Confessions of a Resilient
Entrepreneur PERSEVERING TO SUCCESS
Frumi Rachel Barr, Ph.D.
SAVVY
S ABOUT
Confessions of a Resilient Entrepreneur Persevering to Success
By Frumi Rachel Barr, Ph.D.
21265 Stevens Creek Blvd. Suite 205 Cupertino, CA 95014
Confessions of a Resilient Entrepreneur: Persevering to Success Copyright © 2007 by Happy About® All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author(s) assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. Released: March 2007 eBook ISBN: 1-60005-040-9 Paperback ISBN 1-60005-139-5 Place of Publication: Silicon Valley, California, USA Paperback Library of Congress Number: 2007922023
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Warning and Disclaimer Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty of fitness is implied. The information provided is on an “as is” basis. The authors and the publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book. While the people and events portrayed in the book are based loosely on real events, all the characters are fictional, based on composites of many people the author met or worked with over the years.
Praise for Confessions of a Resiliant Entrepreneur (from the back cover) "No one is better equipped to coach and nurture female entrepreneurs than Frumi, herself a successful entrepreneur, mother, friend and community leader. If 'The Little Engine That Could' were re-written just for women entrepreneurs, 'Confessions of a Resilient Entrepreneur' would be it. Frumi understands an entrepreneur's excitement, temptations and fears intimately because she's 'been there, done that.' Reading her story is like swallowing a big dose of courage. You feel as though you could overcome anything because she has faced life's hardest challenges with aplomb and transformed herself into a stronger, happier and better woman each time.” Cara Good, President, WunderMarx Inc.
"The Frumi Fix is a recipe for turning yourself inside out so your true self can shine. Frumi reminds us it is in the stew of our total life experiences that we have every ingredient necessary to create, and serve, our special offering to others. What she delivers is not her personal ingredient list, rather the inspiration and courage to mix up our own -- from the inside out. And that’s the magic. Once you've digested the Confessions and get your first taste of The Frumi Fix, you'll experience inside-out at it’s best. And I guarantee you'll return for a daily helping." Ann Hult Crowell, A Recovering CEO, Author & Speaker
"Frumi Rachel Barr inspires us to not let catastrophes get in the way of our success. Sure, things can get crummy, but if we keep our focus up and our eyes open, we'll see doors open for us. In experience after experience, Frumi illustrates how asking ourselves the right questions allows the best answers to show up. Frumi's book is a page turner, and I loved the advice she gives at the end. This special book is a keeper!" Joanne Rodasta Wilshin, Author 'Take a Moment and Create Your Life!'
"Don't miss this book filled with personal courage as Frumi bares her soul telling how she overcame whatever obstacles were put in her way. Resilience is Frumi's authentic real deal -- what it takes to create a purposeful, fulfilling life. A definite must read for everyone (not just women) who wonders if they have what it takes to follow their dreams." Marilyn August, Author, 'Journey to Wealth & Wisdom'
"An endearing account of a strategist's relentless quest for personal growth and fulfillment. Frumi is a role model and inspiration for all entrepreneurs whether practicing or aspiring." Katharina Martinka, Business Advisor and Attorney, Martinka & Associates Consulting, LLC
Publisher • Mitchell Levy, http://www.happyabout.info/
Executive Editor • Francine Gordon
Cover Designer • Cate Calson, http://www.calsongraphics.com/
Layout Designer • Val Swisher, President, Oak Hill Corporation http://www.oakhillcorporation.com/
Copy Editor • Valerie Hayes
Dedication To my Mother Layah Surchin Borod An extraordinary leader in her community 1914-2006.
Acknowledgments This book represents a labor of love and has been a long time in coming. There have been many friends, relatives and clients who have watched my journey over my lifetime. Special appreciation goes to my brother Manny, father and late mother; my fabulous friends, Ann, Marilyn, Susan, Heather, Katie, Joanne, Garry, Pat and Rachael – Thank you for all of your love and support. I could never have written this book without Claudia Suzanne and my awesome coach, Dr. MaryWayne Bush. Once I expressed a desire to write a book, there was no way MaryWayne was going to let me out of it. The power of coaching at its finest! Let me not forget my children who have found my path intriguing and sometimes not too embarrassing. And finally I’d like to offer a special acknowledgment to my clients of the last several years for allowing me to serve you and help you on your own journeys. I owe my passion for coaching to all of you. Your success is mine! Frumi Rachel Barr, PhD
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Savvy About This book is part of the Savvy About series driven by Francine Gordon. Savvy About books are written by successful business women to support the professional growth of existing and future successful business women.
C o n t e n t s Intro
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Part I Frumi’s Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 Chapter 1
Hatched for Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Chapter 2
Starting Out Strong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Chapter 3
Setbacks are for Working Through . . . . . . 19
Chapter 4
New Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Chapter 5
Another Stale Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Chapter 6
I Got the Clocks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Chapter 7
Out with the Old, In with the New . . . . . . . . 49
Chapter 8
Moving Out, Moving Up, Moving On. . . . . . 57
Chapter 9
Building—and Breaking—From Scratch . . 65
Chapter 10
New Company. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Chapter 11
New Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Chapter 12
New Me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Part II Your Frumi Fix. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .95 Chapter 13
How Coaching Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Chapter 14
What Really Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Chapter 15
Where Are You Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Chapter 16
Work and Family. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Confessions of a Resilient Entrepreneur
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viii
Epilogue
Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Appendix A
Book Summaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Author
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Your Book
Create Thought Leadership for your Company . . . 137 Why wait to write your book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Contents
In tro
Introduction My life has been about entrepreneurship from start to finish—or at least to present. I was raised by an entrepreneur who was raised by entrepreneurs. I married entrepreneurs and, although I started out working a regular job, I quickly became an entrepreneur. After building and running several companies, I switched my focus to helping other entrepreneurs learn how to impose a degree of balance between their passions and the rest of their lives. So what, exactly, are entrepreneurs? People who want to work independently, not corporately or for someone else. People who have an idea—or a whole series of ideas—that becomes their dream and drives what they want to do with their lives. People who want to build a business and control how it functions, how it grows—even how it dies. Entrepreneurs will find any way to fulfill their dreams, even when people consider their ideas silly or a lost cause. In fact, they persevere in the face of tremendous odds specifically because entrepreneurship is the belief that I can do what I want to do. Somehow, entrepreneurs find the solutions they need to do exactly that.
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And it doesn’t matter if they suffer through a whole series of failures before finding the one business that does work. Entrepreneurship is an approach to life that says I’m going to keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it until I get it right. Corporate people have a different attitude. They want the security of knowing their paycheck will be there every two weeks. They’re not interested in having an entire company’s success or failure ride on their shoulders. Corporate people have a driving need to be financially responsible and secure, not for pursuing an all-encompassing dream and its inherent all-encompassing liability. ** As far as I can tell, I was probably hatched as an entrepreneur. My parents brought me up to think the phrase “You can’t do that” only meant that I, as their child, could not do something right then—not that I, as a woman, could not do it at all. In my house, if you wanted to do something, you were encouraged to do it. I had no idea women were treated differently from, or had more obstacles in business, than men. When I discovered that truth later, I wished someone had told me earlier! But aware or not, being a woman never deterred me, because my parents’ language and attitudes during my formative years were such that I was bred to be an entrepreneur. Which is how entrepreneurs are produced. The conviction that you can be an entrepreneur comes from an internal belief system created by your environment and by the way you are raised. It’s all a question of language and attitudes. The Director of Entrepreneurial Studies at USC once explained it by describing a father playing catch with his son. Where some dads might say, “Oh, too bad, you missed the ball, ” when their son misses a catch, the entrepreneur-breeding parent would say something more like, “Oh, you almost got it—if you just stretch one more inch, you’ll have it.” It’s never: “Too bad, those are the breaks.” It’s always the more motivational: “You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.”
2
Intro
Of course, sometimes the desire to be an entrepreneur is so great the obvious gets ignored. People get so enthused about their big ideas they want to jump in with two feet without pacing themselves—which is certainly part of the entrepreneurial “I can do it!” attitude. As an affiliate of Startup Nation, I get calls all the time from young people saying, “I want to quit my day job and start this company.” I say, “Wait, wait, wait—transition into this. If you have a day job, that’s great. Prepare your business plan. Let’s look at what’s likely to happen. You’re probably thinking you’re going to have money in six months. What if it takes two years instead—can you quit your day job on that basis?” This book is for all those young, starry-eyed entrepreneurs. It’s also for all those well-established entrepreneurs who have made their success, and now want to somehow fit a life into their dreams. We all know people who claim to have twenty years of experience at something, but actually only have one year of experience twenty times over. Well, I’m one of those people with twenty-eight years of experience whose every year was brand new, and who learned to adapt the lessons from previous situations to the next thing I was doing—and use them to move forward. You see, that’s what being an entrepreneur really means: being in a constant state of failure, even when you’re successful. The trick is to “fail forward,” as leadership expert John C. Maxwell says: to take the lessons you’ve just learned, add them to your strengths and leverage your learning in your next experience. I’ve done a lot of failing forward. I hope my experiences will help you leverage the lessons of your next move. Frumi Rachel Barr, PhD February 2007
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4
Intro
Part I Frumi’s Story "You must do the things you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt "Do or do not -- there is no try." - Yoda
C h a p t e r
1
Hatched for Success
I grew up in Canada, in Montreal, the daughter of two hard-working parents. My father was an entrepreneur, manufacturing flavors for soft drinks. My mother worked as the executive director of a women’s organization, so my brother and I were latchkey kids. Interestingly, my parents must have taught me a lot because I never felt neglected or unloved. On the contrary, I brought my little brother home from school, gave him milk and cookies and felt very grown up. I felt he was my wonderful responsibility. My kids would interject right around now, “… and they never fought.” OK, now they’re happy too.
My parents were a mixed breed: my father was an entrepreneur and my mother was an executive in a series of non-profits. Together, they created two can-do kids. My father grew up in Winnipeg, where his parents were entrepreneurs and all his uncles were involved in the family bottling company. He wanted to carry on the R&D (research and development) part of the business, so he studied food chemistry in university. Then WWII broke
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out. Just before he went overseas, he met and briefly dated my mother in Montreal. They corresponded while he was away fighting and when he came back, he carried her off to Winnipeg as his bride. Within two years, though, my parents realized there was nothing for Dad to do in the family business, so they left Winnipeg and he followed his big dream of manufacturing a cola similar to Coca Cola. He never really had any marketing skills, never really had any skills as an entrepreneur, but he definitely knew his business. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t have a university education because her brother went to medical school. At that time in families like mine, if the son went to medical school—which was a big deal—that was it. The daughter didn’t get to go somewhere else. Mom went to work in the nonprofit world, running charitable organizations and doing fundraisers across the country. She felt it was her duty to get a regular paycheck, and she was very proud that she could support my father’s dream of having the ultimate extract company. ** When I was very young, I wanted to be a doctor, like my uncle, until an accident I had at age eleven changed my life. It left me with an ulna-nerve lesion that required physical therapy. That’s when I met Carol, the wonderful physical therapist who became my inspiration. Carol actually walked me around the physical therapy department to show me all the different machines and what the various patients were doing. From then on, I got it in my head that no matter what happened in life, I was going to be a physical therapist, just like Carol. From that moment until I graduated high school, my sole ambition was to go to university and get my degree in physical therapy. Meanwhile, my parents were unknowingly sending me mixed messages. For instance, my father let me know I could do anything I wanted to do—except be a doctor, because women who became doctors didn’t have time for their families. Meanwhile my mother, in typical 1950’s fashion, told me women always had to be basically subservient to men. “Always let them think the big ideas are theirs,” she’d tell me. “Never let on that you have a big idea of your own.”
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Chapter 1: Hatched for Success
Yet Dad maintained that I needed to be independent. He didn’t want me to have to go to a man and say, “Can I have a dollar to buy milk and bread?” the way his mother had had to. “You should be able to earn your own money so you can make your own choices,” he’d tell me. In other words, they were pretty typical parents who wanted the best for me and my brother, so long as we realized we could (and should) do anything we set our minds to accomplish. Except be a doctor. ** Another mixed childhood message was the result of starting grammar school too early. I was only three, so I was always small. Also, while my grades were average—B’s and C’s with the occasional splattering of an ‘A’—I was always behind the rest of the class, so I was always afraid of being a total failure. In fact, I was afraid every day I went to school: afraid that I wasn’t smart, afraid that I was stupid, afraid that I would never amount to anything. Talk about pressure: I was three! The Hebrew day school I attended went through the seventh grade. In Canada, high school starts in eighth grade. We learned four languages in grammar school: English and French in equal proportions for half a day, then Hebrew and Yiddish the other half. Not being a language person, I wasn’t very good in the Hebrew and Yiddish part of things. I was okay in English, but being very shy, I didn’t raise my hand in class. As a result, no one knew how smart or not smart I was. Years later, it occurred to me that maybe my parents worked really hard at saying, “You can do it, you can do it” because I wasn’t doing it. Maybe they encouraged me to counterbalance the fact that I wasn’t as smart as they wanted me to be. They always saw the difference with my brother, having learned their lessons with me. They held Morrie back so he’d be a year older than the rest of the class instead of a year younger. As a result, he did brilliantly. He was the one who always got straight A’s. Obviously, then, he was the one who was smart.
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And who had the beautiful blue eyes. I had hazel eyes. For him, it was always, “Oh, what a gorgeous little boy!” For me, it was, “Isn’t she cute?” Fortunately, my mother told me that my little brother was mine, so I had a lot of pride in him. I would take him by the hand when we walked home from school. He would sit outside my door and wait for me while I was with my girlfriends. We had a very loving relationship, a unified front. We felt as if it was the two of us against the world. That was a very clever strategy on my parents’ part. On the other hand, Morrie is still the favored son. We laugh about it all the time. I’m the one who tries harder—like Avis! ** Once when I was in third grade, I looked at my less-than-spectacular report card and thought, uh oh—how am I going to take this home? I was afraid of disappointing my parents with my poor marks. So I changed them. I cleverly made all the minuses into pluses—in pencil so I could erase them when I took the report card back to school. Unbeknownst to me, though, my mother had a parent-teacher meeting to which she took my report card. I never had a chance to erase my changes. I remember lying in bed that night, waiting for my mom to come home from this meeting—Dad was out of town—and then hearing her talk to herself as she came through the door. “What was she thinking? Why would she do that? I can’t imagine she’d do something like that!” My illegal action caused such a hullabaloo that, where I had been afraid before, now I was terrified. The principal, Mr. Human (he never seemed human to me!), wanted to immediately expel me from school—or so I thought. Luckily, my third-grade English teacher went to bat for me. “I want to find out what’s at the bottom of this,” she told him. “Frumi’s such a sweet little girl; I can’t imagine she would do something like this without having a very good reason.”
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Chapter 1: Hatched for Success
She lived on our street, so we often walked home together. Being small, I thought she was a speed walker. That day as I hustled to keep up with her, she said, “I know you’re having some problems, but what made you do that?” “I don’t want to have to go to another school!” I blurted out. “I’m afraid. I don’t know anybody there. All the people I know are right here. I just want to stay here.” “Frumi, calm down!” she said, slowing down just a little. “No one’s going to make you go to another school!” Yes, I got to stay in the Hebrew day school, “criminal” tendencies notwithstanding, but my self-image could never seem to catch up with the mixed messages coming from my parents and teachers. At school, I sensed that I wasn’t very bright, yet at home, I heard that I could do anything. Add to the stew the fact that both my parents grew up in fairly Conservadox-type Jewish homes yet didn’t really live up to the school’s standards—we kept kosher at home, for example, but didn’t eat kosher out—and my life seemed filled with hypocrisy and confusion. Plus, I was shy—very, very shy—until I was thirteen, when my parents sent me to Winnipeg to visit an aunt and uncle. There, I entered a twist contest with a third cousin. We won! It was a wonderful cap to the whole experience of leaving home by myself and meeting strange new people in a totally different city. For the first time, I felt as if I could cope. It was the beginning of the end of my shyness. The beginning of the end, not the actual end—I’m still shy. Until recently, in fact, I was afraid to stand up in front of a crowd—afraid, even, to introduce myself to twelve people who were going around the room for the express purpose of introducing themselves. My heart pounded with fear. What if I didn’t say the right thing? What if I tripped over my words? What if I sounded dumb? I did it, anyway. Entrepreneurs have to face down their fears every day they’re in business. **
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When I look back at my childhood, I see the strengths and business tools I learned at my parents’ knees. We were a pretty well-functioning family. My parents loved each other; they always snuggled and cuddled and appeared happy. In fact, we looked like the kind of “happily ever after” household you used to see on television. I didn’t even know we were poor. I had everything I needed because, in yet another aspect of the entrepreneurial spirit, we lived totally in abundance. Totally. And I know I took the best of both their outlooks and put them together to create my own perspective. As a working mother, for instance, Mom had to be a strategist and planner. She always said that if a woman had to work outside the home, she was entitled to create support systems in the home that allowed her some comfort and ease, a brilliant policy from my perspective. I listened to her planning processes and unconsciously absorbed her strategies and concepts. My father, on the other hand, was the optimist, the one who believed that whatever happened, everything would be fine. Consequently, I grew up believing that whatever happened, everything would be fine—if I just strategized and planned. I matched the two systems and made them my own. And so far, it’s worked.
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C h a p t e r
2
Starting Out Strong
I started University at the ripe old age of sixteen, totally focused on becoming a physical therapist. This line of study taught me some important guidelines—how to manage time, how to look for symptoms, and how to create solutions for those symptoms. These became the basis for my business learning. My MBA came much, much later.
After leaving the Hebrew day school and graduating from Outremont High School, I went to the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy at McGill University in Montreal to get my Bachelors of Physical Therapy (BPT). It was a very, very heavy course, fully three times that of the other students. McGill art students, for example, had twelve hours of school per week. Physical therapists, on the other hand, had thirty-six hours of specified classes along with a smattering of regular, general-education classes, such as Psychology 101. I did fairly well by the time I finished. I got straight A’s my last year. I didn’t start out doing so well, though. The first year I went to university, I actually failed two classes: chemistry and physics. I had gotten well over eighty percent in
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chemistry when I matriculated from high school, but I held Peter’s hand all the way through the course at McGill. Unfortunately, Peter—my first-year heartthrob—used his left hand to hold my right, so I couldn’t take notes! Clearly, my priorities were skewed. Peter, however, was only my heartthrob, not my love interest—that was Richard. I’d met Richard in high school and had planned to lose my virginity with him at my senior prom because “everyone” said you were supposed to lose it by the time you left high school. But I didn’t. So there I was, a sixteen-year-old college student learning all about virgins in some long English poem. I told my father, “There’s something wrong with me. I’m still a virgin. Richard thinks I should lose my virginity because everybody else has already lost theirs.” I have no idea why I told my dad this, but—as any father would—he forbade me to ever see Richard again. My parents hated him. They felt he was arrogant and thoughtless and showed a lack of respect for other people. For example, he would park his car right down the middle of our duplex’s double driveway with no regard for anyone else’s parking needs. They so did not want me to be with him. Looking back, they were right: Richard was a self-absorbed rich kid. His family had a lot more money than our family, something that scored no points with my mom. But I was a university student who could do anything I wanted to do—I had certainly grasped that concept by then—so I didn’t stop seeing Richard, I just spent more time with his family. I liked their lifestyle. I loved his mother and two brothers. I had fun hanging out at their house and going to their country place. And so, I lost my virginity to Richard in my first year of college. ** In the summer between my second and third years at university, I went to Israel to visit my grandparents. My family was very Zionistic. My father and his six siblings had gone to Israel in 1933 and my father stayed until 1940, when he came back to fight in the combined US-Canadian force called The Devil’s Brigade. It seemed perfectly reasonable, therefore, for me to volunteer to go to Israel in 1967 when the Six-Day War was about to erupt. My family knew the Israeli emissary to Montréal personally, as he was one of the people who
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came to dinner at my parents’ house every Friday night. I knew he could sign me up as a volunteer. I also knew that, having just finished with my third year at McGill, I had a skill that would be valuable in a military situation. But since I was still only nineteen years old, my parents had to sign the papers for me to go. They refused to sign. I told them that considering our family’s history and their Zionism, they were being hypocrites, and our emissary friend nudged them a little more at dinner. They finally signed and I got on the list of volunteers to fly over. Once again, in retrospect, I realize my parents were right. My father certainly knew much more about war than I did. It turned out to be only a six-day war, but it could have been a disaster; I might have never come back. When I think about how I bullied my parents into allowing me to go, I have to give them credit for letting me live my life the way I wanted to, even when I didn’t know what life was all about. Against their better judgment, they accepted that “can do” spirit they had encouraged me to have all my life: devise a plan and go for it, regardless of the risk. Everything will be fine. I believed them. So I went for it. When my volunteer group got off the plane in Israel, the people in charge divided us into two groups: those with skills, and those who would go to a Kibbutz to pick vegetables. They sent me to work at Tel Hashomer, a military rehabilitation center just on the edge of Tel Aviv. The instant prosthesis was just being developed at that time. Until then, amputees had to stay in bed for two or three months until their wounds healed before they could get up on a prosthesis. But someone developed a prosthesis that actually encouraged the wound to heal, so people could get up right away and not lose their walking patterns and neurological pathways. Working with Israeli amputees impressed me so much that I later became a specialist in lower-limb prosthetics.
