales shrink for several months in a row, and that’s a disaster. The shop is staffed for a certain production level, with all the attendant costs of payroll and machinery. If we fail to bring in work at the same rate we produce it, we get hit two ways: incoming cash falls below our spend rate, and eventually we will run out of work to do. Then come layoffs.
I’m not sure what I need to do right now, but my confidence that I could back out of my sales role has evaporated. I can’t rely on the other two, and don’t want to take a chance that they muff a deal when we are behind our quota. I am going to work more deals myself, starting with sucking up to Eurofurn. Maybe they’ll throw more business my way.
APRIL
DATE: MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012
BANK BALANCE: $136,260.92
CASH RELATIVE TO START OF YEAR (“NET CASH”): -$893.40
NEW-CONTRACT VALUE, YEAR-TO-DATE: $543,003
This is the twenty-fifth April since I opened my doors, and the weeks before tax day have always been quiet. But Nick and Dan, who haven’t experienced this swoon, are confident that something will arrive soon. The phone rang steadily in March, and we have a lot of solid proposals out there. And there are always clients who say they’ll place an order if we’ll revise our earlier quote.
Nick is preparing his twenty-third proposal for a buyer at the Kaiser Family Foundation—a new record for us. His first quote went out a year ago, and now he’s racking his brains to come up with another variation. He’s stuck with the same basic design, a ten-foot round table with some
combination of wood and marble on the top. Every couple of weeks, the buyer in Manhattan calls back, swears that his bosses are about to make a decision, and asks for one more change—a different wood, or a different number of data ports, and always a lower price. It isn’t a cheap design and it won’t be a cheap delivery. We’ve bottomed out at twenty-two thousand dollars for the whole thing, but the buyer won’t stop. Nick has asked me repeatedly if he really needs to send another proposal. Patience, I tell him. I have been through this before. Usually they disappear, but sometimes they end up buying, and we can’t let any potential jobs slip away through our own laziness.
Nick has been on the same merry-go-round with an Air Force facility in Virginia. They’ve been very specific about what they want, and it looks like a forty-thousand-dollar order. Again, he’s submitted multiple designs and spent significant time responding to requests for small changes. The flyboys tell us that they are very impressed with the proposals. Using their photos and our modeling software, Nick has made a perfect simulation of their room and finally come up with a table they love. They reassure him that he’s doing great, but that they need to put the job out for bid—federal contracting rules. I tell Nick that this won’t be an issue if we can persuade them to let us help write the bid specifications. That way we can make it very difficult for anyone but us to fulfill the requirements. This trick has worked in the past. Not this time. When they post the job on the federal contracting Web site, the table is described in generic language. And there’s a requirement that bidders must attend a public briefing at the base—a six-hour drive from our shop. I tell Nick to make the trip. He’s done a ton of work, and we don’t want to lose the opportunity by not showing up.