Tireless. Kim Lorenz
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and we were both early risers who did what it took to get the job done. My skills required more travel, time away from home, and spending time with customers at events, often in evenings.
From the very first day our business got started, I was the one knocking on doors, making face-to-face calls on customers, trying to get companies to believe in us and use our services. We started from scratch. We didn’t have a single customer lined up the day we opened for business. That alone was daunting! That meant that somebody was required to work incredibly hard in an attempt to build a customer base. And that someone was me. The business we were able to secure, then provided John with the tires to retread in our new shop.
Thankfully we weren’t by ourselves in the very beginning, as is the case with many startup companies. We were lucky enough to have found two great employees who helped us get off the ground. One was an administrative person to answer the phone we hoped would ring, as well as handling the paperwork on those customers we didn’t yet have. The other was a service person who would drive a truck to different customer locations, or on the road servicing equipment and mounting the tires we hoped we would sell. The truck had an air compressor and the heavy tools required to change or repair large truck tires.
Though it was in the plan to incorporate retreading from the beginning, we had yet to find a facility for lease to build the retread plant, and we wouldn’t have a place for the first few months. The plant could only be constructed in the proper city-zoned industrial areas. Not many people are willing to rent a space to a new business with little credit established and no customers. A landlord wants to be assured the tenant will pay the rent on time. It was hard finding a landlord willing to take that risk. Remember Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who founded Microsoft? They also had real estate problems when they started! There was more than one landlord who has since regretted not taking a risk on Microsoft.
Without a space secured yet, our business was housed in a mobile office (“job shack”) behind a warehouse in the south industrial side of Seattle. I found myself on the road early every morning, calling on potential customers in person, knocking on the doors of businesses that could be a great fit. John, on the other hand, could be found in the office at the same time. However, I would not get home until 7:00 PM most days, while John went home in the afternoons as he was out of work. Until we found a building for our retread plant, there really was not a lot for John to do. As is the case with many people, John was not comfortable walking into a company office uninvited and asking for business. So, that ball was mostly in my court.
I could not operate the retread plant. John did not have the knowledge or experience calling on potential customers. We both had excellent skill sets, but very different; a highly-rated reason for a business to succeed.
Having turned in my new company car when leaving my management job to start this new company, I bought a used Volvo to start making sales calls at customer locations. Most tire salespeople drove pickup trucks… not me. John, on the other hand, had purchased the truck of his dreams: a black, fully loaded new Ford F-250 Lariat, complete with fancy wheels and big tires. I wore slacks and a tie every day, while John considered himself dressed up when he had on his jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. We ended up taking John’s new dream Ford F250 into the business and adding a big compressor and tools so we could use it to service customer trucks and make deliveries.
Can you see the pattern developing here?
John and I had different skills, different personalities, different lifestyles, and different experiences. Is one more important? Is one better than the other? Or are they complementary, both important parts of the equation? I’d say the latter. That said, when choosing any partner, it is best you both possess valuable skills needed to operate a business.
My day would start at 6 AM every day, and often away from the office or even out of state as we operated in both Washington and Alaska. I worked hard all day, and often would not be home until after 7 PM, or out even later with customers or employees.
One day, I needed the service truck (John’s dream truck) to deliver some tires to a customer on my way home. The tires were too large to fit in my car. This truck was our only service vehicle at the time. It was needed 24 hours a day if any customer called with an emergency flat repair. We had to be available to quickly respond to any emergency if we hoped to keep the customer. So, off I went with our only truck, hoping a customer did not call that evening. It was December, so it was cold, and it was starting to snow lightly.
Of course, the inevitable happened. I got home late, well after dinner time, and was in the house a short time when our service person, Dave, called me and said, “The answering service called. Darigold has a milk tanker truck on I-5 with a flat!” Dave was in bed and lived 30 miles south of me, and the truck with the flat was 15 miles north of my home on the side of the freeway. The customer was huge—they ran trucks 24 hours a day. The milk tanker was a 105,500 pound, 9-axle, huge vehicle that was on a tight schedule to make it to the dairy processing plant. We had to perform. This was a new customer to us, and the largest customer for us at that time with hundreds of trucks. We would lose the account if we could not service them properly.
So, off I went. No dinner, tromping in the snow, heading out at 10 PM to fix a flat tire along a busy freeway. The bigger problem was that I had never done this from a truck before! I can change the big tires. I had done it in the shop over the years. I thought I knew what to do, but had never really done it by myself. I had been an executive. I wore a tie every day. Now I found myself on my back with a hydraulic jack, on the side of the freeway under a huge truck changing a tire and wheel that weighs more than 150 pounds. I had a tire gun that also weighed about 80 pounds connected to a huge airline that allowed me to remove the big bolts. The Darigold truck was back on the road in short order, and I packed up the tools and headed back to our home just after midnight.
Jill, my wife, was up, worried and in tears for lots of reasons. It seemed to her that I had to do all the work. This is the point of this little story. As I entered our home through the garage to remove my now wet and filthy clothes, I apologized to Jill, and explained it was all part of building this new business. She understood the hard work, respected that, and knew starting and growing a business would be hard, but she still couldn’t help but blurt out, “WHAT IS JOHN DOING?!”
“Jill, for all you know, John is doing everything I am doing and more.” I left it at that even though I knew it was not the case, but also knew there was nothing more John could be doing at that time.
A partnership does not have to be fair or equal, or anything else. Both John and I needed to do what we were best at doing at that time to grow our little business venture. I was not proud that a year earlier, I wore a suit, drove a new car, had a great office and expense account with many employees and here I was getting out of wet, dirty clothes doing hard physical work. John would be building our manufacturing plant soon and have his hands full, doing work I was not able to do, as he had a different skill set than me. I was hoping John would be holding up his end when the time came. While we do not know the future, I felt he was a man of his word. He wasn’t a slacker; he was a genuinely hard-working person.
Think this through, though: at this early stage of the business, I was putting in many more hours than John. I started earlier, worked later, and was away from home more often. It might be I was doing 70% or more of the work to get the company started, but does that matter? Looking at Jill’s point of view, all she knew was that her husband seemed to be doing all the work in this new company. She could only make a judgement based on what she heard and saw, and at the moment she saw her husband having been on a service call in the snow at night. She was rightfully concerned. Not to mention my ruining a nice shirt and shoes. The Darigold driver did mention I was the best-dressed service person he had ever seen!
After a few years, we all laughed at Jill’s question, “What is John doing?” and the story behind it. There was no way Jill could know all the details behind the current situation. The lesson here is that it is simply best not to bring work home. At that time, neither partner or spouse had any idea if we would succeed or what the future would hold. So, while I did want to reply to Jill that John was really not doing much at that time, my gut feeling was to simply say what I said, that he was “doing everything and more.”
A few weeks prior,