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While in Israel, I lived with my aunt and uncle, a Brigadier General in the police force, and commuted every day from their house to the hospital. One day I was sick and stayed home. The bell rang. I answered the door to find one of my patients standing there. This soldier had lost his leg above the knee in the Negev. He woke up on the battlefield wounded and alone, thinking he must be dead because everyone around him was dead. He actually resented being alive because his whole unit—made up entirely of kids with whom he had grown up—was gone. To make matters worse, his girlfriend ditched him when he lost his leg because he was an amputee. His name was the Hebrew word for miracles. I let him in when he appeared at my door because I knew him. I never thought he would rape me. But he was so angry over his girlfriend and everyone else deserting him that he no longer had any rules or boundaries left. Afterwards, I kept thinking, ohmigod, this is just what my father said could happen! Why didn’t I protect myself more? I not only felt violated physically, I felt violated mentally due to my conflict between protecting his stump so it would not hurt or bleed all over the place and protecting myself. I was traumatized but I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. I was afraid my uncle would kill him or, worse, court-martial him. I was terrified that I was pregnant. And I still had to see him every day at the hospital! He would tease me as if it had all been a joke. I told some of the other soldiers not to leave me alone near him but I never told them why. I never told anyone. Other than that one sad incident, the soldiers were wonderful. I’ll never forget Zvika. He had been on the Israeli basketball team but when I saw him, he was spending his days sitting in the gym. He absolutely refused to have an artificial leg. My heart went out to him. He just sat in his wheelchair. He was so devastated. Only nineteen years old and his whole career was gone. I had never been a basketball player but I started dribbling the ball, throwing it at the hoop and horsing around to try to make him laugh. After about a week, it worked; he started laughing. He thought I was the stupidest thing on two feet. But eventually, he started playing with
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me and, at the end of my stay, he walked me to the bus stop—on an artificial leg. That was so special, one of the big triumphs of my stay in Israel. Someone even wrote a newspaper article about us. I still have it. Zvika’s triumph highlights yet another aspect of the entrepreneurial spirit, and one of the things I like so much about life: having the chance to make a difference, however it happens. Being in Israel at that time was very inspirational—so inspirational, in fact, that nothing was ever quite the same. I returned to doing regular physical therapy when I came home but it never meant as much as working with those heroes. They were all in tough situations, needing to be motivated, needing to know that life was still worth living. I was only there for three months altogether but those three months truly changed my life. ** Every time I helped an Israeli soldier, every time I met another living, breathing inspiration, I thought about Carol. All the way through school, I had wanted to go back and tell her how much she had inspired me when I was eleven. She had given me a goal, and even though I hadn’t believed I was all that smart, remembering her had helped keep me going to achieve my goal. During my senior year at McGill, I attended an awards ceremony. I must have attended a number of them, but this one stands out in my mind because the award was presented by her family in memory of Carol, who had died from leukemia. I’d never gotten to tell her, never gotten to thank her adequately. And yet, if not for her, I never would have been a physical therapist and, if I had never been a physical therapist, I would not have been able to save my own life three years later. That same senior year, I had a very short, very intense relationship with a guy named Jordie. It only lasted six weeks until February 29th, Sadie Hawkins Day, when girls could ask a guy to marry them. Jordie encouraged me to ask him, so I did. He accepted. But the next morning, he called and said, “I can’t go through with this. I’ve made a mistake.”
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I was heartbroken. I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t sleep. I had been totally in love with him. I grieved for months. Moreover, I knew that if I didn't marry him, I’d have to go back to Israel that summer after graduation and work at the hospital. I had promised my cousins and grandmother that I’d return. But I didn’t want to go. It was more than being gun shy; the idea terrified me. So I turned back to Richard. All through college, I would go out with someone, break up, then go out with Richard again. He was my best friend, my fallback lover, my Plan B. He was lovable and familiar. And always there. He’d asked me to marry him more times than I could count. Finally, I said yes. Poor guy, he never knew I married him to keep from going back to Israel—or that I married him on the day Jordie and I had said we’d get married: December 22, 1968. By the way, decades later when I was visiting Montreal, I actually called Jordie and said, “I’d like some closure. This has bothered me for thirty years. What happened?” It turns out he’d had his whole life planned out—finish law school, go to Europe for a year, come back and open a practice—and I didn’t fit. He had met me the wrong year. I just didn’t fit into his planned life. “Go for it” gone awry! In any event, Richard and I had an all-out Jewish wedding. I wore a velvet dress with a ten-foot-long train that I could hardly drag along the carpet. Doug, Richard’s brother and best man, tore up his prepared speech and toasted us instead by saying, “A man is supposed to marry his dead brother’s wife—so if Richard hadn’t married you, I would have!” An interesting wedding, a not-so-interesting marriage—and only the first of four!
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C h a p t e r
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Setbacks are for Working Through
At twenty-three, as the result of my physical therapy training, I was fortunate to self-diagnose Hodgkin’s. This was my crucible, which taught me the value of life, the value of persistence, and the value of fighting for whatever was worth having. That experience became an important part of who I was then and who I am now.
By the time I married Richard, I’d been working at the Veteran’s Administration (VA) hospital for about six months. I had started there when I first graduated because they had an opening, but was really just waiting for an opening at the Jewish General Hospital, where I had met Carol. As soon as an opening came up at Jewish General, I moved over. In the meantime, I was doing my best to be a good wife, but I wasn’t all that enamored with being married. I felt as if I was always waiting. Richard was in the retail business—ladies’ clothing stores—and usually worked very late hours. I was forever looking out the window, waiting for him. It was so disconcerting: I had one life at work and a totally different life at home. I would do all kinds of things just to fill time
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because I didn’t have many friends except for the women at work. Regular physical therapy may not have been as stimulating as Israeli physical therapy, but life outside of work was very ho-hum. Work was an entirely different situation. Being a people person, I soon knew everyone’s name, from the chief of such-and-such to the janitors, especially once I moved to Jewish General. I’d walk through the hospital as if it were my community. I was passionate about helping people. From a life-training perspective, those years as a physical therapist taught me two vital entrepreneurial concepts: time management and how to look for symptoms and create solutions. ** School fails to teach you so many things, some of which should be obvious, such as when you actually have a workload, you have to make it work. You can’t leave out a patient because you just didn’t get there. I received a list of patients to see every day—sometimes a very heavy list—and each person had to feel they were getting my very best. I had to manage my time well, which meant figuring out the little quirky things that would allow me to do my job effectively. For instance, I realized I needed to start at the top of the building and work my way down. It also helped to plan how many patients I could do before lunchtime—simple ideas, but they nevertheless seemed to elude some of my coworkers. I soon realized other people just couldn’t manage the same kind of workload I could. For the first time, it occurred to me that people worked at different paces and had different abilities—and that things weren’t necessarily fair in the workplace. Where I might handle twenty patients in a day, someone else could only handle twelve. But we were earning the same wages. My first taste of inequality. But I had to make it work and, at the same time, make everyone feel special. I didn’t use the term then, but now I would call it “The Client Experience.” Everyone has to have a good experience with me. That’s my intention. My patients had to feel loved and safe or the physical therapy wouldn’t be as effective, something I’d learned from my role model Carol when I was eleven. While making each person feel special, I still got through everyone on my patient list.
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To me, it was a simple matter of strategizing and planning. I didn’t just “let it happen,” I figured out how and in what order I was going to get the work done. If one person wasn’t available, I would see another. I was always strategizing, planning and re-planning, which, of course, is an entrepreneurial constant. I also looked for symptoms and created solutions, another entrepreneurial concept that has served me well through many, many businesses. Patients had presenting issues or symptoms such as, “My neck hurts.” But it wasn’t always about their neck. The pain might have been due to their posture or their back—or their back problem might be due to their neck, which might be due to how they sat. Discerning the root cause of the problem was a process. I wouldn’t just think, the sheet says this person’s neck hurts. I’d think, why does this person’s neck hurt? It was a study with each person. Once I figured out the underlying problem, I knew what to do. Over the years, I have found that people approach most business issues in one of these two ways: either “Here’s the symptom, just treat the symptom,” or “Here’s the person, let’s treat the person.” The first way is the tried-and-true corporate path. The second is the spirit of entrepreneurism. ** Richard and I had been married about a year and a half and were living with my brother-in-law for the summer when mononucleosis broke out in the area. Douglas got mono. Fortunately—or so I thought—I didn’t. One day that August, we went waterskiing and I fell. That night as Richard and I were eating dinner in a restaurant, he said, “What’s that big lump on your neck?” At first, I thought it had something to do with the waterskiing but then I felt it. It was huge. I went to see a doctor the very next day. He told me I had torn a strap muscle. I was a physical therapist; I could deal with a torn strap muscle. I took down my Grey’s Anatomy and tried to figure out what strap muscle I could have torn but it just didn’t make any sense. So I called one of the
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orthopedic surgeons I knew at the hospital. “Dr. Heller, Dr. So-and-So told me I tore a strap muscle and to forget about it, but I can’t believe I should. It’s huge. Can I come see you?” It was five o’clock at night, but I went right to his office. He looked at my neck and grimaced. “You know, you’re a good girl and I like you a lot so I’m going to tell you something. This is something bad. You need to take care of it. I don’t know what it is but I’m going to send you to Dr. Steiner.” I automatically began strategizing. “It’s five-fifteen, Dr. Heller. Dr. Steiner is in his office until six o’clock. Would you call him for me and ask if I could come right over?” Dr. Heller said yes. Dr. Steiner said yes. I was in a medical building at the bottom of a hill and Jewish General was at the top, so I went charging up the rise. Later I realized that if the lump had been an aneurism, I’d have been dead by the time I got there, but since it didn’t have a pulse I just raced up the steps. Dr. Steiner was a cardiovascular thoracic surgeon having a mid-life crisis, so he always wore torn operating room (OR) shirts that showed his tanned, hairy chest. As I sat on his examining table panting, he said, “Why are you so out of breath?” “It’s not because of your OR shirt, Doctor. It’s because I ran up the stairs.” For some reason, that statement struck him as funny, and set us on the course to a close relationship. But the lump on my neck wasn’t something he handled, so he sent me on to the chief of surgery. After that, things happened at whirlwind speed. I had a biopsy within a week, confirming the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s. I had my spleen out within another week. (I remember my first thought at seeing the breast-to-groin incision: I won’t be able to wear a bikini! Such are the priorities of a twenty-three-year-old.) The pace of it—the swiftness in which I had the biopsy and the surgery—is why I’m still here.
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The idea that I was dying didn’t hit me until I noticed five other people in the hospital who also had Hodgkin’s. They all died. I was the only one that didn’t. By then, I had realized I really wanted to live and was terrified I wouldn’t make it. But my fear was nothing compared to Richard’s. He was terrified I was going to die. My devoted husband—the guy who had asked me to marry him so many times I couldn’t count them, the guy who cried so hard when he heard the news about my Hodgkin’s—visited me only once in the hospital. Fortunately, my mom, my brother—with his horrible sympathy-pain stomachaches—and my mother-in-law were all there for me. Richard’s brother Doug sat up with me all night before my operation. In fact, both Douglas and Morrie subsequently went to medical school and became doctors because of my illness. But Richard couldn’t even bear to kiss me. He was afraid he would somehow catch my cancer. When the doctors took out my spleen, they tied my ovaries behind my uterus and told me not to have children. When I was in the hospital, I had nurses around the clock. When I underwent six weeks of radiation with all its typical side effects—my hair fell out in back, I became very frail, I was in a lot of pain—my mother drove me to and from the therapy. When my father-in-law thought I was going to die, he promised to buy me a car. All of a sudden, everyone was feeling some kind of empathy. But not my husband. I didn’t work during radiation but went back to work as soon as I could. Not for the money—I didn’t want to be alone in the apartment! I was alone all day and most of the night with all the fear and anxiety. As it got closer to Christmas—which, in the retail business, means long, long hours—Richard worked morning, noon and night. It wasn’t much of a life. Even after the surgery was declared a success and I’d finished the entire course of radiation, he never lost his fear of my dying—or, more accurately, that we’d have a couple of kids, then I’d die, and he’d be stuck with the children. Later in life, he very much regretted his attitude, because he never got married again or had children. But at the time, he couldn’t see past the word “cancer.”
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After a while, in fact, I started thinking I would die if I stayed with him simply because we get what we expect and he expected me to die! Right around that time, a friend took me to see Love Story. As I sat in that theater and watched Ryan O’Neil sit by Ali McGraw’s bed throughout her entire illness and death, I started to cry—not because of the film itself but because there I was, living through something so similar, but with no support or love from my husband at all. I cried for three days. My prognosis was considered “Unknown” for five years. I had to go to the doctor every couple of weeks, then every three months, then every six months to have my blood checked. In the meantime, my relationship with Richard just kept deteriorating. He still wouldn’t kiss me. He couldn’t get over his fear, so in his mind, I was practically dead already! He was right about one thing, though: I really wanted to have children. When they told me I couldn’t, it became even more important. But, obviously, I wasn’t going to have them with Richard. We split up in December, two years after we got married. I wanted to live. One part of me says I wouldn’t have known I had Hodgkin’s if it hadn’t been for him and the water skiing making the lymph node swell so much it bulged out on my neck. On the other hand, my mother says if I hadn’t married Richard, I wouldn’t have been with Douglas, who had mono, so I wouldn’t have developed Hodgkin’s in the first place. But who knows? It might have shown up later in my life anyway. My parents never really liked Richard.
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C h a p t e r
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New Adventures
In the early seventies, a patient of mine invited me to tour his office furniture factory while the physical therapists were on strike. That little tour resulted in my taking a position in the factory that evolved to the Chief Operating Officer—although we didn't call it that in those days. Along the way, I married the owner.
December, 1970 Before Richard and I split up, my parents took me with them to a beverage-industry trade show in Philadelphia. There I was, thin as a rail with my hair just starting to grow back, working at my father’s booth, giving away chocolates filled with his cola substitute. One particular fellow from Coca Cola came to the booth every day. He was thirty years old, blond, blue-eyed—and hitting on me. By the third or fourth day, this was very flattering. I spent a couple of wonderful afternoons with Jim. He would tell me I was a mess, which was his way of saying he found me attractive. I thought, Wow, I’m still a woman. I don’t have to not be kissed.
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I’m a very loyal person but I’ve done this a couple times in my life. It was the only way I knew to get out of a situation in which I felt trapped. It wasn’t a strategy on my part—I didn’t expect it, I wasn’t looking for it. It just popped up. And I was shocked; I’d never realized I would do such a thing. But it was wonderful to feel like an attractive woman again after living all those months with Richard, who made me feel undesirable, rejected and pushed to the curb. Richard later said he knew something was up because when I got back to Montreal, I didn’t stop at the store to see him, I just went home. A week or so later, I told him I wanted a divorce. We both sat in the living room and cried. I knew I was still sick and facing a long recovery but I also knew I wanted to live, and my “Unknown” prognosis terrified me. The anxiety and panic would build up in my chest every day. Not only couldn’t Richard do anything to help it, his constant fear that I would die just made it worse. After the affair with Jim reminded me that I was a viable, attractive woman, I finally realized I could deal with the situation better on my own. Richard and I certainly weren’t going to make it together. It was time to move on. So I moved back in with my parents, who transformed their basement into a little apartment for me, and went to see an attorney. “I can get you lots of money because his parents are rich,” the lawyer said. “How long will that take?” “Well, divorces can take as long as three years.” At that time in Canada, you had to either prove adultery or claim some mental cause to get a divorce. Richard had already said he would make it easy for me. He’d get pictures taken of himself having an adulterous affair—just as long as I didn’t ask him for money. So I told the lawyer, “It’s not about money. I just want to be free. If I fight about money for three years, I’m going to be dead. I don’t want that. I want to totally focus on being alive.” And that’s how I left my marriage with only the money from our joint account: $100. I had given Richard every penny of what I’d earned for two years. It wasn’t big money but it wasn’t shabby; physical therapy is
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a profession. I had expected to find more in our joint account. Richard said he lost it all to poor investments. I didn’t understand that but I didn’t ask for an accounting of it either. I was traditional. A nice Jewish girl. Leave the financial matters to the man. ** My parents were thrilled to have me back. I was the first of the boomerang children. I still had my job, which meant I could make money, live rent-free in the basement, and get back on my feet. So, of course, the first thing I did was buy a car: an MGB convertible. It cost $2100. I only had $500 and had to pay the $1600 over twenty-four months. Even worse, it was the most ridiculous car for Montreal winters. Dr. Steiner took one look at it and said, “That’s a car for someone in the fast lane.” “Yeah, but if I die in the next five years, I want to at least have lived a little.” It made sense to me. At that point, I was Dr. Steiner’s physical therapy specialist. He had open-heart-surgery patients and amputees. He also had a little girl patient with lupus. Beth was eleven years old and dying. She asked her parents if I could be with her when she died. All through my entire ordeal with Hodgkin’s and the rape in Israel and everything I went through with Richard, I’d never had one Valium, but when that little girl died, my mother had to come collect me. I was a puddle. As I took a Valium, I decided right then that I was too raw. I couldn’t do physical therapy anymore. I was in the midst of five tough years, where every time I was happy I was afraid I was going to die and every time I saw something tragic, I came unglued. So I gave up physical therapy. It was almost that simple. **
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Within a few months of leaving Richard, I started dating again. Mostly I dated doctors because that’s who I met at the hospital. It seemed like every one would eventually say, “You’re so great, we have so much fun together. I’m really falling for you. But … we don’t know your prognosis. I think we should break it off.” Ohmigod, I thought after this had happened several times, I’m never going to have a normal life ever again! Everyone thinks we have to wait five years. And I was in a hurry. At twenty-three, five years is a very long time. So I went to Florida with my girlfriend Evelyn to relax. Along the way (and unbeknownst to my parents), I took a short side trip to visit Jim, the Coca Cola guy. We spent a weekend in Atlanta enjoying the falling snow—and that was the end of that. We kept in touch for a couple of years. He was very sweet, but there was nothing more to it. He’d been a catalyst for me, a means to an end, not the end itself. On the way up from Florida (and Atlanta), Evelyn and I went to Baltimore, where she introduced me to a doctor friend of hers, Andy. I guess he must have fallen for me hard because he decided to come visit me in Montreal where, unbeknownst to me, he called on my father. “You know, your daughter has had a really tough time, and probably no one would marry her because she’s been sick. But I’m a doctor and I can take good care of her. I’d like to marry her.” “Have you talked to her?” “No, I thought I’d talk to you first.” “I have nothing to do with it,” my father said. “I think you’d better talk to her.” In retrospect, it was awfully sweet, but at the time I didn’t see anything positive about it. Andy went back to Baltimore and I went back to work. Meanwhile, the divorce was moving forward. By the time I met Kenneth, Richard had undergone an attitude adjustment. He felt so guilty about not being able to handle my Hodgkin’s that he decided the least he could do was make me look good. If I was going to be single, then I was going to look gorgeous. He would invite me to the store and
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shower clothes on me: a fur coat, mini-skirts, hot pants, all kinds of outfits. I’d never had so many clothes in my life. I looked great. The shrinkage in his stores was very high that year. I actually met Kenneth before I had my epiphany with Beth. He was in the hospital for elective surgery on a bone spur and needed crutches. I went up to the ward and gave him the crutches—and from that point on, he pursued me relentlessly. He was thirty-two years old, British, never married and sure I was “the one” for him—but he never told me the one-hundred percent truth about anything. Everything was “show” to Kenneth. He had a lot of British class-conscious issues. He lived in a really nice apartment—without a stick of furniture in his living room. He claimed he owned “a fleet of cars.” They were only two little station wagons, one for him and one for his brother-in-law, but he had a need to present them a certain way. My parents found that odd. They actually didn’t care for him anymore than they had for Richard, but he fell for me hard. When the physical therapists went out on strike, Kenneth invited me to tour his factory and see where he worked. I was so taken with that factory! I’d never been to one before other than my father’s shop, which was really a lab that made soft drinks in great big vats rolled around on enormous dollies. Kenneth’s company made acoustical office panels and decorative plants, two businesses in one, both for offices. Walking around with him, I was amazed at everything I could see—and had a million-and-one suggestions. “Why don’t they do this? Why don’t they cut the fabric this way?” Kenneth was an industrial engineer yet here I was coming up with all these concepts. He was as amazed as I was. “Well, hot shot,” he said, “why don’t you come work here while you’re on strike and see if you like it?” So I did. I ended up working with him even while I continued as a physical therapist. When Beth died and I fell apart, I knew where I really belonged—in Kenneth’s business. I started doing the purchasing. Then I pretty much took charge of operations. We got engaged that
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summer and married in November, shortly after I turned twenty-five on October thirteenth and just a few weeks shy of a year after my divorce from Richard. But first, while I was still living at my parents’ home, Kenneth sold his car. “How can you just sell your car without talking to me?” I said. “What are you going to drive?” “I’m going to drive your car. When we get married, I’ll drop you at the hospital and then I’ll take your car and go to work.” “No. Oh no. It’s my car. You can’t do that.” My car was a symbol of my independence. The whole time I’d been married to Richard I’d had to take three buses to get to and from work, and had been totally dependent. I could never come and go as I pleased. That was not going to happen again. But by the time we had this, our first big blow-up, he had already sold his car. I’ve never been smart enough to see all the red flags before a marriage. Kenneth wasn’t really making any money; he just appeared to be well off. He claimed he sold his car because his mother never drove; it was normal for him to have only one car in the family. But mine was an MGB, a two-seater. The stupidest car you could have! It didn’t make any sense as a family car. I think the truth is he really liked my zippy little MGB and just figured he’d take it over. I was adamant that he wouldn’t, so in the end he figured that his father, who was in the business with him, would pick him up. Because I’d been married once before—my parents had spent $10,000 on that wedding—I didn’t want to have a big affair again, so we got married in my parents’ house. It was almost like a competition. We figured we could get seventy people in the house, thirty-five of our family and thirty-five of theirs. They didn’t have thirty-five family members; they had to scrape to find people to invite. But they never said, “You know what? We only need ten people; you can have sixty.” It was never like that. It was, “You’re having thirty-five? We’ll find thirty-five!” An interesting relationship from the beginning, although I got along with his family for the most part. But not entirely.
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My parents didn’t believe in celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving because they were Jewish, but Kenneth’s parents did. So there we were, married two years with a baby—Michael was born by then—and they invited us to their house for Thanksgiving. The night before, we happened to be over there and my mother-in-law said she was having trouble with her oven. She gave me the turkey to take home to prepare for noon the next day. Now, I had never prepared a turkey in my life. I had no idea what to do but I wasn’t going to tell her that. There was this little underlying rivalry between us and I think she kind of wanted to show me up. At least I took it that way. So I just said, “Okay, I’ll bring the turkey back by noon.” As soon as I got home, I called my mother. “I know you have a really quick turkey recipe, my aunt’s recipe. How do you do that?” The system had to do with wrapping the turkey tightly in tinfoil so it only took twelve minutes a pound to cook. Well, it was the second Monday in October, already snowing, and there I was, driving all the way across town in the snow, to pick up long tinfoil from my mother so I could get the turkey ready by noon for my mother-in-law. My aunt’s system worked: it was an unbelievably succulent turkey, not a dry morsel on the bird. My mother-in-law was blown away. She wanted the recipe but I never gave it to her. Maybe if she had told me what to do or been nice to me … but no, she didn’t and wasn’t, so I never, ever gave her the recipe. ** After we got married, I transitioned to working full-time with Kenneth in the factory. He reasoned that because he had invited his father into the business, it would be good to have his wife in the business especially, as I learned over the years, because he was very over-protective and needed to know where I was every minute. I reasoned that since we both knew we wanted children, working together was a sensible way to integrate our work and our personal lives. And I loved the factory! Every day, there were issues, problems, and challenges. I really got my teeth into it. I began to realize that I was an entrepreneur at heart, so this was a natural progression for me. I was coming up with all kinds of ideas and implementing them—something
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you don’t get to do when you’re working for someone else who has the final word on which suggestions to implement and which to ignore. Many employers don’t even appreciate employees coming up with new ideas. But when you own and run the company, you can make any changes you see fit. For example, they would get an order for fifty acoustical screens. They would cut one piece of material, put it on the frame, and move onto the next. I said, “Why are you doing that? How are you keeping order that way? Why don’t you cut fifty pieces and put them to one side so that when you’re ready to do this order, they’re already waiting? We can move the screens out faster.” Speed was an important issue because the orders always got out late. The factory wasn’t systematic at all. Kenneth had an engineering degree but he hadn’t applied any logical system to his production sequence. Once again, it was a time-management problem: here are the symptoms, this is what we aren’t doing, here’s how we fix the problem. That’s exactly how I looked at everything. I started keeping ledger cards to figure out how many frames we needed, how much fabric, how much fiberglass, how much this and how much that. It wasn’t all that difficult and I enjoyed it. Then I set up schedules: if it’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we work on this order, then we work on that order. For the first time, the company was actually growing and providing delivery when we said we would provide delivery. Fortunately, my husband didn't feel threatened by any of this. It worked for him. He only felt threatened when there was something that didn’t work for him. But we were making progress and soon, we were making money. We ended up being able to buy a house. Then we were able to buy a bigger house. Then we could afford to have two cars. It all just worked.
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Another Stale Marriage
When I was busy in my role as operations manager at the office-office furniture factory, I was also pregnant, seeing private patients and teaching a biology class to continuing education students. Money was tight and I had a baby on the way, a fact my students thought was hysterical since I was teaching them sex education. It was time to figure out how I would continue working with a child at home.
When Kenneth and I married November 1971, we both knew we wanted kids. And, yes, I got pregnant on our honeymoon—but we didn’t go on that honeymoon until the following July. We went to Europe and traveled by car through Amsterdam, Holland and Denmark. Michael was conceived in a tent and born the next April, in 1973. We had delayed our trip so that we could afford to take off an entire month. Before we left, Kenneth turned off the electricity in the apartment because, he said, we’d be away so long. I don’t know what he thought needed turning off. He was often too smart for himself.
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When we got back, we were met by a horrible smell coming out of the apartment and the refrigerator was covered in green moss. You can’t get that kind of a smell out of a fridge. But rather than just accept the responsibility that we needed to buy a new refrigerator, Kenneth sabotaged it instead. He did something to the plug to make it look like it had shorted so the landlord would have to take care of the expense. It was a small matter but it felt like a very big deal to me. It was gradually dawning on me in those first few months that all the niceties from the pursuit were gone. In their place were so many untruths, so many things that rerouted our relationship. I remember discussing the refrigerator incident with my parents, who would have never done something like that—turning off the electricity or deceiving the landlord. All of us got really uncomfortable. I started thinking, who is this person I married? What kind of things does he do? ** By that September, I was doing two other jobs besides working at the factory because we didn’t have enough money to make ends meet. The first one was seeing private physical therapy patients, referred by the hospital or one of the doctors with whom I used to work. They weren’t the same as critical-care patients; their problems were chronic. It was easier for me to go to them than for them to get to the hospital. The second job was teaching continuing education. It turned out that my seventh-grade teacher, Lenny, was an old and good friend of Kenneth’s, and he needed someone for an adult biology class. I had no experience as a teacher but Lenny figured I was credible because of my physical therapy background. So there I was, twenty-five years old and pregnant, teaching biology and sex education to people of all ages who had dropped out of high school and were now back to finish. I remember the students calling to say they missed me while I was in the hospital having Michael. I only taught one more semester after he was born, though, because by then it was getting old. Teaching the same stuff over and over for two semesters was enough. I did continue with the physical therapy patients for a while but after a couple years that got old, too.
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To facilitate the changes that come with a baby, I created an office in the house so I could keep up with my work for the factory. This was long before anyone thought of home offices. I just figured, “If I can do all this work at home with the baby, then I can stick him in the car and drive to the factory and deliver this or that.” We had a fax machine in the house, so Kenneth and I could transmit instructions and such back and forth by fax. I never really took maternity leave, not even when I had Jennifer, in 1976. I had the office in the house and a planned schedule for visiting the factory. I hired a baby-sitter for when I was out or carried my little papoose with me. As the years went by, I continued this routine. As he got older, Michael would sit in my office at a tiny little Fisher-Price desk with his Fisher-Price phone and, while I placed orders to Fiberglass Canada, so did he on his own phone. He thought he was my most valuable employee. This was before computers and email—everything was still complicated and written up by hand. If I didn’t finish my work during the day, it continued after dinner and after bedtime. It was all for the “cause” of having a family. We were in this together, for the “cause.” I thought I had it all. ** The company had a number of financial issues. I don’t think Kenneth ever really knew how to run a business properly and, at the time, I didn’t know any more than he did. I knew how to do operations but not how to handle marketing. Then a lot of French-English issues came up in the Alberta government in 1977 and one of our biggest clients blackballed us because we were from Quebec. So we decided to move to Toronto. If only we could get to Toronto, I remember thinking. We had to sell our house at a loss because of all the political unrest and drive there in the travel trailer we’d left in Vermont to use as a country house. We opened a factory but had to live in the trailer for a couple of months until we could move into a house. I ran the office from the trailer with two little kids at my side. We had moved to escape the political nightmare in Montreal but the business still wasn’t managed that well. I wasn’t involved in its financial aspects; I just took care of getting the work done. Kenneth took care of
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everything else. We had a bookkeeper but she was interested in paying the bills, not in the company’s larger picture. I had a sense Kenneth didn’t handle financials effectively. To top it all, Kenneth was in denial that the business was going to go down. Kenneth’s dad was no help. He was only concerned with the part of the business that put together flower arrangements and trees, the internal décor of the office. And his brother-in-law, who had been selling for him, had stopped soon after we married. Within eight or nine months of our relocating to Toronto, the business went into receivership. ** At some point, I had thought that I would do things differently than Kenneth and wanted that opportunity. Besides, I needed something to do when the receiver came in and sold the company to its competition. I wasn’t going to go back to being a physical therapist. I would have had to retrain. Ontario had an entirely different certification program. I had let my private-patient efforts peter out as I got more and more busy with the kids and trying to keep the factory working—and I had a lot of guilt about that. When I was sixteen and impressionable and just starting McGill, the head of the school said, “If any of you are here because you want to get married, you should leave. There are only forty places in this class and they should be taken by people who want to make a career out of physical therapy, not someone who’s just studying this to find a husband.” I remember thinking, whoa, this is a big commitment. Of course, at the time it was what I’d been working for since I was eleven. I never expected to leave physical therapy. When I did, I felt I’d let the school down. I didn’t consider seeing patients at home as following the profession. So when my five-year reunion came around, I didn’t go. When my ten-year reunion came around, I didn’t go. When my twenty-five came around, I told myself I needed closure. I needed to go tell them the terrible thing I’d done, leaving the profession.
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About fifteen of the forty original students were there, all sitting around a table. They each introduced themselves; they were all heads of departments at this or that hospital. When it was finally my turn, I just looked at them. I was still shy enough to be terrified of speaking in a room with that many people in the first place. I said, “I’ve let you all down. I remember the head of school telling us this is for life.” Then I told them what had happened with the Hodgkin’s and with Beth, and how I just hadn’t been able to do it anymore. And I cried. Someone stood up, and said, “Hey, everyone. Can you think of a better reason to become a physical therapist than to self-diagnose Hodgkin’s and save your own life?” They all clapped. ** Just before Kenneth’s business folded, we had started to design a line of decorative wall clocks for office furniture boutiques. When the company went into receivership, Lenny and I decided to buy that piece from the receiver and start a clock business. My first company! I still knew nothing about money or marketing. I only knew how to produce the clocks. Lenny put up the money and we leased a small, 2,000-square-foot industrial space. That’s when I hired my first nanny, an au pair from Germany named Rosie. Michael called her “my Rosie.” She didn’t live with us but reported faithfully to work every weekday morning so I could go to my clock factory. That’s also when I first started suffering through all the traditional guilt that working mothers do. When I was at the office, I wanted to be home with Michael and Jennifer; when I was at home, I thought about all I had to do at the office. I also wanted to be like the other mothers and do my part at pre-school. I remember one day standing at a sink washing paint sponges with an apron over my business suit. I wondered what I was thinking—there was so much to do at the office and here I was washing drippy sponges! My son knew I couldn’t be a regular at the pre-school, but I felt that every effort I made went into the ledger in his brain, letting him know his mother cared, and tried.
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What I really didn’t understand was the mid-life crisis Kenneth was going through at the same time he was losing his business. Of course, it had been hard to live with him for some time. He was very controlling and had very high standards for everyone else, so it was a difficult marriage. I don’t know if he saw it that way, but I did. When Michael was small, he could never do anything well enough for his father. Kenneth treated Jennifer the same way. He wasn’t a very forgiving person and certainly not an entrepreneurial dad. He expected too much from the kids and if they didn’t do it right, he sent them to their rooms. From the time they were born, Michael and Jennifer had been in competition with each other. Who could run upstairs faster and so on. I didn’t like it but Kenneth fostered that competition. It’s really quite shocking to look back and see how ineffective I was as a person. But at the time, I felt it wasn’t worth the battle. Everything in our marriage always seemed to turn into a battle. Having been married once before and now having two children, I certainly didn’t want my marriage to fail, but all kinds of little things kept picking at me. For instance, he was always trying to take my car away from me. Once I had the children and was home, he figured I didn’t need a car. I figured I needed a car more than ever! In retrospect, I felt as if I had a pillow over my face the whole time I was married to Kenneth. Everything I wanted to complain about or stop would evoke a fight so huge that it was easier—and safer—to just keep my mouth shut and do my own thing when he wasn’t around. Being married to Kenneth was a lesson in how women were really treated, in sharp contrast to my parents’ you-can-do-anything credo. And, again, when I was at work, I was a different person. At the factory, I was in charge and things were working and running. At home, I played the dutiful Jewish wife. I had not yet learned how to balance my life and work. I only knew I wasn’t happy. The first year of my clock factory was the year Kenneth spent without a job until the competitor who had bought the bulk of the business hired him. During that year, Lenny and I moved our clock business, leasing factory space from a landlord who custom designed it for us. Ted, the
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architect doing the design (who later became my third husband), discovered early on that since Kenneth knew everything about everything, Ted didn’t have to inform him of anything. In a classic illustration of Kenneth’s need-to-control that I didn’t find out about until later, he told Ted that we needed so-many feet of turning radius for a forklift so the beams in the factory had to be exactly so-many feet apart. This was my factory that Ted was designing but Kenneth got involved with everything because he knew how it had to be done. A couple of years later, Ted and I were in another industrial building, a moving company. They didn’t have any beams at all. “How come there aren’t any beams in here?” I asked. “They don’t need to have beams.” “Why did we need to have them?” “We didn’t.” “Then why do we have them?” “Because Kenneth was so emphatic about where the beams needed to be put that I didn’t feel the need to tell him that you didn’t need them at all!”
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C h a p t e r
6
I Got the Clocks
We had no way to validate whether the clocks were going to be a good business, but we forged ahead. I got the money from Lenny and bought the division from the receivers. It was very foolish; I had no knowledge at all of how to start or run a business. Looking back, it was totally ridiculous, something I would never advise a new entrepreneur to do.
We called our company Deko Clocks. The clocks were solid wood, leather, or acrylic with different graphics—your basic kitchen or office clocks. We sold them through the network of office reps we already had. But truthfully, how many clocks does any office buy? It was ludicrous that we actually expected to make money doing things this way. There was no real thought behind our enterprise. It was all wishing and hoping. And I built a factory for it! ** Sears was Simpson’s Sears in Canada, an affiliate of Sears Roebuck in the states. Eventually, one of the reps got an appointment
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with them to sell the clocks. By that point, though, I was starting to see the light and realize there was no way on earth I was going to make money with the business the way we were running it. I offered to go to the Sears meeting instead of the rep. He looked at me and said, “You know, they’re probably one of the most difficult companies to deal with. And you’ve never sold a darn thing. What are you thinking?” “Well, it is my business and I need to know the truth.” Reality wasn’t really my strong suit. I went to visit Kurt, who had been a Sears buyer for a long time. He liked the clocks and was very sweet to me throughout our meeting. At the end he said, “I’m gonna keep your clocks and put them in my sample room. We’ll make a decision in March.” My mind started racing. This is January. If he doesn’t make a decision until March, I’m not going to make any money until then. This is a losing proposition. So I told him it was very kind of him but I’d take my samples with me. “I think you’re just being nice to me but you could be even nicer by answering a question: how does anyone make money in the clock business?” He roared. “You know,” he said, “as long as I’ve been a buyer, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that question. But there is an answer. And I’m going to share it with you because I’ve been trying to convince different people to create a certain kind of clock for me and no one wants to do it. They think it’s junk.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a few brochures. I’d just been to the gift show in California, so I recognized them: simple framed pictures of a sunset or a scene with a battery-operated clock up in the right-hand corner. The clock face was printed onto the picture. “These are going to be really big,” he said, “but no one wants to make them. Do you think you could?” I said, “Sure, that’s easy.”
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I’d just been running an office furniture factory; of course I could get them made for him. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give you two weeks to come back here with samples and a plan on how you’re going to do this. If you can prove to me you can do it, I’ll give you my business. And I’m taking a huge chance, so the plan is important.” We shook hands and off I went. This was before the Internet, so I was doing my research the old-fashioned way. But I’d always had the ability to ask people for help if it wasn’t for me, especially if I was asking for resources. “Where do I find this? How do I find that?” So I went back to my office, picked up the phone, and called dozens of people who gave me leads to dozens of others who gave me leads to still others. When I found I could get lithographs from New York, I ordered a whole bunch. I knew there were rehabilitation centers where people go for occupational therapy that did things like woodworking. My physicaltherapy background played into that. I looked up rehab centers in the Yellow Pages and called around. I was looking to hire supervised people who needed the work and worked cheap. I had the rehab center workers glue the pictures onto Masonite and put a wood frame around them. Then I called Kurt. “You gave me two weeks, right? Well, it’s been one week and they’re ready now.” He was very impressed. I took him on a tour of the rehab center that would make the clocks the first season. If they were successful, we planned to buy the woodworking equipment and make them ourselves the second season. And that’s what we did. That first season Sears sold a ton of clocks. The next season we had some of the machinery at the back of our small warehouse and I looked for larger space. I ended up leasing 15,000 square feet from a landlord who was putting up a beautiful, new 30,000-square-foot building (the one in which Kenneth knew where to put the beams) and was very fond of me. He didn’t know any other women entrepreneurs, so I was his key tenant. The building had two
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round sections in the front and the offices were very pretty. Because I had Sears’ business, it was much easier to get business from the larger catalog houses. And that’s how I got the business going. By that point I knew about operations and marketing but I was always looking for new people and ideas. I met my receptionist, for example, while I was standing in her checkout line at the grocery market one day. She had such a good customer-oriented approach that I asked, “Do you want to continue working in a supermarket or would you be interested in working in an office?” “I have no office experience,” she said. “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll train you. You have the right attitude.” Another time I was having dinner at the Pickle Barrel and saw this amazing guy bussing tables. He was so fast—he had incredible manual dexterity. I called him over and asked the same thing: “Do you want to continue working as a busboy or would you be interested in working in a factory?” Within two months of his starting work at our company, he was the factory manager. I read in a trade journal that the largest clock company in the United States was in Chicago. They manufactured all the ridiculously molded clocks—owls with swinging eyes, cats with swinging tails and so on—that were so popular at the time. I knew I’d have to pay a huge duty to import them into Canada but if I brought them in pieces, the duties would be much smaller. I called the guy whose name was on the ad and told him I had a clock company in Canada and would be in Chicago the next week. I said, “I have two dates I’m contemplating. If you’re available on one, I’ll meet you for lunch.” He was, we did, and by the end of lunch, we had decided on a reciprocal-license agreement. He would get my clocks and put them together in the states—the original design clocks I’d gone to Sears with in the first place—and I would buy his components and put them together in Canada, which allowed me to buy the battery-operated
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clocks in higher volumes. This was a lot of fun for our Canadian department stores because they hadn’t been able to buy the imported clocks due to the high duties. I sold mirrors and a whole lot of other stuff along with the clocks and the company took off. We had a lot of problems—I learned everything by making mistakes, some two or three times!—but I got down the marketing and sales parts. Unfortunately, I still didn’t really know the financial side. I was using borrowed money with a line of credit because the company was growing so fast that it was very hard to keep up with the capital required. Interest rates started to climb and climb and climb. When I first went to Sears, they were at twelve percent; by 1980, Canadian interest rates were at twenty-one percent. I had a potential investor beyond Lenny who was very excited about the company and I’d recruited a wonderful sales manager who came from one of the department stores. The company looked like it had a very bright future. We were told we’d have half a million dollars in investment capital. Then, suddenly, that went away. The guy couldn’t perform. He had his own issues. I went to the bank to tell them what was happening and they said they were going to have to call in their loan. ** This was one of those instances where I didn’t know that women were different from men. Back in the seventies, when I first started the company, I had walked into the bank and asked for a line of credit. After we concluded everything we were going to do, the bank manager said, “Oh, by the way, send your husband in to sign the papers.” “Why do I need my husband’s signature?” He looked surprised. “Because we don’t give women a line of credit on their own. Their husbands have to co-sign them.” “Well, then, I’m in the wrong place,” I said, standing up. “Because my husband isn’t part of my business, so he can’t sign. I don’t want him to be part of my business.”
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The bank manager waved me back into my seat, “It’s okay. Sit down.” He gave me the loan anyway. What I didn’t realize at the time was that he called Lenny and asked him for a signature. Because I didn’t have my husband sign, Lenny became personally responsible for the entire loan, instead of the company. I found that out very late in the game. Lenny was a silent partner; he mostly supplied the money and stood back. He was still teaching but had received an inheritance and felt this was something he wanted to do. He wasn’t in on many of the decisions. He only signed the papers because he believed in the clocks. Fast forward to 1980 and those high interest rates. I walked into the Sears buyer’s office and said, “We have a problem. The bank is thinking of calling our loan, the interest has gotten too high, and even if I make the clocks for you now, it doesn’t make much sense anymore since your price is based on twelve-percent interest rates and now it’s twenty-one percent. But I have the solution. Here are the names of three of my competitors who would love to have your business. If you asked them if they’d like to buy my company, they’d jump at it. Then you’d be back on track for the Christmas sales.” And that’s what we did. We contacted the three companies, they bought our inventory, and I was out of the clock business. The good news was that we took care of the customer; he didn’t lose his credibility or his reputation. The bad news was that neither my partner nor I really got anything except out of the business. That’s when I found out Lenny had signed with the bank. He lost a lot of money. He had to pay back what he’d pledged because he had signed a personal rather than a corporate line of credit. And so I lost my friend. I didn’t have the money to pay him. ** By the time Deko Clocks folded, Kenneth and I were separated. The company had started in June 1978 and we had separated at the end of November 1980. It wasn’t his company but he was my husband, and he was the industrial engineer who had planned the space and
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how the equipment would work as if the company would last fifty years. It had lasted about three. From morning until night, he’d had ideas about what I should be doing and if I didn’t do them, he wanted to know why not. The reason I could give him was that I didn’t agree with all his ideas. That’s what brought the marriage down. From morning until night, I had someone on my case about everything I was doing—and whether I was doing it well enough for his standards. When I would be on the phone in my office with the Sears buyer, for example, Kenneth would be there, listening. As soon as I hung up, he’d criticize every last thing I had said. Yet I was the one who had the relationship with Kurt! I remember telling him a funny story once because I wanted him to laugh so he would remember what I was saying. When I got off the phone Kenneth said, “That was a ridiculous story. You were wasting his time and yours.” “Yeah,” I admitted, “but we had a good time with it. You weren’t talking to him, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Needless to say, Kenneth’s constant critique was very undermining. I had enough pressure between having a partner, running a business, making decisions, and raising children. I didn’t need Kenneth’s constant critique. He had a set idea in mind about how he wanted everything laid down and I never followed any of his sequences on anything. It was all just too much. For example, when the kids got to school age, I started them early at a Hebrew day school. Michael did okay but Jennifer couldn’t cope. I wanted to pull her out of school. I’d been a much more passive child than Jennifer; she was a little hellion. It was easy to see she wasn’t happy; she acted out constantly. She wouldn’t even let me dress her. Since she’d already made one big change when we moved from Montreal to Toronto, taking her out of school didn’t seem like such a life-threatening act. But Kenneth never believed she was really struggling. He thought I only wanted to change her school because it would be easier for me, even though it was actually harder because I had to take Michael to one place and then take her somewhere else. After Kenneth and I separated, I took Jennifer in for psychological counseling to see how
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much she was struggling but Kenneth still refused to believe she was having trouble. He always saw everything I did from the worst possible perspective, as if it was all for my own benefit, never for anyone else’s. I finally had enough and left him. At that point, I believed I could do it on my own. The investor was interested and I had another season lined up with Sears. Everything was going right, which was important because leaving this marriage wasn’t going to be as easy as leaving the last one. But then, my parents had never really liked Kenneth, either.
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C h a p t e r
7
Out with the Old, In with the New
The real fun was just about to begin. I went through a bitter divorce. My ex-husband tried to take my children away because he considered me an unfit mother—I was out of town at trade shows thirteen days a year! I followed my attorney’s advice and fought about the money, not the kids, and by the time the divorce was final three years later, the kids stayed with me.
Okay, I didn’t really have the courage to leave on my own. And I didn’t like that fact. But Ted and I had become friends when I was going through the hardest time with Kenneth about how to build the factory and what machinery we needed. He was very attractive, very good looking—and very married. He was a very safe person with whom to have an affair since he was as unhappy in his marriage as I was in mine. I didn’t expect anything from him except emotional support. We talked to each other a lot and listened a lot. We were both at a place in our lives where we needed someone who understood us. When you’re married, you don’t always talk about your problems, even with close friends. Whatever goes on in your house is private; you try to work
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it out. Some people have a best friend or a mentor or a coach to talk to, but I didn’t. I didn’t have anyone. Ted and I understood each other’s marital distress and business woes. We touched something in each other. Eventually, though, I realized the idea of sharing him with his wife—who I couldn’t stand—became appalling. I was living in spurts, like a fireman, controlling one crisis after another with no time to think about the future and no idea of how to avoid situations that would lead to another crisis. Most of the time I felt oppressed and abused, as if I had to fight to keep my head above water. So I stopped seeing Ted altogether and asked Kenneth for a separation. No sooner had Kenneth moved out than Ted knocked on my door. “I’ve just left Cindy,” he said. “It’s now or never.” He moved in. It felt like the two of us against the world, going through what I later realized was an insane period. When Kenneth heard Ted had moved in, he kidnapped the children, took them to his parents’ house and refused to bring them back. Then he got a restraining order to keep Ted from living in the house. Ted immediately moved out of my place and into a spare bedroom one of my employees had, which allowed my lawyer to get Michael and Jennifer back for me by the end of the weekend. In time, he also got the restraining order lifted and Ted moved back in again. This time, no one had to contrive grounds for divorce. I was an abused wife. I hadn’t been physically mistreated, I’d been psychologically battered. I didn’t even realize I had been abused or what the term "abused" meant. And I had certainly never experienced anything like this at home, which flies in the face of conventional wisdom about abused women. First I’d married a coward—no one in my family had ever been cowardly—then I’d married an abusive man. Both had been so controlling! Yet I’d grown up in a household where everyone had their “happily ever after.” I guess “happily ever after” didn’t prepare me for real life. I was incredibly naive. No one had ever told me there were snakes in the grass. Kenneth went to court and told the judge I was an unfit mother, partially because of Ted, but partially, he claimed, because I was always traveling for business and wasn’t around for the kids. I went over my
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calendar; I was gone thirteen days a year! So we all went for testing: Kenneth, Ted, and me. It turned out that Ted and I were better parents for children growing up because we were better at fostering independence, while Kenneth was a better parent for a baby who needed extreme nurturing and care. At five and seven, Jennifer and Michael weren’t babies anymore. And since Canadian divorce takes up to three years, my lawyer had a different strategy this time around. “Children or money?” she asked. “Children,” I answered adamantly. “Good,” she nodded, “then we’ll fight about money. After three years of living with only you, no judge is going to take them away. They usually leave them with the mother anyway. So let’s fight about money and he’ll forget about the kids.” So we fought tooth and nail about money for three years, which had no effect on me at all because what I wanted out of the marriage—besides “out” of the marriage—was the kids. From the distance of time, I can see how none of this was quite fair to Kenneth. I don’t think I would have done these things with anyone else. But I was so fearful, not just that Kenneth would take my children away from me but, like any abused wife, I was just plain afraid of my husband. I needed a knight on a white horse. Ted was my rescuer. Ted had no children of his own but he really loved mine and was a good dad right from the start. We were like a classic joke. At thirty-two, I was an older Jewish woman with two kids. He was a childless twenty-nine-year-old Catholic. My parents weren’t happy. Neither were his. In the beginning, my father wanted to sit Shiva (as if I had died) because I was with someone who wasn’t Jewish. He wouldn’t talk to me for five or six months. Ted’s parents wouldn’t talk to him either. But they all came around. In fact, my parents liked Ted! We moved out of my house within about eight months and found a remote farmhouse on a beautiful piece of land in the northeast corner of the city, quite off the beaten track. Getting the kids to school was quite a drive. But for a while, we both felt as if it was us against the world.
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** I had made a deal with the company that bought Deko Clocks that I would work for them for the first year. We had a small office outside of Toronto. They liked the relationships I had with all the customers; when they bought me, they bought the relationships. They wanted it to appear as if Deko was still in existence. But after a year, the person who had previously been in charge of marketing wanted the job. I agreed that the relationship was over and started looking for other things to do. I tried a couple of different things, such as selling physical therapy equipment. I couldn’t find a good fit. Meanwhile, Ted had just started his architectural firm and it was beginning to grow. One day when I was waiting for him I heard his secretary say, “I think the books balance. They’re about ten cents off…” Well, I remember thinking, that could mean they’re ninety-nine dollars up or ninety-nine dollars down—somebody should check the books. When I brought it up to Ted, he started telling me about his company. People owed him a ton of money. I said, “Maybe it’s time for me to learn about finance and bookkeeping.” He was really worried at first about my getting involved with his company because we’d both be drawing from the same well. If the company wasn't a success, it would be bad. But it had always been part of my philosophy to try to incorporate my work into my life and my life into my work. We both enjoyed working really hard, so we figured we might as well be a team. I’d take care of the office, he’d take care of the architecture and design and finding the customers. So I learned to be a bookkeeper and managed the office for the next twelve years. The company grew and grew. At one point, we had as many as sixty architects. We even acquired another company. As computers became popular, we started to shrink the number of employees because we could be more cost-efficient with fewer people. In the meantime, the kids went to Kenneth a couple days a week and every other weekend. It was always difficult. Being kids, they didn’t always want to go. Being Kenneth, he always blamed that on me,
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claiming we were saying bad things about him to the kids. We weren’t, of course. Actually, it was nice having someone to take the kids off our hands every other weekend. Better than having to find a babysitter. Ted was far more of an entrepreneurial father than Kenneth had been and liked the way I parented, so we parented very well together. He was very kind and loving. When he took over with the big kids, he tried to use what his father had called the “board of education,” which was a paddle, but he never did much with it. Neither one of us ever really believed in it. A light tap on the hand was usually enough. Instead of punishing them, we usually reasoned with them. During the entire divorce-pending interlude, Ted was the one who talked to Kenneth. I just couldn’t. I felt so much anger and pain that I couldn’t bear to talk to him. The judge eventually said that even though I didn’t have the factory or the job anymore—I was working part time with Ted—I could have earned a good deal of money, so he split the money down the middle. I walked away from the marriage, again, with no resources. But I got the kids. ** At the end of those three years, Ted joined my family. Since he didn’t have any kids of his own, we decided to have some together. Michael and Jennifer were ten and seven by then, so I felt we needed to negotiate how we would continue to expand the family and still allow me to “do it all.” I loved working in the firm and felt I had to contribute to the financial security of our family. Ted and I negotiated everything: how we wanted things to be, what was important, where we could compromise and where one of us had to give in. Coming from Milwaukee, he had strong family values, so he was a willing accomplice and easy to negotiate with. We came up with a plan for integrating our work and family so we could grow our business and enjoy our children together. Unlike with Kenneth, where it was pretty much all on my shoulders, I couldn’t have managed this plan alone. It took both of us to implement a plan of this nature. This is when the balance in my life finally kicked in and I started living holistically.
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Our first “deal” called for me to continue working and for us to hire a live-in nanny. We advertised for someone willing to work in an active, noisy household with lots of visiting children and lots of laundry and cleaning. The ad didn’t draw a lot of attention but our one call came from a very willing person. I only needed to use this ad a few times because my housekeepers always stayed a long time. Our second deal made sure we were always home for dinner at five-thirty so the children didn’t get hungry and cranky. We’d put the kids to bed and go back to work. I wanted the kids to be able to lead active lives with after-school sports and things like that. I didn’t want them feeling like their mother always worked, so I made sure I could go to a school play in the morning or watch a ball game after school. To compensate for the lost time, I often took work home. As computers became more popular, we actually rebuilt our house with a computer room so the kids could all participate. Our little place in the country grew from quaint-sized to a 7,500-square-foot mansion. We started right after Michele was born. I gave birth in May and demolition began in June. We continued living on the property in a 500-square-foot three-bedroom trailer for six months so I could supervise everything. This trailer was something else. Our two semi-grown children each had a bedroom with the crib in the middle—Michael had to climb around it to get to his room—and we had the third bedroom. Also in residence was Dusty, our Wire Hair Terrier, and somewhere in these confined quarters was my huge, 1984-vintage “portable” Compaq computer. The place felt like a zoo. Every morning the construction people would thump up a plank to the trailer and pound on the door. I’d appear with baby on one hip and drawings in the other hand. I was the general contractor for the house while still handling the bookkeeping and other matters for the architectural business. Ted brought me whatever I needed from the office. The work was similar to what I did at the factory, but much, much more complicated.
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I was being Superwoman! I even wanted to get my MBA at that point but Ted insisted it would be too much. As winter approached, crossing the front yard to the house became a treacherous battleground. I fell one time too many and announced it was time to move into the house. Now, picture this house: there were no stairs to the second floor so I had to climb up and down a ladder, baby and all. Ted and I slept on our queen-sized bed in the bathroom. The night after the construction workers put the insulation in the ceiling, it fell all over our sleeping bags. What an adventure in itchy living. Still, life went on, work went on, and the house was eventually finished. Ted and I both went to the office every day and usually got home in time for dinner. Afterwards, we went to the computer room. In fact, we worked at home for the most part, which is why the kids didn’t really know how hard we were working. On the weekends, their friends would come over and play in the backfield. To them, it was all so easy. ** A few years went by. Apart from work, I juggled getting my older children to their school on the other side of the city and taking Michele to pre-school. Our housekeeper was a tremendous asset but I still wanted to show my face and participate in the madness—and our fourth child was on the way! I nearly lost my cool when we decided to merge with another firm and the closing date landed just after my due date. I was a little concerned about job security as the new partners were not that keen on having a wife in the mix—especially not as the financial person. My youngest son had just arrived a week before the merger but I decided to be in the office that day anyway. I ran home at lunch every day to feed Cody, hoping staying with the housekeeper wouldn’t permanently damage him. What a Godsend Nanny was! She and her husband Poppy lived in our basement, the perfect resident grandparents.
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An average day began with Michael leaving bright and early with Poppy, then catching the bus to school with a skateboard for additional transportation. He came back to the office each day and we left for home. We chose an office with a Bally gym so we could work out without losing travel time. Life had to run like clockwork. I must admit, keeping to the schedule was a bear. Spontaneity went out the window. Somewhere in all this work and organized living, we still had a marriage to address. Every now and then, I gritted my teeth and booked a vacation somewhere because, we came to realize, it was essential to our functioning well both as a couple and as business partners. We always came back refreshed, recharged, and full of new ideas for more productivity and changes at the office. None of this was perfect. It was a series of trade-offs, many of which the children felt the most. They once complained, for instance, that other mothers left cut strawberries in the fridge for their kids. I’ve never figured out if that was true or not but I sure did feel guilty that I didn’t have those strawberries waiting for them. According to my kids, I never was quite like other mothers. Of course, they also claimed other mothers played football and because I was pregnant, I couldn’t comply. That was probably pushing their luck. By 1986, computers had improved a lot. All six of us had a computer in our upstairs computer room, even two-year-old Cody. Ted worked on his architectural masterpieces using AutoCAD, I used my accounting software, the older kids turned out state-of-the-art school assignments and the younger kids played games. I’m convinced Cody’s math skills are a result of those nights in the computer room. It was a crazy, hectic zoo but it was working. Or so I thought.
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Moving Out, Moving Up, Moving On
In 1991, we moved to California. Both Ted and I started over, as we had sold our architectural practice. About a year and half later, I found myself living in a bad country-and-western song. His taillights receded down the road, leaving me with four children, a mortgage, no family for support, and a fledgling new business. Everything just got harder
At the end of twelve years together, Ted went back to Milwaukee to visit his parents. Three months later, he told me our relationship wasn’t doing all that well, so he’d had an affair while he was in Milwaukee. I said, “That was three months ago.” “Yes.” I took a deep breath. “Now you’re going to tell me the woman you had the affair with is pregnant.” “Oh no,” he said, “but I’m telling you because I’m worried about you. I haven’t heard how she is.”
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I knew right then it was his girlfriend from high school with whom he had unfinished business. He said, “How did you know?” I said, “I’m not sure. It just makes sense.” I had no idea what had happened that the relationship suddenly wasn’t “doing all that well.” In today’s terms, he’d probably use the term “alienation of affection.” The children kept me so busy that he felt neglected, as if he wasn’t important to me anymore. Of course, I still ran his office; I still saw him all day, every day. But I spent my time at work staying on top of the books so we always knew where we stood. I knew the company financials were vital, so I always finished the month-end statement by the seventh of the next month. Everything worked well. We went to Europe every year. We had a beautiful home, a wonderful life. Until he got someone pregnant. I felt as if I was living in the Big Chill. Ted’s old girlfriend was thirty-nine and still nice looking with no kids. Along comes her old boyfriend, also still looking very good and now very successful as well. I remembered his telling me years earlier that she had sold her picture to Playboy for $10,000. I’d never thought much of her. “She’s going to call in the next week or two and tell us she’s pregnant and demand something from us, right?” “No!” He refused to believe she would do anything like that. I refused to believe he hadn’t stayed in contact with her, and I didn’t want to believe he could be so stupid as to not realize she’d set him up. Sure enough, she called. He passed her on to me. She said, “I want $5,000 a month in child support or I’ll make sure the police arrest Ted at the airport the next time he comes to Milwaukee to visit his parents.” Wisconsin had serious laws about deadbeat dads.
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I told her we couldn’t afford to pay her $5,000 a month and that she had made a choice. This was 1988, so ample birth control was certainly available. If she’d wanted a baby so badly, she could have just had one, she didn’t have to call Ted and demand money. Clearly, she just wanted a child and saw an opportunity to make some money from the situation, as she had with Playboy. We ended up buying her an annuity that provided $500 a month in child support until the baby was eighteen, which was more than I’d ever gotten. Plus, Ted maintained a relationship with the child. Meanwhile, my dreams felt shattered. Of course, I knew we had started by having an affair, so I figured what goes around does, indeed, come around. Being Catholic, Ted wanted to stay in the marriage no matter how many thousands of Hail Marys he had to say. But he was also part Italian, which meant that part of him felt I should be a good little stay-at-home wife while he played around. In fact, he wanted to tell everyone about the baby and include it in his—our—life. How was I supposed to tell my teenagers, who adored him, that their step-dad had fooled around and created a child out of wedlock? I didn’t even tell my parents until much, much later. ** Clearly, Ted and I needed to work on our relationship; just being a working team wasn’t enough. We also clearly saw the goods-and-services tax taking effect and another recession coming, so felt it was as good a time as any to wind everything down. In 1991, we decided to leave Canada and move to the United States. We gave our clients to another architect’s company and helped our people move on. We were trying to choose between Seattle and Newport Beach when Ted’s best friend David asked him to move to Newport Beach and get into investments with him. So we left our house on the market and off we went. We loaded up a forty-five foot trailer, including our boat, and sent it on ahead. Jennifer spent the summer in Toronto with her dad and Michael, then eighteen, stayed behind in anticipation of leaving for the University of Western Ontario. Ted stayed behind as well, to handle business-transfer matters. So Michele, Cody and I ended up driving our conversion van all the way across the country by ourselves.
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** After cold, damp, northern Toronto, California was like being dropped into paradise. We started out renting a beautiful house in Big Canyon, with its golf course community. Talk about culture shock. Mothers have a lot more to do around here, what with year-round sports like water polo first thing in the morning and soccer and baseball in their seasons. I was always coming and going and dizzily trying to keep up. Being new and shy and fiercely independent, I had a hard time asking other mothers for help. Besides, most of the other mothers didn’t work. Their lives revolved around carpooling, tennis, and the PTA. Our first year here, I learned that all the mothers helped prepare for the Spirit Run, a five mile race or walk around Fashion Island. My participation demonstrated how much of an anomaly I was. I went to the orientation, where I learned of the nine-day ordeal coming up when they expected me to report to school every day to count the forms returned by the parents. The first class to have all their forms in would win a pizza party. Being the entrepreneur I am certainly guilty of being, and strategizing being one of my core strengths, I came up with a strategy. When the packets were ready, I launched a telemarketing campaign. I called every parent and asked for their assistance by sending back their packet on the very first day. Otherwise, I knew, those forms would just sit around the kitchen. “This will help our kids win their pizza party,” I reminded each mother. I had my son follow up by calling each classmate to remind them to bring the packet to school the next day—a little pressure from a key accomplice. All twenty-nine packets, of course, came back the very first day. Cody’s class, of course, won their pizza party. And I, of course—the instigator of this incredibly efficient campaign—was never invited back. But my son was proud of me. **
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Meanwhile, Ted kept flying back and forth to Toronto to close the deal on the business—and probably have another affair. I knew by then that he’d had many affairs before me and probably while he was with me, too. It was just his way. He had a lot of good qualities plus one very disreputable one. Once he sold the business back in Toronto, Ted no longer wanted to be an architect. He wanted to be an investment banker instead. Here we had moved all the way to California to start a whole new life together but we weren’t going to work together anymore. Ted and David and another partner began looking at different start-ups. They did it from our house instead of going to an office but I wasn’t included. Ted apparently did not want me involved in anything now that he had David. In fact, he’d led David to believe the previous business had been his alone, that I was just a bit player on the team. David believed him. By then I had come to recognize when Ted was having an affair, so the next time it happened I went to a marriage counselor. Margaret said we needed to discover if Ted was a philanderer or just having affairs because a philanderer needs a different kind of help. Philandering is like a disease, she said, like being addicted to sex. The man needs the variety, the chase, and the experience to get the kick. I couldn’t live with the real possibility of another fifteen women over the next five years, so if Ted was a philanderer, I figured I would just get a divorce and live without him. If this girl turned out to be a fling, though, he’d be the one with the choice. “If he’s just having flings,” I said in one counseling session, “he should go back to Toronto and figure out if he wants to be with her or with me and his family.” I couldn’t keep living on the edge without knowing what was going on, especially since AIDS was rampant at the time. I had no idea what I would be catching. Finally, Margaret sat us down one day and said, “As far as I can tell, he’s just having flings.” Ted said he’d go to Toronto and think about it. And that’s when I heard the country-western theme playing in the back of my head, as I stood there in the driveway watching the taillights of his van drive down the street. I had three kids in school, a business I was just starting and an enormous mortgage to pay on the Big Canyon
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house Ted had bought for me out of guilt, not unlike Richard all those years ago. But we still hadn’t sold the house in Toronto yet, which meant he conceivably might not come back. I was terrified once again. He left on a Friday. Margaret had said to come back and see her afterwards, so I went to her office bright and early Monday morning. She said, “I think I’ve made a mistake.” “What do you mean?” “Well,” she said, “I’ve listened to the tape again, and now I feel maybe he is a philanderer.” “You call that a mistake?! I sent my husband off on a journey because I believed what you told us.” “I know it’s going to be really difficult for you,” she said. “We’d better set up a series of appointments.” I just looked at her. “Oh, no,” I said. “No, no. Now that he’s gone, you aren’t what I need. I made the decision to move all the way across the country based on what he said and I made the decision to send him off to Toronto to sort things out based on what you said. I think I’d be better off on my own.” So I looked for a different therapist, one for me, not us. I needed someone once a month or so, who could give me the tools I needed to know what to do next. I didn’t realize it then, but I was looking for a coach, for the very help I now give my own clients. But coaches were not available at that point in time, so I found a therapist who talked me through my options. I decided that if Ted came back and had another affair here, that would be my cue to end the marriage. It was. He came back and invited his lover to the house when he thought I was out of town. That last straw ended our relationship. But this time, I was beyond heartbroken. I’d loved him deeply, despite his infidelity. He had been my business partner, my lover, my husband, and my best friend. He had been my rescuer all those years ago. He had fathered two of my children.
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One of the things that helped me through the devastation was Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. In the movie, the radio alarm would go off every morning at six, playing the same song with the same chatter and leading into the same day as the last. The day after I saw Groundhog Day, my alarm also went off at six in the morning. As I rolled over to shut it off, I started to laugh. Well, I could do what he did in the movie and learn the lessons over time, or maybe I can learn the lessons from the movie and start living for today. So I made a choice. I didn’t want to be miserable. I didn’t want to wake up in fear anymore. It was like a new dawn. I made another choice: we no longer needed the five bedrooms, swimming pool and enormous mortgage of the Big Canyon house. I put it on the market and Ted and I agreed to split the mortgage until it sold. Unlike Canada, California has a no-contest divorce. We’d gotten here in July 1991, filed for dissolution of marriage in 1993, and were legally divorced in March 1994. Very easy mechanically. Not so easy emotionally. By then I was forty-six. I thought I had finally married my one true love. I hadn’t expected to be a single mom with three kids at home, another away at university, and a brand new business. Good thing I had already jumped back on the entrepreneurial wagon again.
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Building—and Breaking—From Scratch It’s hard to say life is tough when you live in Southern California. On the one hand, Newport Beach is paradise; on the other, it’s expensive and difficult for a single mom. I let the housekeeper go and forged ahead on my own.
Back in the early 1990s, in the midst of the family settling into Newport Beach, my father had introduced me to a Brazilian company that wanted to market an exciting hair-care product in the States. At first, I dismissed the idea but Ted encouraged me to look at it, so I sent a sample to a friend who was black and he tried it on his daughter. She got excited because she was suddenly able to take care of her own hair, so I got excited about the product, which seemed to enhance people’s independence as well as their self-esteem. In 1993, I started a company to market Rio. Well, I’d picked one hell of a business—the product crossed races! There I was a white woman with incredibly straight hair, selling a non-caustic, supposedly all-natural relaxer to blacks and Hispanics. Rio softened the hair bonds the way an old telephone cord stretches
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out over time. People had been using it in Brazil for fifty years to make kinky hair soft and manageable. Some people said it was the product responsible for Brazilians having all that beautiful hair. Whatever the case, our customers totally fell in love with it. I realized quite early, though, that my walking into black hair-care shops wouldn’t work. Not only was I white, I wasn’t a hairdresser. I just could not be credible in those stores. I had to find people to pitch the product for me. I called Essence and Ebony, a couple of magazines which were owned by and targeted to Blacks, and spoke to the management. Eventually, they led me to Mary, a Puerto Rican. She tried the product and fell in love with it. We agreed to split the work: I’d raise the money, she’d sell the product. The company limped along for a couple of years before I realized our approach wasn’t really getting us anywhere. Finally, I met a stockbroker who, in turn, introduced me to Peter, an infomercial producer. He called himself The Hair King. Looking back, I trusted Peter too much. I didn’t investigate him enough. I sat in his office while he told me a story about how he hated not being able to trust people. He had trusted one of his employees too much, he said, and had been disappointed. I felt the same way. He sucked me right in. I showed Peter what Rio did and how it boosted people’s self-esteem. Female customers across the country were sending in amazing stories about how the product had changed their lives. He got very excited about it, too. I ended up signing all the licensing rights over to him and together we produced an infomercial with me acting as the liaison between the company and the infomercial people. Meanwhile, since I still had my half of that huge mortgage to cover and three kids to support, I worked for my friend David for the nine months it took to get the infomercial up and running. David feared delegation because he never before had anyone to whom he could delegate anything. He’d had to keep control over everything. Then I showed up.
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David was renovating an old airport hanger and turning it into a studio. A good part of the building had to be presentable in six weeks for the American Film Festival. First thing, I said, “I know you’re wrapped up in the renovations, but you have other things you need to take care of. Why don’t I take over the renovation project?” His eyes flew open wide. “Do you know how important this is? Do you know what the due dates are? What if it isn’t complete? What if you can’t get it done on time?” I said, “Just leave it to me. I’ll devote my time to it and it will be ready in six weeks.” And it was. I got it done in six weeks, complete with a kitchen for the staff, because movie companies give their staff a lot of perks. It hadn’t been that hard. After all, I’d worked in an architectural firm and had been general contractor on my own house. From then on, I shadow-coached David, doing everything for him from opening his mail to following him to meetings. I was his one-woman entourage. But I always managed to get home by the time the kids arrived from school to be sure they did their homework. I got one of the first pagers so the kids could 9-1-1 me if something came up. We always stayed on top of technology. ** The licensing agreement between Peter and me paid me an escalating royalty. The product holder traditionally gets a flat five percent but I negotiated the deal so that the more we sold, the higher my percentage, up to twelve percent. The infomercial featured Mary and Andre, a hair stylist. During the filming, Andre did something unscripted that just drove the audience wild. He stuck his finger in the product, put it in his mouth and said, “This is so natural, I can even eat it.” You certainly couldn’t do that with a caustic relaxer! We shot up from selling almost nothing to selling twelve million dollars worth of product.
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The key to successful infomercials is having people buy the product once a month. Our infomercial aired over the summer and through the fall, about six months all together, and became a phenomenon. Peter was paying me a huge royalty. Somewhere along the way, though, I started to realize he was actually selling more product than he was importing. Soon after that, he decided he wanted to do away with my royalties. He could only “do away” with my royalties if an issue arose, like the Tylenol scare where the company had to apologize to its customers. So Peter staged an “issue,” and suddenly people’s hair started to burn, turn green or fall out. Now, that could not have happened if they were using the real product. Granted, it could turn hair green, but only if used over a prolonged period of time on blonde or gray hair. Grecian 5 had performed that way originally, too, but we hadn’t been selling Rio long enough for that kind of effect to occur. People were passionate about the product, which meant they were passionate about these alleged “issues” as well. They didn’t want anything to happen to their Rio. Peter asked Mary to go on TV and claim that the FDA had removed the product from the market. The FDA was a curious entity. They had originally told us we didn’t have to do any testing but the moment something went wrong, they wanted to see test results. As a result, the infomercial blew up in November 1994. Peter then asked Mary to go on TV and say the problems were all the result of a single bad batch—but she wouldn’t. Mary knew that whatever was harming people wasn’t her Rio and she was incredibly passionate about people not thinking it was. All this happened around the same time as the OJ Simpson white Bronco chase, so the news reports would flash back and forth between Rio and the OJ car chase. Peter finally took the product to Nevada and totally shipped it out. He owed me half a million dollars in royalties when everything ground to a stop. That’s when I got hit with the class-action lawsuit. **
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The class-action lawsuit sued Peter as the infomercial producer. I got attached to the case because of our affiliation and because I had been the person bringing the product in from Brazil. Fortunately, I knew more about what Peter had done wrong than the prosecutors could possibly have discovered, so I cut a deal on the criminal piece attached to the suit and worked with them to bring him down. I felt almost as much a victim as our customers. I suspected Peter had produced some kind of knock-off. I couldn’t think of any other reason the product would suddenly behave so differently. I had no evidence to prove anything, though. I only had evidence that he shipped more than the company purchased. If he didn’t make it, where had it come from? Meanwhile, I knew the original product had never harmed anyone’s hair, so we got it tested at an independent lab. The results proved that Rio was less harmful to the eyes than Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. I suppose we probably could have won the lawsuit but it would have taken more money than I had. We decided instead to let our liability insurance pay off the plaintiffs. Receiving a letter from an attorney telling me how horrible I was and what terrible things I’d done when I hadn’t was a unique experience. My first reaction was, “What are they talking about? I didn’t do any of those things!” I launched into a defensive response. But as I learned, it’s better to get a nasty letter than no letter. When you get nothing, there’s nothing to respond to and you can’t strategize. As a result, my attorney taught me a wonderful lesson: everything is an opportunity. Even the nastiest stuff is an opportunity. All you have to do is recognize it as such. The other day, for example, I was getting ready to go see a client and realized that, because every day is different, I had miscalculated. The time I’d set for my leave time was also the time I’d set somewhere in my brain for my shower time. When I got out of the shower and looked at my watch, I realized I’d miscalculated by forty-five minutes. So I got in the car, called the client and told her I’d screwed up. People often celebrate when that happens but I wanted to make an opportunity out of this. I suggested that instead of meeting at eleven as scheduled, we’d meet at eleven-thirty at a restaurant and I’d take her to lunch. She
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readily agreed—she really needed to get out of the office. That’s what I learned from the lawsuit period. Instead of thinking, “Woe is me,” I now think, “How do I turn this into an opportunity?” Turning something one could construe as negative into an opportunity has become a daily habit for me now. It’s a wonderful way to look at life. Losing a pair of glasses becomes an opportunity to get another pair! With that attitude in mind, I started to look at every horrible letter I received differently. The experience took me to a different level of looking at and dealing with adversity. I learned what to worry about and what not to worry about, when it was time to be in fear and when it wasn’t. Meanwhile I was still getting calls from all over the country. Customers would call the factory in Brazil to see how they could get their Rio back and subsequently found their way to me. The entrepreneurial husband of one our original customers promised me he would become an investor if I would try again. I really believed in this product. I had to figure out how to get Rio back to this enormous customer base. But first, I had to let all the bad press and bad feelings dissipate. Then I could start over. ** All in all, 1994 was a tough year: my divorce from Ted came through, the infomercial started and ended, and I got hit with the class-action suit. But, as they say in the world of infomercials, wait—that’s not all, because 1994 was also the year my oldest daughter went into deep crisis. Jennifer had a hard time adjusting to the tenth grade when we first got to California. By the time she turned eighteen and was graduating high school, she was going through a rough time and wanted to live at the beach for a summer. I didn’t think that was appropriate, so she staged a fight so big and raucous that the little kids ran around with their hands over their ears because of her language. I finally asked myself why I was holding her back—it was so toxic. So I let her go. Her best friend moved up from Florida and they lived at the beach.
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That fall, Jennifer started Orange Coast Community College. By October/November, they had lost their electricity because they hadn’t paid the bill and there were fruit flies in the air. Worse, Jennifer was totally on drugs. In Newport Beach, a pretty young girl didn’t need to buy drugs, people simply gave them to her. I realized she wouldn’t listen to me; I had no influence with her anymore. Michael went to see her. He came back and said, “If we don’t get her out of there soon, we’re going to lose her. She’s into some horrible stuff.” The kids had been going back and forth to Canada to see their father since we first moved to California and Kenneth had always said the door was open for his children, so I shipped Jennifer off to Canada to live with him. It got her out of Newport Beach and back into a structured environment. She had to do another year of high school because her grades weren’t good enough to get into college up there, but she eventually went to Montreal and got her degree. She’s a magnificent young lady now. Her dad gave her a good start, but I think she straightened out mostly on her own. I had to straighten out my business problems on my own as well.
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New Company
Perhaps part of my success was that I never believed it was a different world for women. When I was raising money for my infomercial product, an investor I respected refused to do business with me for three reasons: 1) I was a woman, 2) I didn’t have my MBA and 3) he didn’t like the liability issues. I was shocked! I think the first two reasons clouded his judgment about the third. In any event, I got my MBA—and created a strategy for the investor to feel comfortable.
The class-action suit went on for a couple of years. I kept getting phone calls from women all across the country saying they wanted their Rio back, they wanted their hair back the way it had been. Some of them were from the deepest part of the South and I could hardly understand what they were saying. I knew I had to start a new business. I spent 1995 getting down a new set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) and doing all the testing and things I should have done for Rio. In 1996, after the suit had resolved and the bad press had dissipated, I started Copa and spent that year looking for funds.
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One of the southern callers, Barbara, was working as a customerservice rep for a telephone company in Atlanta after leaving an abusive marriage and losing fifty pounds. She insisted that if I ever started up the company again, she’d come to California to help me—sight unseen. And she did. She believed so strongly in what we were doing that she up and moved out here to become my head of customer service. Meanwhile, I had written a profile of my ideal partner: someone between thirty-five and forty who had taken a direct-marketing company public, cashed out, and wanted to work part-time. It was brief because I figured either people would know someone who’d done that or they wouldn’t. It was like asking, “Do you know anyone who drives a Porsche and lives in Newport Beach?” You either know someone or you don’t. I looked for a person, not for money, because people introduce you to people. With that profile in hand, my hard-to-get investor realized he knew the perfect person, so the three of us became partners and Copa got funded. We couldn’t import the same product—that would have taken too long for FDA approval—so we had to manufacture a new product in the states. I knew I had to prepare myself for the FDA because it would have been criminal to market any product at that point without doing all the things I should have done for Rio. I certainly couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what they were at that point. We worked with the Brazilian factory to create and license another formula that worked without copper because the FDA would base its objections on the copper. One day as I waited at a bus stop in Vail, Colorado while visiting Michael, I approached a man and struck up a conversation. He turned out to be a lawyer from Los Angeles. I started telling him about my class-action lawsuit, and mentioned that I was looking for someone who could help me with FDA compliance procedures. He said, “I know the perfect person. She’s an expert in FDA compliance. Her name is Lillie. Would you like me to connect you?” Lillie was wonderful, just what we needed. Copa turned out to be only about eighty percent as effective as Rio but with Debbie Allen as our spokesperson, we started production on another infomercial in 1997 which ran during 1998-99.
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** As before, I took a job while the infomercial was in production. In fact, I spent another nine months commuting to Los Angeles, this time to help out my new silent partner, “George.” Michele, Cody, and I still lived in the expensive Big Canyon house. Jennifer was in Canada with Kenneth; Michael, who had already gotten his degree in philosophy, worked in Hollywood. I’d leave the house every morning at six and get to the office about seven. The kids would walk to the bus stop on their own. At one-thirty, after the stock market closed, I’d leave Los Angeles so I could be home in time to pick them up at three. It was a perfect case of integration. “George” had an enclave of executives from his different companies sharing a suite and was more than happy to have me in the suite—as long as I had my Copa phone next to my desk so I could stay on top of the new company I was putting together and he hoped to finance. I temporarily replaced his Executive Assistant, “Clarice,” who had been with him for ten years. Her last day on the job she said, “Even a day working with George yelling at me is better than where I’m going,” which was to work with her son for three months, something she felt she had to do to help him get his business started. “Don’t you dare change a thing,” she warned me. “I want to come back to find things exactly the way they were.” I ignored her warning. Clarice returned after six months but by then I had computerized the office and moved it into the modern age. A major part of the job was keeping track of George’s stock-market transactions and Clarice used to make a big production of disappearing into her office for weeks at a time to sort out all the stock transactions at tax time. I had set up a system using computer spreadsheets and handled everything daily. In fact, I had systems that allowed me to keep on top of everything. Clarice was furious. “The way it’s set up,” she fumed, “any moron could do the job now.”
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She refused to come back, so I stayed for another three months and then replaced myself with two people. Even though it wasn’t my own business, I still looked for symptoms and developed solutions. In fact, “Catalyst for Change” is part of my logo. Nothing ever stays the same when I show up. ** Copa had a rocky beginning. The new product carried both the memory and taint of the old product. The people who had loved Rio bought it; the people who hadn’t been sure about Rio didn’t. For the Rio infomercial, I had licensed the product to the producer, Peter, and had only been involved with collecting royalties and monitoring communication. That, I realized, had been one of the reasons for Rio’s failure: I had disconnected too much from the process. For this second infomercial, I stayed more involved. Copa was a virtual company. We had a fulfillment house, a call center that doubled as our customer-care center, and an FDA-compliant manufacturing plant. I coordinated the operations but the system didn’t work well. When someone else ships your product, you have to depend on them to actually ship it, which means they also, at least initially, handle your customer service. There was something inherently wrong with our shipping center answering where’s-my-package questions. The fulfillment center got paid every time it answered that question, so it almost paid them not to ship the package on time so they would get the phone call. We realized what the problem was a few months into the infomercial airing and decided to take over the customer service and fulfillment functions ourselves. We created the fulfillment center, which kept growing, but used an established call center, Forestville and Tucker, to handle our customer service functions. They hired the best people and our people worked for them. We moved our offices into the back of the call-center so we could coordinate everything on site. If we had started the business that way, it probably would have been successful for many years. Instead, we were trying to regain momentum we’d already lost. Ultimately, it just didn’t work. Then
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George, who was in his sixties at the time, had a skiing accident and hurt his neck. One thing led to another, and he decided the time had come to get rid of all his aggravations—and we were one of those aggravations. He—we—ultimately sold the business in 2000 to a company in New York. We were supposed to create another infomercial for the product but the new owners never went through with it. Debbie Allen went on her way and Barbara moved onto something else. After the September 11 catastrophe, business everywhere simply ground to a halt for a while, especially in New York. Copa never recovered. ** I wanted to get my MBA throughout the entire Rio/Copa period, but could never figure out how to fit it into my schedule. One day I told my friends I needed to find a program on Tuesday and Thursday nights so my classes wouldn’t infringe on the weekends I had the kids. Within two weeks, I got a fax about California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) opening a new campus in the technology area of Irvine, right down the road from my office. Would I come to a meeting? The classes would be held on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I worked on my masters all the way through Copa. Just as the company wound down, I finished my MBA. When the business was sold in 2000, Forestville and Tucker’s CEO invited me to be his Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and help him grow his business. He enjoyed working with me, he said. He would make me a partner. I didn’t even have to buy in; I just became a partner. I joined Forestville and Tucker to help them look for money and install different accounting and operations processes. They specialized in handling the Red Cross’ 1-800-HELP-NOW disaster campaigns. Ironically, I left them in August 2001. Meanwhile, the Big Canyon house sold and we moved into a house on Spyglass Hill. I finished my MBA in October 2000 and graduated in January 2001. Somewhere in there, I married and divorced a great guy with whom I actually had nothing whatsoever in common.
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New Man
I was married to Richard for two years. I was married to Kenneth for nine, Ted for twelve and Gregory for two. I never received alimony or child support from any of them. Every time I left a marriage, we just went our separate ways and I shouldered all the responsibility. In between, I took care of business.
I’ve noticed a definite pattern in my life where business and marriage are concerned. When Kenneth’s business stumbled, so did our marriage. When Ted and I sold the architectural firm, our relationship started to fall apart as well. When I built and lost Copa, I did it concurrently with marrying and divorcing my fourth husband, Gregory. I had started seeing Gregory in 1996 while I was working on developing Copa. I met him at the gym. We were both always reading and we used to trade books. Eventually we started leaving books for each other. We were just good friends. He was married—or so I thought—and I was Internet dating.
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I had met someone from Chicago who decided to come out to see me without really telling me he was coming. He hadn’t been quite truthful about himself at all. He wasn’t well and he had a lot of skin issues. I felt it had been a bit unfair to tell me all his medical problems at the last minute. I’ve since learned that’s what people do: they reveal whatever they’ve been hiding at the very last minute. One day at the gym as I pedaled away on a bicycle next to Gregory, he asked what was up with me. I said, “You know, I’m here as a kind of escape. I have this person visiting me from Chicago and I’m just so fed up with the whole idea of dating that I’m not going to do it anymore.” “So ...,” Gregory said, “just what are you looking for in a man?” I knew he was married; what harm was there in having a conversation? I started telling him what my kids were involved in, and how, whenever they had a game on the weekend and I wanted to go, whoever I was dating tended to say, “Why are you going? It isn’t your weekend. Ted will go.” I’d have to explain I went to my kids’ events because I wanted to go, not because it was a responsibility. The kids always spent most of the week with me but Ted and I had alternate weekends and he took them Tuesday and Thursday nights. It was a wonderful way to be divorced, really, since we each had built-in babysitting. But if it was my weekend off and Cody had a baseball game or Michele had a soccer match, I’d go and it was very hard for me to connect with a man who thought I didn’t need to do that. I wanted someone who understood the importance of my family, someone who realized that if I wanted to go to a game, he should either come with me or plan to see me afterwards. “In other words,” I finished telling Gregory, “I want someone who will actively enjoy my children.” A couple weeks later, Gregory asked me out for sushi. “I realized later that you must think I’m still married,” he said that night, “but I’ve actually been divorced for a year and a half. I just realized that what you were describing that day at the gym is exactly what I’ve been missing.”
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So we started dating. And got married about six months later. I’ve always succumbed to the big rush. Gregory was a very fun guy. He got very involved with my kids very fast. He could have been a successful attorney if he’d put his heart into it, but he never did. He liked to play; he liked to take Cody golfing in the afternoon. And he liked to smoke pot. He called it a “nice break in the end of the day.” By that point in my life, I no longer even thought about ever working with a husband again—Gregory or anyone else. All my attention and energy went into getting my MBA, handling the business, and being there for my kids. Having Gregory around was very helpful because he loved driving the kids everywhere while I studied. But we were never really comfortable with each other. I didn’t realize it until I read The Five Languages of Love1, but we didn’t even feel love the same way. Gregory’s love language was acts of service. He thought he was showing his love for me every time he drove the kids hither and yon or did the shopping and other little things around the house. My love language was quality time and conversation, something I’d had in common with all of my previous husbands, even Richard. All Gregory’s acts of service really had no effect on me whatsoever. I soon realized he hadn’t been telling me everything, just like my Internet dates. When he said he didn’t have a mortgage on his house, for example, I took it to mean he had paid it off. Later, I found out he’d gone bankrupt a few years earlier and had no mortgage because his mother held it. He also had two kids—he’d been married four times—but wasn’t very close with either of them. It didn’t make sense; if he wanted to be actively involved with children, where were his? Gregory’s life story had a lot of missing pieces. Over time, those discrepancies eventually contributed to our marriage not working out.
1. See the Appendix for a list of Book Notes, including this one, available at www.clarityandresults.com
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We got married because we both liked being married but we had different ideas about what marriage was supposed to look like. He didn’t agree with my belief in property separation, for instance. I wanted a pre-nup to protect what I had, which, at the time was cash in the bank. He had assets to protect as well. Yet one of the first things he wanted to do was sell our two cars and use my cash to buy a $40,000 Suburban. I shook my head. “I’m not comfortable doing that,” I said. “Why should I buy the car if you’re going to drive it? I’ll pay half, but I’m not paying it all.” What is it with men and cars? They always have to change the cars right away. I liked my Explorer; his car was the one getting old. Looking back, I think he hadn’t bought a new car because he didn’t have the money. A Jewish Newport Beach lawyer and he had no money. What he had was a very wealthy mother. His retirement was well taken care of. Gregory did a hodgepodge of family law and business transactions to earn his living. He was a good lawyer but not an entrepreneur—he probably should have been a corporate attorney. Very often he would say, “I don’t do that kind of law,” when some potential client or business came up. “Then why don’t you associate with someone who does that kind of law,” I would ask, “so you can refer people back and forth?” His answer was always that he just didn’t want to. I don’t think he ever thought out the basic concept of his business. He had no plan, no marketing or business strategy; he just bumbled along. By the time we met he’d been in business for years and wasn’t about to change. After Richard and Kenneth and Ted—all hardworking go-getters—Gregory frustrated me. He’d call around 9:30 in the morning to say he’d already accomplished so much that he didn’t need to work for the rest of the day. By one o’clock, he’d be home, lying on the couch, reading a book. I guess he just wanted to be a stay-at-home dad. He was already in his mid-fifties, so there was no way he was going to develop any ambition at that point, which was just one more reason why our marriage didn’t
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work out. He had no ambition and I had nothing but. I was running Copa and going for my MBA; I had no time or inclination to help him develop his business. I did make suggestions, though, trying to help him figure out how he could become more productive so he could be happier, but—just like “Clarice”—he still lived in the dark ages of doing everything by hand. I’d suggest using this or that computer system, but he always said no. Then he’d accuse me of not being interested in his business “Of course I’m interested in your business,” I’d say, “but we keep having the same conversation. Why don’t you follow through on anything we discuss, so we’d have new issues to discuss? We’re just having the same discussion over and over. If nothing’s going to change, there’s nothing to talk about.” He finally got a computer and moved forward. Again, I was the catalyst for change but he resisted that change every step of the way. Sometimes, I suspected he liked being stuck. Another one of our issues, of course, regarded how we handled money. He wanted a joint credit card. Every time he brought it up, I’d ask how much he owed on his current card and whether he had paid it off that month. He’d always say no. “Well, you know I pay mine off monthly,” I’d say, “so when you catch up with your card and decide you want to do it my way, we’ll talk. Until then, I’d rather not.” Conversations like those, he insisted, made him feel I treated our marriage like a business transaction. Maybe I did. After all, this was my fourth time around. I’d had business successes and failures and marriage successes and failures. Sooner or later, a person recognizes what it takes to stay afloat. ** Gregory and I did share the cost of certain things. We’d each put money into an account every month to cover rent and utilities and then I’d pay the bills. But apart from that, everything was separate. Including yet another house.
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Shortly after we got married, Gregory sold his house to a friend, and Ted and I finally sold our place in Big Canyon. Gregory and I rented for a few months, but then, of course, we wanted to buy. I didn’t want to put all the money I’d just gotten into a new house, and he, of course, hadn’t gotten anything from the sale of his place because it had been in his mother’s name. So I went and had a talk with his mother. “I think it would be a good idea for Gregory and me to buy a house,” I told her, “but we need to be on equal footing. I think we should each put $25,000 into the house. I was hoping you would lend it to him, and we could pay you interest.” She agreed and I have to admit, Gregory and I had fun buying the house together. It was in Harbor Ridge, a gated community at the top of Spyglass Hill—in Newport Beach, of course. Once I got to California, I never left Newport Beach. My kids made it clear that if we ever moved to Irvine, we might as well have moved to Connecticut. The house was very pretty. We bought it the day after we saw it and the four of us—Gregory, Michele, Cody and I—moved in. Later the next year, Jennifer moved in for a few months, right as the marriage was ending. That might have contributed a bit to the marriage ending, too. ** Gregory was a hunter with lots of trophy heads: moose, deer, bears, all kinds of stuff. I had art on my walls. When he moved into my place, my art stayed and all his trophies moved into his ranch and a friend’s house. Eventually, his friend wound up with a whole wall of heads. After we were married, Gregory won a lottery to hunt for a big-horned sheep. It’s an expensive sport but he was very excited about it. Finding a guide and getting prepared became the focus of his existence. He hunted and got the sheep. Later in an interview, he said, ”Hunting that sheep was the best moment of my life.” “Is that true?” I asked him. He said, “Yes, absolutely.”
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I thought, Boy, I’m really in the wrong place. I didn’t know what I was doing there. Gregory took the sheep’s head to the taxidermist, planning to hang in our house. By then Jennifer had returned from Canada and moved in. When she and Michele saw the sheep head on a workbench in the garage, they started giving Gregory a hard time. “We’re gonna throw up every time we walk by it in the house,” they promised him. Poor Gregory; he got no support from my kids. Or from me, either, as far as he was concerned. He wasn’t happy. He was in the wrong place, too. By the time we separated in October 1999, Copa was winding down—once again, as the business went, so went the marriage. Jennifer had already moved to San Jose to work as an inside-sales coordinator, and Michele had just gotten her drivers license, which meant she could drive herself to water polo. I sold the house and slid down from Spyglass Hill to a two-bedroom townhouse, although with Michele and Cody still home, we really needed three. Michele and I shared a room while I built a room in the garage. The room wasn’t legal and I was given two years to comply with taking it down—which I did, right at the end of those two years, when Michele went off to college. She loved that room.
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New Me
After graduating with my MBA in 2001, I took a certification course to become a business coach and found my true calling: helping leaders develop their life plans and businesses. Coaching has been an evolution for me. When I first started, I just wanted to help people in transition. But that’s not why my phone rang. It rang because people wanted to know how I had done what I had done.
My two partners at Forestville and Tucker were very young: one was twenty-five, the other thirty-five. I made good money and had a car allowance, but I always felt like the mother hen. Of course, that may have had something to do with the fact that, as the finance person, I was always the one who had to say yes or no. They usually wanted “yes.” I usually had to say “no.” Around March 2001, Joanne Rodasta Wilshin, an author friend who wrote Take a Moment to Create Your Life, organized a group called The Gaian Sisterhood. We’d go around the room and talk about what we wanted to do in our lives. When it was my turn, I said I was bored to tears with my partners. Working for Forestville and
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Tucker didn’t feel right anymore. I felt burned out, exhausted. The business had come as far as it could go and I had philosophical differences with the two men with whom I worked. I offered an example. We had decided to attend a trade show in Las Vegas. The CEO suggested we cut a check for $1,000 each as a perk. The three of us went to the show and ate at the Paris Hotel, spending $500 for dinner. I had trouble with that—it was more than my monthly grocery bill. How many calls would the company have to make to earn five hundred bucks? The other two partners took their $1,000 each and went off to gamble. With mine, I bought a stuffed leopard (that I still have) and an outfit. As the three talked in the car on the way back, they both admitted they only had two or three dollars left. I had eight hundred dollars left, plus a leopard and a sweater. “My life sucks,” I summed up for the Gaian Sisterhood. Joanne told me to close my eyes. “Imagine it’s three years in the future. You’re just getting up in the morning, feeling the carpet under your feet. Now tell me,” she said, “where are you and what will you be doing today?” I’d never experienced or even heard of anything like that before. The experience was shocking. I said, “I’m going to go talk to people and be deep in conversation.” I opened my eyes. “How do I know that? What does it mean?” “You don’t have to have all the answers,” she said. “Just see where it leads you.” The next morning, I happened to bump into my friend Mariy. We talked for a few minutes. “ What are you doing these days?” I asked. “I’m coaching for a living.” “What’s that?”
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“I meet with people and talk to them,” she said. Then she went on to describe exactly what I had been thinking of the night before. Joanne had said to see where my vision would lead me. How could I ignore this interchange? So I called my friend Katie, who suggested a coach she knew, Tony. Mariy suggested a fellow she knew as well. I talked to him first. He said he’d teach me everything. “You go look for the clients and I’ll split the fee with you, sixty-forty.” That stopped me. If I were going to go out and find people, why wouldn’t I do it for myself? I was an entrepreneur! I already knew I didn’t like working for someone else. Why would I want to just switch to working for another “someone else?” So I called Katie’s friend Tony, who directed me to the Hudson Institute in Santa Barbara, a wonderful coaching school with a very good methodology. Their program essentially sounded like another master’s program. I enrolled in April 2001. ** The Hudson Institute’s adult-development theory leads to a lot of introspection. The work itself revolves around your life roles, responsibilities and purpose. It really makes you reflect on who you are. I discovered that I had never actually looked at my life in its entirety or at the choices I’d made. I had never looked at, “Who am I, why am I here, what does it all mean?” I had ignored the big questions of life—I had never even considered that I had other options. As I had gone through life, I figured that what happened, happened. It had never been about conscious choice. I also learned that most people do the exact same thing. They go to school, get their degrees and say, “Okay, this is what I have to do now that I’ve set it up.” They never think beyond their initial five-year plan—if they even make one in the first place.
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I had a very interesting time at Hudson. They divided us into small groups so we would interact with other people during growth sessions. Early on, someone recognized my tendency to assume the leadership role. “How about this time, you don’t do that?” one of the instructors suggested. “How about this time, you just take a back seat and let someone else lead?” As a result, we ended up not really having a designated leader—and I learned to lead from behind by making suggestions instead of giving instructions. Rather than say, for example, “Stephanie will read these books, Carol will read those, I’ll read the rest and we’ll compare notes afterwards,” I learned to say, “If we have so many books to read, why don’t we each take a couple and make book notes?” I came to love this different, exciting kind of leading. I also learned that I needed to “dial myself down,” as they called it. My energy and ideas were always on “high.” I had to lower my personal volume to medium or low. So my learning during that year was to lead from behind and dial it down. It was wonderful. We were supposed to finish the course in eight months but one of our four-day intensive-training sessions fell on the weekend of September 11, 2001. I wound up graduating in January 2002 after having incorporated my coaching company in October 2001. Michele, Cody and I still lived in the little townhouse, but now, for the first time, my home office wasn’t in addition to another office. ** The more I got into coaching, the more I wanted to help people find their “next thing.” My first year out of school, I organized retreats, mini-models of what we did at Hudson, to explore clients’ “what’s next?” I would take people away, one-on-one, for half a day at a time because not many people had three solid days to spend away from their home and business, although my very first client did. He came in from San Jose, stayed in a suite and worked with me in that suite for three days. It was great. It gave him direction.
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But I didn’t have that many takers for this new plan. I was trying to do something new, something that didn’t have anything to do with business or entrepreneurs. I was making the mistake most people make. When people decide to do something new, they usually want to leave behind everything they did before. They don’t think to take the best part of it, the part they liked or the strengths they had developed. They just want to chuck it all. That’s exactly what I was doing, and it wasn’t working. Instead, I kept getting all these, “How did you…” calls: how did I raise money for this company, how did I organize those finances, how did I do this, how did I do that. I started meeting people for lunch just to answer their questions. I had decided that telling them how to fix their problems wasn’t my real work, so I felt fine giving the information away. I wasn’t coaching; I was just answering questions. I discovered it was easier to answer a specific “how did you” question than a general one. For instance, if someone asked, “How did you raise money for Rio?” I could answer it. I not only had the attitudes and political and psychological tools I’d learned and created, I had the real-life experience. People knew that about me; that’s why my phone kept ringing. But it wasn’t coaching. At least, that’s what I thought. Then someone invited me to freelance as an adjunct coach for Venture Point, a small business-development center affiliated with the Orange County Business Council and catering to high-growth, high-tech companies. I hadn’t collected a paycheck since I’d stopped working for Forestville and Tucker the previous August and my savings were strained to the limit, so I said yes. I worked with entrepreneurs looking for help with preparing their ideas, business plans, and pitches for venture capitalists. Venture Point used what they called a coaching model rather than a consultative model to help people develop their business-plan thinking. Unfortunately, their advice was sometimes less than constructive. “That’s a terrible idea,” I heard people say flat out when I first got there. “I don’t know how you think you’re going to make money doing that.”
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Wow, these people really don’t understand entrepreneurs, I thought. What they needed to say was, “How can we validate this idea?” So instead of stomping on people’s dreams, I’d say, “I’m sure you don’t want to go down the road five years to find you’re the only one who thinks this is a good idea. Let’s prove it’s a good idea. Do surveys, study it. Then, should you come to a place where you discover it’s not a good idea, you might also discover you’ve come up with something else along the way that will lead down a different path. Don’t think that if this venture doesn’t work you won’t find anything better.” That was the real starting point of my new career. I started out thinking I was helping new entrepreneurs with their ideas and pitches only so I could earn so-many dollars an hour while I built the rest of my practice, but in the process I discovered I knew more than I realized I knew. I could relate to these people because I understood how they thought. They didn’t want to know why it couldn’t work; they wanted to know how it would work. And they valued my opinions and advice. It started me thinking about who else would value me. I realized I’d been a CEO, I’d been a CFO. I knew what it was like to worry about money and operations and schedules—and I knew those concerns were the same whether the company had five employees or five hundred. I remember walking into the CEO’s office of a $50 million company and saying, “I’ve been a CEO. Not at your scale, but I understand your issues.” We had an immediate rapport. And that’s when I realized why my phone kept ringing. People who wanted to start a business or fund a business wanted my help, my advice—my coaching. They would get my name by referral, from people telling other people, “You should give Frumi a call. She’s done this, she’s been there.” My very first clients came through Venture Point but when I stopped working for them people came to me from my circle of influence, from people who knew I wrote Book Notes that indicated my areas of expertise, and from general word-of-mouth. I didn’t have to become something new, I already was something new: an Executive Coach, a catalyst for change for business leaders and their teams.
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Once I knew who and what I was, I also knew I needed to define a marketing niche, an area of focus unique to me, making it easy for the potential clients to find me. Since I loved working with financial people inside companies, I targeted them. I continue to do most of my marketing through my Book Notes, located online at www.clarityandresults.com, and through my connections to different organizations. For example, I served as Vice President of Finance on Professional Coaches and Mentors Association’s National Board for eighteen months. When the person in line to be president decided he didn’t have the passion for it anymore, I became President of PCMA’s National Board. ** To help me find my own power, I hired MaryWayne Bush, a very powerful woman and well-respected coach. At first, I didn’t understand what “finding my own power” meant; it sounded almost evil. I learned it refers to the ability to know when to say yes and when to say no—in other words, to recognize your personal boundaries. MaryWayne helped me learn how to design and build my life the way I wanted it, rather than always being there for everyone else— quite a novel idea for a mom of thirty-one years. I had always felt selfish putting myself first. MaryWayne encouraged me to think about being selfish. What a concept! I soon realized that my clients needed the exact same thing. Whether male or female, everyone needs to learn how to find his or her own power. Everyone needs to recognize whether they are living their lives on their terms or on someone— or everyone—else’s terms. I think one reason I’ve been so successful as a coach is because I’ve walked so many miles in my clients’ shoes! ** I’ve found that having a coach makes all the difference in my life, just as it does for my clients. For example, after Michele finished high school and moved to San Francisco and Cody left for University of Southern California, I didn’t need an entire townhouse for just me, so I put it up for sale. I wanted a change. I wanted to cash out and live differently. I wanted my own time and space.
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The house sold but the buyers wanted a quick, four-week escrow so I immediately had to start looking for an apartment. I found the one I wanted and put my deposit down. Then the house fell out of escrow. I knew giving up the apartment and not moving until the house sold would be the responsible thing to do. But I didn’t want to lose that apartment! I discussed it with my coach. “Why do you have to sell the house?” she asked. “Why can’t you move anyway?” That had never occurred to me. My belief system and inculcated behavioral patterns would never have led me down the path to that conclusion. But MaryWayne was right. I rented out the house and moved into my dream apartment. I might have suggested the same thing to a client but this wasn’t a client, this was me. My emotions. My memories. I’d been taking real-estate courses and looking for investment properties, so not realizing the townhouse’s potential seemed even more foolish. But sometimes, we need to hear someone else, someone outside our own head, ask the question. That’s the value of coaching. Coaching helps us recognize what we already know, but would never think of until we hear someone else ask the question. My mom would never have asked the question; she would have “known” the responsible thing to do. My friend would have just said, “Oh, that’s disappointing. But maybe the house will still sell.” It took someone looking at it from a different perspective to say, “Have you examined this option? What other options do you have?” Isn’t that what we all need? An executive coach, a catalyst for change. That’s who I am.
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Part II Your Frumi Fix "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." - Anne Frank "We are each the sum of all our choices." - Frumi Rachel Barr I’ve always been something of a helper which is why I initially became a physical therapist. I’ve always had the kind of curiosity that prompts me to ask the kinds of questions that change people’s lives. These days, I see it all the time in my coaching clients. I even affect my friends! They’ll call me and say they need a “Frumi Fix.” I never understood what they were talking about before, but now I know it’s about people needing inspiration, about needing to know how to get something done. So, when it comes right down to it, my coaching is all about providing executives with a Frumi Fix. In the next few chapters, I’d like to provide one for you.
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How Coaching Works
Yes, I’m a Certified Coach–but even more, I’m a business advisor. Coaching is how I go about doing my advising. I provide the catalyst for the change in people’s lives. My clients tell me that when I start uncovering things, it’s a positive “Frunami” of change.
Most people are used to thinking just one way: work is work and life is life. Coaching clients begin to think creatively so they can learn to holistically blend their work into their lives and their lives into their work. Before I got into coaching, I’d never consciously thought of living that way. Why? Because no one had ever asked me the question. That’s the advantage of coaching. These ideas don’t just pop out of us on our own, especially when we’re totally wrapped up in creating, developing, and maintaining a business. ** Before you begin working with a coach, make sure you have a common pace between the two of you. For instance, I’m a very “fast” person–my energy is always on high, even when I dial it down–so if someone is very slow, I find it painful.
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I don’t mean I expect people to be able to make decisions on the spot. We all have to sleep on things and think them over first. I’m talking about the ability to pick up things quickly. Leaders are typically smart, dynamic, fast-paced individuals. That makes a good fit with me. You have to figure out what makes a good fit with you. When I coach, I never worry about the issues. Whatever they are, they’re solvable. I’m more concerned about the personality and integrity of the person. I think most coaches would agree with that approach. I maintain strict confidentiality; I like to provide a “safe place to land” for my clients. When you look for a coach, check to see if that guarantee is part of his or her standard contract. It's a two-way street; coaches need to feel safe with their clients, too. After all, most coaches are like me: I will go to the client or meet them halfway, both physically and emotionally. Some people choose to have breakfast while others prefer lunch, a coffee shop or meeting on a park bench. I meet them wherever they want, physically. Meeting them where they are emotionally demands skill. Ask your potential coach where she or he expects to meet; is it comfortable for you? I usually work with my clients for an hour every two weeks. You may want to meet more or less often. If my clients say something relating to a prime concern on the fifty-ninth minute of the hour, we’ll keep going. I figure if it takes that long to get it out, it’s important and we’ll see it the whole way through. Ask your potential coach about his or her session-limit policies. At the end of every year, my clients and I hold strategic sessions to talk about what’s worked, what’s gotten in the way, and what could be better next year. Does your potential coach have a similar practice? Is it adaptable to your needs? Between sessions, my clients can email or phone me for what I call “just in time” coaching. Sometimes, for example, a client wants more input right before or after a difficult conversation. When someone gets into a crisis, whether it’s a turn of the conversation or an emergency decision, I’d rather they call than wait two weeks until their next session. By then, it’s too late to do anything about it. This is an invaluable part of coaching. Will your coach be available to you during emergencies?
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One great coaching benefit is the opportunity to think out loud. As soon as something comes out of a person’s mouth, they’re listening to it along with me. That can lead to astounding things, because sometimes the spoken idea just doesn’t sound as good as it did in a person’s head. Sometimes it might even sound more reasonable. When you work with a coach, you not only expose your dreams and plans but your fears and foolishness as well. Does your potential coach have the right kind and level of empathy for you? Trust your instincts. I’ve taught coaching at Chapman University–“Here are the steps: you help leaders find their voice, you help them find their vision”–but the act of accomplishing that transformation requires intuition and art. I need to hear things in someone’s voice or see it in their body language. When I was first studying coaching, I missed something very important when someone laughed; I now know that laughing is as important a reaction as crying. At this point, nothing escapes my curiosity. If anything is different from what a person usually does or presents, I ask a question. Part of the coaching art comes from curiosity. Where a coach can safely ask questions out of curiosity, simply demanding an answer is intrusive. Your coach needs to trust his or her intuition about you—and you need to trust yours about him or her. ** I truly believe that we get whatever we focus on; we can manifest our desires by focusing strongly on what we want. First, of course, we have to reach the right vibrational level to allow what we’re seeking into our psyche, which means we have to be self aware enough to use our emotions as a guide to attracting whatever we want. I tend to attract the type of clients who don’t find that kind of concept ridiculous. They are business people who are aware of their own spiritual natures and are grateful to find another spiritually oriented person in the business world. And I do mean spiritual, not religious. I’m referring to the kind of thought process that acknowledges we are all spiritual beings in human form. Those are the people I feel best equipped to help the most.
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What kind of vibrational level are you comfortable with? What type of spiritual, religious, ethical, organic or moral nature would make the best fit for you and your coach? ** I always use one client as an example of a coaching failure, although he would not agree on that term. He was in partnership with two other people and I kept harping on the fact that they were not addressing a shareholder’s agreement. He kept telling me he had everything under control. After two years, the shareholder’s agreement still had not been signed and the client was left with no choice but to abandon the business. He had wasted two years because he would not listen. Another time he accepted a CEO position in a company that didn’t offer him equity. I pointed out that if he didn’t get equity in his contract, the company might not renew it when it expired. He nevertheless spent eighteen months building the company’s profits from zero to seventeen million, after which, as predicted, they didn’t renew his contract. When he came back to me again with yet another idea he wanted help with I said, “You may not realize this, but I regard my relationship with you as a failure twice now. The first time because you didn’t listen about the shareholder’s agreement and the second time because you didn’t listen about getting equity in this business. What’s going to be different the third time?” “I don’t consider either of those situations as failures,” he said. “It’s not like you hadn’t mentioned those things. I knew what you thought when I ignored your advice.” It turned out we had totally different values: he wanted the experience and I wanted to keep him financially secure. Now I know to determine up front exactly what the client wants to achieve so I can determine whether or not I can really help him. You and your coach have to be on the same page, even if you do not know exactly what you're trying to achieve when you first begin working together. Your coach cannot help you if she or he is trying to steer you toward something you don't care about, or away from something you do.
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** Most people I work with have issues about choosing the right people with whom to partner because most large businesses are partnerships: Hewlett-Packard, Lord & Taylor, and so on. Few large successful businesses grow from single entrepreneurs working sole proprietorships. It’s hard to find the right partner; so much needs to be established up front. Partners always fear losing the other partner. They fear they can’t do it on their own. Consequently, instead of saying up front that they don’t feel the split should be fifty-fifty, for example, they’ll go along until the pressure of the status quo becomes unbearable. But it’s even harder to say, “I’m doing this and you’re not doing that so we need to change our partnership agreement,” two years down the road. What happens if their partner runs out on them then? They’ll really be stuck. I think partner problems have become more acute due to today’s ever-increasing technological pace. People need to start off agreeing on the rules of the road; how to make decisions together, how to use the resources of the company, what people to hire, how to spend money, when to move to new premises. Each partner has a different filter; each partner comes from a different place in the decision-making. All partners, whether their business is large or small, struggle to resolve these same issues. They all also struggle with denial. From time to time, everyone gets to the point where they don’t want to look at themselves in the mirror anymore. This usually happens when they start to see things about themselves that they don’t want to see, things that are getting in their way. People don’t always want to face reality. That’s the time they need me the most. In fact, I even warn my clients about this right in the beginning. I tell them, there will come a point when they just don’t want to see me. That’s usually the exact time when something significant is about to happen. You have to trust your coach to have your best interests at heart. **
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Another focus in both my clients’ and my own life involves noticing everything. How are the relationships working? Are decisions being made as conscious choices or automatic reactions? Since becoming a coach, I’ve started to recognize how all the choices I had made up to that point had affected me. We always think, “Well, those are my choices and I’m stuck with what I chose, right?” No. We aren’t stuck. We can make choices about what we want next. In fact, we can change the choices we’ve made so far: “Wait a minute, that’s not what I want anymore.” Whether concerning relationships or work, just realizing that you can make a conscious choice–and that it can be flexible, revised or even discarded when it becomes unnecessary, obstructive or destructive–is one of the most empowering learnings a person can experience. This is one of the greatest benefits of coaching! ** Picture this scene: a little girl comes down for breakfast. Her father is sitting at the table about to drink his coffee. Excited, she jumps on him. His hands go up and the coffee spills. Dad now has two choices. In the first scenario, he gets upset and yells at the little girl. He growls that they have to be at the school-bus stop in five minutes so she’d better get ready, then leaves her alone while he goes up to change. She’s so upset she doesn’t get into her clothes properly. He ends up leaving his briefcase behind as he runs out of the house to drive her to school. Result: his whole day is messed up—and so is hers. In the second scenario, he takes a deep breath and says, “That’s okay, honey. Stuff happens. I’m going to go upstairs and change. We need to be out at the bus in ten minutes.” He changes, she gets dressed, they get her to the school bus on time, he remembers his briefcase, and they both have a wonderful day. All because of a choice he made from the onset about how he was going to treat his daughter. Everything is about choice. We can even choose our attitudes and reactions. For example, when the father in the first scenario gets to the office all upset and calls me, I listen, acknowledge his decision and feelings, and then talk about what different decision he could make
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next time. One of my questions would be, “What conversation should you have with your daughter when you get home?” By the end of the conversation, he would recognize the reaction options he had for these kinds of situations instead of simply falling back on his automatic emotional ones. We wouldn’t ignore the problem or leave it alone. We would explore his emotions and create a set of options to handle them effectively and satisfactorily. In other words, we would look for symptoms and strategize solutions. ** My coaching comes down to three things: Clarity, Communications and Results. Clarity refers to being very clear about who you are, where you’re going, what you want, and what you don’t want. It means understanding how you made decisions before, and how you want to make them in the future. That’s the first thing we work on. Communication means not only communicating those thoughts but also being more courageous about what conversations you need to have, who they should be with, and when they should occur. I often find that people’s relationships aren’t as rich and authentic as they could be because they aren’t having the conversations they should have. If you don’t communicate in a work situation with the people over you or under you, for example, how do they know whether they—or you—are doing a good job? Communication is all about asking key questions and getting feedback. Results mostly involve preparing people for conversations they don’t want to have, usually because they don’t know how to have them safely. We all know that saying, “We have to talk, things aren’t the way they should be,” could be paralyzing to the other person. I help people learn how to approach their conversations more effectively. “I value our relationship and I’d like it to get even better.” When you start a conversation that way, the other person is immediately curious. “What are you talking about? How are we going to get better?” If you then tell them the positive outcome you want, you’re more likely to have a richer conversation and obtain those results.
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These simple components—Clarity, Communication and Results—can make a big difference in a person’s life. They can change how you relate to just about everyone. ** Coaching is not therapy. To me, therapy means looking in the rear-view mirror: what have you done, why did you do it, what was your belief system at that point, how did your parents and their belief system affect your decisions? I do that only once with a person so I can understand the context of their current situation. I need to know, for example, if they’ve been making certain life decisions because their father committed suicide when they were nineteen. One session of “therapeutic questioning” helps me understand my client’s attitudes and strengths and the value/belief system with which we’re starting. We may refer to those aspects occasionally but coaching is about forward through the windshield. Rather than sort through, “How did I get here,” we work on, “Here’s where I am now, here’s where I’d like to be, how do I get there?” That’s the first layer of coaching. The next layer involves, “What resources do I need? Do I need certain skills? Do I need to meet certain people?” I help clients figure out how to determine and find those resources. The third level happens while the client is on the way to acquiring those assets. Once things have been set in motion, new situations, conversations and relationship issues will come to light that, if not addressed immediately, might prevent him from getting where he’s going. That’s the value of “real-time coaching.’’ We create an underlying plan in our regular sessions but I’m always there to help with the implemental conversations and situations as they occur. I like to think of the process in terms of a closet. All your life you’ve been putting things in the closet, throwing in one item after another. Along comes a coach like me, a catalyst for change, who opens the closet door. As things spill out, I hold a light on them so we can look at who you are now and how you can get to where you want to go. It’s all a matter of becoming self-aware. Once you’re aware, you can start making changes.
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For example, I sometimes coach people to help them change certain behaviors, such as a management style that’s tough on everyone else. When someone becomes aware that just before they blow up the pit of their stomach starts to writhe, they can learn to think, “Oh, there it is. I’m about to blow my stack. I’d better stop.” That’s a significant and very positive change. ** People come to me when they’re healthy and want to move on, when they want to know how they can move forward faster, or when they need help coping with an avalanche of change. They want someone in their corner. It’s the person locked in the tower—“It’s lonely at the top”—who has no one to talk to because everyone around has his or her own agenda. Or it’s the person who wants to quit his or her job and do something different, only to have the spouse say, “But what about the mortgage?” Or it’s the CFO laying off fifteen people and thinking, “Oh, God, what if I’m next?” Where can they turn for an impartial opinion? The advice and input they get from the other people in their lives comes complete with that person’s own fear. I only have one agenda with my clients: a retainer check. Otherwise, everything that happens in their lives is theirs. Consequently, I can be much purer in my advice and in helping someone achieve his or own clarity. People come to me because of my knowledge and experience but they choose what advice to accept or ignore, and they bear their own consequences. They have to make choices with which they can live, and arrive at those decisions that are in line with who they are. In a way, I’m a paid friend. I get to know someone’s inner heart, fears, and doubts. Almost every business leader I work with starts out by saying, “I know everyone thinks I’m big and successful, but I’m really a fake and a phony.” They have no idea how they got to their position but they want to know how to stay there and become the leader they’re supposed to be. That’s where the fun begins, because when I can help those people, it’s a beautiful thing to watch. **
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If you’ve read this far, you probably understand why people call me a catalyst for change but it took my own coach to help me see it for myself. MaryWayne and I were working on figuring out who I am at my core. The more questions she asked, the more I realized that nothing ever stayed the same when I showed up. Interestingly, as soon I realized that, I started getting affirmations in emails from people going back thirty years! One was an old boyfriend with whom I’d gone to senior prom and who, much later, had been my brother’s economics professor. Morrie ran into him in Montréal and gave him my email address. During our subsequent Internet exchange, he commented that knowing me had been very significant for him—in fact, it had changed his life. A couple of weeks later, another former classmate found me through Classmates.com and wrote something similar: he’d never forgotten me and how I had changed his life. I kept thinking, “What did I do?!” How could I have changed anyone’s life that long ago?” But I’ve come to realize, nothing ever stays the same when I come on the scene. I am a catalyst for change in people around me. My friends call to ask me for a “Frumi Fix.” So, when it comes right down to it, my coaching is all about providing executives with a Frumi Fix. In the next few chapters, I’d like to provide one for you. Don’t just answer the questions at the end of each section with the first idea that comes to mind. You’ll get more out of the exercises if you reflect on the concepts instead of dashing off glib responses. Thinking through the answers will bring you closer to self-awareness, which will bring you closer to change. Remember, there are no “right” or “wrong” answers—just honest and unaware ones. Ready? Let’s get started!
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What Really Matters
You can do it all if you understand that there is no such thing as work-life balance. Rather, integrating your work into your life is a balancing act.
First, we’ll take a quick look at some self-awareness ideas you might not have considered before. •
Do you feel ready to burn out?
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Do your kids know who you are?
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Do you wonder how you'll ever have time for kids?
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Do you want to have dinner with your family?
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Do you want to watch your kids’ baseball games?
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Do you want to prepare for your presentations and receive promotions?
** Let’s start where the rubber meets the road: values. We all talk about values but most people don’t actually walk their talk. We all think we know what is important to us. We certainly know
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what should be important to us. Yet, if you analyze two important facets—how you spend your time and how you spend your money—many people come up short. Are those facets in alignment with what you say is important in your life? Everything we do, every decision we make, every course of action we take is based on our consciously or unconsciously held beliefs, attitudes, and values. We face new choices at every turn. Ideally, we make our choices based on the values we hold, on those principles and priorities that are important to us. I know unequivocally, for example, that education is one of my parents’ core values or critical priorities. They were not well-to-do during my childhood, yet they chose where we lived based on how close it was to their handpicked school. They were quite prepared to sacrifice many things in order to provide both my brother and I with a private education until high school and a university education after that. I had to examine my own core values as part of the introspective process of studying to be a coach. I said my parents were a priority but I could see no evidence of that in my behavior. I visited them once a year or so and spoke to them every other week. Those phone calls always felt strained because they never remembered what organizations I belonged to or who was who among my friends and acquaintances. If my parents were one of my core values, our relationship needed some work. To improve that relationship, I started emailing my parents every day. Now they have a list of the alphabet-soup of organizations I belong to (PCMA, ICF, etc.) and a directory of what I call my “cast of characters.” I work on being a good daughter every single day. I’ll never regret what I didn’t do. Many people say their children are terribly important to them but how do they demonstrate that to their kids? One of my accountant clients frequently lamented that his work was so frenzied his son would grow up before he could find any time to spend with him. To rectify that, we started with something small to integrate his son into his workday.
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Every day when the son arrived home from school, my client’s watch alarm rang to remind him to call home. Without this simple tool, over time he would forget to make the call. Imagine how valued a child would feel when his or her mom or dad called every day to check in. No, it’s not the same as being there in person but even small wins count. Make a list of your core values. Which ones do you actively support? Which ones need your attention? ** We all spend our time fulfilling commitments in a variety of roles. Some people’s roles are very complex; others’ are simpler. Your roles might include being a spouse, a son or daughter, a sister or brother, and a mother or father. You may also have a network of friends. These constitute your personal, family, and couple roles. You also have roles in your external environment, such as commitments both up and down the hierarchy of those you report to, your peers, and those who report to you. You may have vendors, clients and numerous people in your business network. Your social roles may include actively contributing to or participating in an organization. Phew—that’s a great number of people and obligations taking your time and energy. Just as we collect items in filing cabinets and closets, we also collect roles as time goes on. Now that you have reviewed your values, you need to look at which roles are meaningful to you now. Take some time to reflect on your friendships. Are there any unhealthy ones you should clear out? Are there conversations you should have with friends, relatives, or colleagues that are weighing you down? One of the principles of time management is to take the clutter out of your head and list all your pending projects. You can do the same thing with your roles and relationships. Make a list of all the people who fall into your different role categories. What actions can you take to spend energy only on those that are meaningful, significant and fulfilling?
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** From the time we are very young, we make choices based on the way we interpret the world around us. These interpretations create our belief systems, and our behavior—how we act in the world—is based on those internalized beliefs. Our behaviors in turn determine our results and our results determine the shape of our lives. All the choices we make along the way impact us. All choices are either heart-based or head-based: how we make decisions, how we negotiate to get what we need at work or home, how we deal with conflict and unpleasant circumstances. Either we make these choices consciously or our brain uses its default mechanism to choose for us. But only seven percent of what goes on in our brain is conscious; the other ninety-three percent is unconscious. That’s pretty frightening isn’t it? To be on top of how you make choices, you need to exercise that seven percent and make conscious choices. Here’s a favorite example. I love anything chocolate, especially if it comes with ice cream. If someone were to put a piece of mud pie in front of me, my unconscious brain would open all my internal files and examine the history of chocolate, most of which is positive: brownies are good, cake is good, dark chocolate is good, and so on. My brain’s default position therefore would direct me to go ahead and eat the mud pie. But if I wanted to make a conscious choice, I would ask myself, “Do I really want to eat this dessert? Do I want to work out for sixteen hours just to work it off? Is it worth it to me?” I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a stretch to make that conscious decision. Being aware of what you are thinking and how you will make choices in the future is an important aspect of integrating your work and life. First, you have to know where you are and what you think. Next, you have to examine how you have made your choices in the past. This is a reflective journey. It’s important to know how you got to this point so you can decide where you want to be in the future. Then you can fill in the middle with a plan.
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Start a journal. Make notes about your impressions of yourself and your decision-making process. Are you happy where you are in your personal, business and social lives? Did you get to here because you followed a plan or did things “just happen?” Where do you want to go? Are you happy with the way you make choices? What kind of decision changes would you like to make? ** Let’s look at your self-talk, about the internal dialogue going on in your head as you navigate through your busy day. The mind creates whatever we think about, so be careful to make what you think work for you. I’ve always been fascinated by the ideas in Take a Moment to Create Your Life. According to Joanne Rodasta Wilshin, you can create what you want in your life and, equally, what you don’t want. When I worked with Joanne, I created many new things just by making the declaration that I would. One of my favorite creations was a new home. This was the period after Ted and I had sold the house in Big Canyon and Gregory and I were renting in Corona del Mar. It was an expensive neighborhood and I was a little discouraged about how hard it would be to find something in the right price range in that school district. Michele was surprised at my concern because she’d heard me so often talk about the things I was creating. Bolstered with a new resolve, we went to visit open houses the next week. There were signs leading into a gated community I knew was very pricey but Michele gave me “the look” when I hesitated, so we drove in anyway. There, at the crest of the hill with a view to the ocean and the city lights, was a townhouse development I hadn’t known existed. My offer was accepted within hours. Even if your faith falters every now and then, you can create your life if you believe you can. Be conscious of what you are thinking about so you can create expectations that stretch you. Pretend you are in the balcony of your life’s theatre watching yourself on your life’s stage. When you know how you behave every day, you can start making small changes to
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integrate your work into your personal life and include those people and things that are important to you. You cannot change how you are doing things until you know what you are already doing. We all have a committee in our head passing judgment on everything we do. As you start to pay attention to what you think, ask yourself, “Whose voice am I hearing?” Is it a critical parent, a not-so-helpful old friend, or an ex-spouse? You can negotiate with the voices you value, fire the committee members who aren’t helpful, or ask them to replace negative thoughts and suggestions with supportive ones. Your core beliefs will pop up often in the form of these voices. Recently, I was thinking about investing in a real-estate training course. My committee was very active, suggesting I was wasting my money on snake oil and telling me I wasn’t good enough or smart enough to be an investor. I had to change my self-talk and insist on the support of every committee member. I wore an elastic band for a week so I could snap it every time a negative thought came up. In just a few days, the negative voices receded to a whisper instead of their initial roar.
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it is gone past me I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Frank Herbert, Dune
Fear is that dis-ease prevalent in the people and organizations all around us. Fear prevents us from making the changes we need to make to have a better life. The answer to fear is faith—faith in yourself to find the answers and faith in your higher spirit. Add another aspect to your journaling: what are you afraid of? What are your fears holding you back from accomplishing? What kind of changes could you make in your committee’s voices to feel more secure and help you move forward toward your goals? What would you do if you were not afraid? **
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None of this is easy. Making changes in the way you run your life is a big deal and takes a serious commitment. I met a woman who decided not to work as an attorney anymore because it was too stressful and she wanted more time with her children. Her husband, an attorney, left the house at the crack of dawn, long before his children woke up. I asked the couple if they ever thought about having a home office. They hadn’t and immediately dismissed the possibility. I couldn’t help wondering what would be different if the wife could continue working to some extent and the husband could leave the house later and come home earlier. The most difficult trade-off for a mother is making the decision to work outside the home and relinquish the care of her precious little people to others. I greatly admire the women I’ve met who made the choice to be a homemaker, such as my friend Sharon. She was just as industrious in her world as I was in mine, baking pies, making jam, making minced garlic and being heavily involved in her three sons’ sports teams and her daughter’s figure-skating world. But, I’ve also seen the trade off for stay-at-home moms: when their children are launched, they suddenly lack purpose. I also greatly respect the women in the corporate world for hanging in there as they raise children. To me, that is the most difficult trade-off of all: the children go to day care while their mothers work hard and struggle with guilt. When at work they want to be at home; when at home they think of all the things left undone at the office. I can’t even begin to imagine the wrench of leaving a sick child at home. Perhaps that’s why more and more women are leaving the corporate world to become entrepreneurs, the obvious, albeit not easy, path to “doing it all.” They don’t have to answer to others for their choices but they sure live an uncertain life—ninety-five percent of all new businesses fail in the first five years. That’s quite a trade-off. What are the trade-offs you’re making in your life right now? What are you willing to trade to get to where you want to go? **
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When you are starting to think about your life holistically, what happens at home matters as much as what happens at the office. That’s where the five different Love Languages—Words of Affirmation, Gifts Received, Quality Time, Acts of Service and Physical Touch—come into play. My Love Language is Quality Time and its subset, Quality Conversation. When I’m in conversation with my clients, I’m showing them love and I’m feeling loved, which is totally congruent with who I am. I want them to know that I care and are listening so they will get the results they want to get. What is your Love Language? How do you demonstrate your love? What do other people do that makes you feel loved?
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Where Are You Now
One of my favorite coaching tools is the “life line.” It reflects your story and the choices you have made until now.
You are your "story." Each of us lives within a dramatic pattern that reveals who we are, who we should be with, what we should be doing and what will happen to us. Your "story" contains plots, characters and themes. This Lifeline exercise is an opportunity for you to become more conscious of your "story" so you can become more clearly the author of your own future. What is your adult lifeline—the basic contours of your life story since you came of age? What went well and reached a "peak?" What did not go well and hit a "valley?” How does your story go? ** Use the age line below (“Create Your Life Line the Story of Your Life”)
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to guide your story from past to present, moving from left to right, and ending with today. Be sure to put a date on each peak and valley so you can recount your story. When you are done, insert vertical lines to indicate the chapters of your life. This is a wonderful starting point for working with a coach. You can use this tool to examine which of your strengths helped you through your peaks and valleys of your life and thus create an inventory of your strengths, or you can also ask yourself how you made decisions at each stage of your life.
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Did you ask for help?
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Were you spontaneous?
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Did you sit anywhere too long and let life pass by you?
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What do you wish you had done differently?
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Did you integrate your work into your life at any point?
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Did you have personal life/work balance?
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Peaks
Peaks
Peaks
Peaks
>____________________>_______________________>______________________>_____TODAY
Valley
Valley
Valley
Valley
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Work and Family
Work, for most of us, is the largest relationship we have. We spend the majority of our waking hours thinking about it, getting ready for it, driving to it, being at it and driving home and recovering from it. It is therefore most important that we make it meaningful, effective, and successful so that everything else in our life gets better as well. Life becomes more joyful. We become better role models to our kids.
** Our society regards working hard as very respectable. Many people feel that working eighteen-hour days is a badge of courage that demonstrates dedication to their job, and many companies reinforce this concept. But there is a line between working hard and having a work addiction which can have devastating effects not only on those individuals but also on those who live and work with them: their partners and spouses, their offspring, their business associates.
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Work addiction as defined by Bryan E. Robinson in Chained to the Desk: A Guidebook for Workaholics, their Partners, and Children is “an obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifests itself through self-imposed demands, an inability to regulate work habits, and overindulgence in work to the exclusion of most other life activities.” Many people use work as their “drug of choice.” Like food, alcohol or drugs, it helps them forget their worries, relieve emotional pain, boost their self-esteem, and entertain themselves. Work can provide “an emotional sanctuary while distancing them from loved ones and friends.” Of course, this does not mean that working long hours to meet financial commitments makes one a workaholic. True workaholics are driven by deeper, internal needs. Workaholics often create or look for work to do, while healthy workers enjoy their work, often work long hours and focus on getting the job done efficiently. Healthy workers think about and enjoy whatever they are engaged in at the present moment. Workaholics think about working a disproportionate amount of time, even during social activities or leisure times, when their minds wander and obsess about work. One of the ways to determine if you are a workaholic is to ask those who are close to you whether they find themselves lonely and isolated. Often at the same time that friends and employers applaud workaholics for their accomplishments, family members question their own sanity. •
Workaholics are always in a rush and super-busy.
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Workaholics play the control game. They perceive delegating tasks or asking for help as signs of weakness or incompetence. They over-plan and over-organize. Spontaneity and flexibility are limited.
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Nothing is ever perfect enough for a workaholic, so they often get angry with others who fail to meet their high standards.
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Workaholics’ relationships fall apart in the name of work.
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Workaholics produce work in binges. They create personal deadlines that mandate binging on every project.
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Workaholics are restless and no fun. Workaholics feel guilty and useless when they do something that does not produce results.
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Workaholics experience work trances—they literally tune out the present.
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Workaholics are impatient and irritable. They hate to wait (e.g. in lines). In the long run, their impatience can result in impulsivity.
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Workaholics think they are only as good as their last achievement and seek self-worth through performance and achievement.
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Workaholics have no time for self-care. They pay little attention to their physical needs, like nutrition, rest and exercise.
If you are uncertain if you fit these criteria, discuss your behavior with those near-and-dear to you. ** Being the sole breadwinner of the family, as men traditionally have been for centuries, imposes a tremendous burden. To be successful in the old linear way of thinking, men have to find a profession or trade and apply themselves strictly to bringing home the bacon. They work hard for power, for financial gain, and for whatever is unique to their circumstances. But that eighty-plus-hours-per-week pace is a trap. There is no way to get off the hamster wheel when so much—ever bigger houses, more and more plentiful toys—depends on your peddling faster and faster. Whoops—the kids are grown up and ready to leave for college. Can’t quit now! Many men go through a “mid-life crisis” somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five because of this perpetual hamster wheel. By that time, their wives no longer know them, so at the point when they need the most support, they have no one to whom they can turn. How can you tell your wife you want to get off the hamster wheel when she lives in the home and environment you have created as the status quo? I prefer to call this a time of mid-life “questioning,” when men start thinking about what life means—how can they now find significance? It’s a shame this is the norm rather than the exception.
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What can you do when you are stuck on the hamster wheel? Start by being very aware of what your world is and how you operate in it. Think about doing things differently. You may think you’re productive all those long, working hours, but life is not only about time management—a good deal depends on energy management. As I turned forty, I realized that life was slipping by and I hadn’t tried many of the things I had hoped I’d get to do eventually, such as downhill skiing. When I received an invitation to join a Wednesday getaway from Michael’s ski school, I felt I was missing out on what stay-at-home mothers could do. So I signed up for the seven Wednesdays involved. Ted was appalled that I was leaving the office mid-week when he couldn’t. But there I went, off on a big bus with the other mothers and a few fathers. I had a fabulous day. In fact, one of the women I sat next to on the bus became a wonderful friend as the result of bonding on the ski hill that first day. When I got home, I was full of energy and stories. Ted was still disgruntled. I challenged him to figure out how he, too, could rearrange his heavy schedule and come enjoy some fresh air and fun. He met my challenge. For the next six Wednesdays, Ted stayed up much of the night before so he could go, and slept all the way to and from the ski hill in the back of the bus. It’s interesting what solutions you can find when you’re motivated enough and someone challenges you to do things differently. What fun activity do you feel unable to do because you’re “trapped” on your hamster wheel? How can you challenge yourself to do something differently so you can enjoy that activity? **
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I had no idea what types of struggles working women coped with until I started coaching. I never realized how different my working mother was from the other, non-working mothers of my childhood. I thought all children were encouraged not only to have ambitions but, also, to go out and fulfill them. I’ve since learned that, as late comers to the world of business that men have controlled for centuries, women have to learn to play by the rules created in their absence. The following are several of the issues I have observed through working with women as clients, and on which I occasionally give teleclasses. •
Women often work much harder than men yet receive the same compensation. They often feel that unless they work very hard and give their all to the job, they are “cheating” somehow
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Women tend to wait to be given what they want. I once had a client who never thought to ask for a car allowance until she realized that everyone else at her management level was getting one.
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Women will sabotage themselves by polling before making a decision. Jennifer used to do that. She didn’t realize that every time she asked five or six people what she should do, she was leaving behind the message that she couldn’t make a decision on her own.
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Women often assume responsibility without authority. I’ve done this myself. I once assumed the role of conference co-chair without asking for the title. Fortunately, I realized it in time to correct it—which served to elevate my brand!
As Lois Frankel writes in Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, these concepts are important. If you are stuck in an unhappy balancing act and not getting all that you deserve, it’s time to become self-aware, recognize what you need, and ask for it. Are you working more or harder and not receiving adequate or equal compensation? Are you waiting for something you could be asking for? Do you self-sabotage by trying to reach consensus instead of making a decision? Are you taking on extra work without receiving the recognition you deserve? **
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We’ve all heard that when you work with purpose and passion, it doesn’t really feel like work. But sometimes what you used to love doing gets old and stops being fun. At that point, you have to make a choice. You could “repurpose” yourself and find a “calling” or something else that resonates with your heart. You could repurpose your work and make it worthwhile again. Or you could reenergize yourself by remembering what or who you are working for. If you started your career doing something to satisfy a spouse or a parent, maybe it’s time to do something for you. Just because you’ve spent ten, twenty or even thirty years doing one thing doesn’t mean you can’t take your strengths and move on to something else. Clearly, you might have to make some sacrifices, but it’s so much easier to integrate life and work when your work is worth doing and your life is worth living. Are you happy doing what you do for a living? What would you do if you could start your working life over now? What kind of sacrifices are you willing to make to change your work into something you enjoy again? ** Work greatly affects who you are when you come home. You can’t avoid it—you take who you are at home to work and vice versa. A person unhappy at work carries that negative energy home with them. Sometimes this is a temporary situation. When it’s not, it’s time to re-evaluate what is keeping you on your particular hamster wheel and what options are open to you. If nothing else, creating the dialogue with your spouse or significant other can surface how this “disconnect” is affecting your relationship. Once you have a mutual awareness, you are in it together. You might think of creating a quiet time or a ritual that allows you to decompress so that you can be fully engaged in your home environment afterward. If you are consistently miserable at work, what do you need from your partner to allow you to transition into your home when you get there?
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** Work can also be a unifying element for a family. Remember, you are a role model for your children. If you hate your work, your children may think that all work is negative. Discuss your choices with them so they understand the trade-offs you are making, what your thoughts are for the short term, and what your plans are for the long term. Always think about what conversation you could have with your spouse and children that would create a more supportive environment for everybody concerned. I didn’t do such a good job explaining what my work was all about to Michele as she was growing up. I didn’t take the time to describe and involve her in what I did, so she got the impression that working in an office or a business meant sitting in a chair looking at a computer from nine o’clock to five o’clock. As a result, she decided to become a teacher and to give the world of business a wide berth. While she was in school, she worked in a cookie store for a while, then for a frozen-yogurt franchise. Later, she had an opportunity to work for a company that sold knives through students. A year later, her boss told me that of the 800 students hired, a very large percentage sold only $200 worth of product. A small percent sold $2,000. My daughter, who supposedly had “no interest in business,” sold $35,000 of product. When she became an assistant manager in that same company her third year in university, she switched her major from Humanities to Marketing. Michele said that what she enjoyed about her job was the variety of recruiting, training, demonstrating, and managing. At one point, she invited me to speak to a group of her employees because she felt many of their parents were not supportive of their jobs. She wanted them to have another perspective. Whether you want to be or not, you are the role model for your children. Your attitude about work influences their development.
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How are you modeling work attitudes to your children? Are they absorbing the feeling of having pride in their work or are they getting the impression that work is horrible, boring, stressful, and to be avoided at all costs? What kinds of changes can you make to model a more supportive, positive impression? ** Just as being unhappy at work affects your home life, being unhappy at home affects your work. Trouble at home can manifest as trouble focusing on and achieving your goals at the office, and no boss or manager will allow you to go on too long without living up to their expectations. From time to time, a senior executive apologizes to me when our conversation veers off to personal challenges—but no apology is necessary. This is often a breakthrough to understanding what is really going on and what is getting in the way of progress. The opportunity to discuss options brings the decision-making chaos out into the open so possible solutions can be examined. Where does your unhappiness originate, at home or at work? Are problems at the office negatively impacting your family? Or are problems with your personal life carrying over to create difficulties at work? ** Whether or not you have children, family is usually high on most people’s list of priorities. Certainly having the support of family can help tremendously when you come home from work. Creating a family team may or may not be a new idea for you. When you involve your family in decisions that impact them and in your purpose for doing what you do, you not only teach your children, but also gain their support at the same time. It can also explain to them why you are tense or irritable at the end of the day. You may be surprised how sharing your thoughts will change your family’s interpretations of what’s going on.
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As my children were growing up, we had a “Family Council” meeting every couple of weeks on Sunday night. This was an opportunity for anyone to voice their thoughts on how to make home a happier place. We aired our grievances and looked for solutions. Later, Family Council nights turned into regular family-night dinners. I was surprised when I mentioned to Michael once that one of his sisters was moving back to Southern California around the same time he was. He immediately said, “Great! We can have family dinners again.” Family dinner times are a great opportunity to review family values and expectations and to be supportive of the challenges we each face. There is no substitute for showing that you care, even if not every attempt is successful. How does your family operate as a team? What can you do to help encourage more family support for yourself and other family members and enjoy a happier home? ** Sometimes you just have to say no. It’s not always possible to do everything you want to do for yourself in addition to those things you have committed to do for others. You have to decide what you can let go. The trick is to eliminate those things that are not in alignment. Let’s say, for example, you want to have a “portfolio” career—the type of career where you do a variety of things for different people—and that several people ask you to do business development for them while another potential client asks you to devote sixty percent of your time to their marketing plan. This would probably create quite a bit of anxiety as you try to choose between two conflicting sets of activities, unless you choose to do only the business-development activities. Then you can look at the common denominators in order to network and interact with people who are all in alignment with each other. Being in alignment also means maintaining your personal integrity. If the values of your company are uncomfortable for you, you will not be in alignment with the company. When there is a lack of alignment between an executive’s behaviors and those of colleagues, no one will be happy, much less fulfilled.
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Do you feel in alignment with your company, your superiors and/or your partners? What would it take to realign your work life for greater satisfaction? ** For many of us, reluctance to ask for help is just about one of the hardest behaviors to change. We will go to any length to remain independent. We actually stop ourselves from asking someone else to give us a hand. Sometimes we are not even aware that we don’t ask for help. As a coach, I often hang around with the rest of my tribe. A couple of years ago we did an exercise in which two people were “handcuffed” together using ropes. We had to figure out how to undo the ropes. I realized well into the game that there was no rule preventing us from asking for help. A good friend had already figured things out but it was still a major decision for me to ask her partner how they did it. It was only when my partner got too frustrated that I decided it was okay to ask for help. My big take-away for the evening was the surprise that it had taken me so long to ask. Don’t think I learned my lesson just from that event. Years later, I was in a seminar where the trainer announced a contest. Only one person in a room of 550 went to the trainer and asked if he had any clues he could give to solve the puzzle. Only one person. What makes us all so hesitant to ask? How do you feel when someone asks you for help? Isn’t it a pleasure to help a friend, meet someone who wants some advice or pick someone’s child up with yours? What stops you from asking for the same thing? There’s a big difference between being a “taker” and recognizing that a little help now and then can make a big difference. Do you recognize when you need help? Can you ask for it, or do you resist admitting that you cannot do it all? What kind of changes would you have to make to allow yourself to ask for help before a situation reaches the crisis stage?
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E p i l o g u e
Epilogue Life is a journey and we all go through it continuously, no matter how expert we are in different areas of personal growth and development. More often than not, I seem to attract the clients who have something to teach as well as who need to learn something from me. So, where are members of my family now? The children are all doing well. Michael is an attorney, happy in his new field and far from home. Jennifer is thriving as the western business-development manager for a company that offers paperless solution technology. Michele is graduating this year with a BA in marketing. She opened an office for her knife company last summer and was tenth out of 200 in the nation. Cody is at the top of his class at USC, taking a double major in finance and accounting. As for my ex-husbands, I have no relationship with Kenneth at this point, possibly because our paths simply ceased crossing. He's still in Canada while I’ve been in Southern California for sixteen years. Sadly, we’ve never had the opportunity to work out the pain between us. It's a shame but that's the way it is. My relationship with Ted, on the other hand, has evolved into being best friends and extended family. We have Sunday dinners together, often
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with one of his girlfriends present. He’s my "In Case of Emergency" number and I’m his. Sometimes the divorce works better than the marriage. I’m loving life as an empty nester and continuing to grow my business. At this point, I am developing leaders within organizations less by coaching and more by helping them have conversations that count. By that I mean having conversations with my client that make them recognize how they may be letting their team down by not doing what they said they would or by creating silos within the organization. At the core of life, it’s all about communicating. I've discovered that life is a journey of becoming self aware, authentic and real, which is also what coaching is all about. The most important learning about one’s self is recognizing that we are all human and we all will make many mistakes. Forgiving ourselves for our mistakes is the first step to forgiving and being empathetic and compassionate toward other people. Those are the kind of thoughts that show the maturity in the journey. Part of my maturity is recognizing the real, biological differences between men and women. Although more of my clients are females, the majority of clients who pay me directly are male. Men seem more ready to understand the difference between making an investment in themselves and spending money. So the only way I get to coach women is when their organization thinks they’re worth coaching. And even then I consistently get questions like “How much money are they spending on me?” and “I don’t think I’m worth all of this.” Why? I believe it’s in the female genome, in our DNA. Women have a basic need to be taken care of. It’s only in the last fifty years that women have become really self sufficient and professional. Nevertheless, they still have that lingering sense that someone should be taking care of them and they almost have an anger about it. Men's DNA gives them the sense that they’re supposed to take care of people; when they can’t do it, they get angry. They’re often afraid to get into relationships because they cannot support the woman. How could only fifty years change six generations of DNA, which is how far back our genes go?
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As for me, I’m quite happy to be real in myself and let what wants to happen, happen. And even at this age I’m loving being old enough to recognize what it is that I’m experiencing.
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Epilogue
Appendix
A
Book Summaries
I’m an avid reader of books aimed at personal and professional development, and I chronicle my efforts in book summaries that I share with friends, clients and colleagues. I provide a list of these book summaries and recommendations at http://www.frumi.com. Please feel free to click on Books and Reports and peruse as many titles as you like. I update the list every month, so send me a note at
[email protected] if you’d like to be added to my email list.
Below are just a few examples of what you'll find at http://www.frumi.com/index.php/weblog/boo ks_and_reports/
Book Summaries The Attractor Factor by Joe Vitale Building Trust In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life by Robert C. Solomon & Fernando Flores
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Change Your Questions Change Your Life By Marilee G. Adams Ph.D. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End by Rosabeth Moss Kanter Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman EQ Edge, The by Steven J. Stein, PhD and Howard E. Book, M.D. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success by John C. Maxwell, Thomas Nelson Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work & in Life, One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott Four Agreements, The by Don Miguel Ruiz Good To Great by Jim Collins Last Word on Power, The by Tracy Goss Power of Full Engagement, The by Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz Winning by Jack Welch
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A u t h o r
About the Author
Frumi Rachel Barr, PhD, a veteran entrepreneur, has founded or been a partner in numerous companies, holding both Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) positions. Her hands-on experience ranges from manufacturing to service industries to direct-marketing enterprises; her consulting and coaching experience has taken her into virtually every type of corporation and small business. Her success has been so encompassing that clients, associates, and fellow coaches have dubbed her a “Catalyst for Change.” Dr. Barr specializes in inspiring leaders to rediscover the strengths and values that energize them so they can, in turn, renew their colleagues, employees and business operations and has a proven track record for helping
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entrepreneurs and leaders balance the needs of growing their businesses with the needs of their personal and family lives. Dr. Barr holds a Bachelor of Physical Therapy (BPT) from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from California State University, Fullerton, California (CSUF), a Coaching Certification from Hudson Institute, Santa Barbara, California and a doctorate in Business Administration from Pacific Western University. She is a board member of The Entrepreneurship Institute in Orange County and immediate Past President of the National Board of the Professional Coaching and Mentors Association (PCMA). She has also been a member of the advisory board for Chapman University’s new Business Coaching Certification Program, International Coaching Federation (ICF), and the Mentorship Program of NAWBO (National Association of Women Business Owners).
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Your Book
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