The

Entrepreneurial

Code

Lessons from an

Ivy League Entrepreneur

Chapter Twenty-Three

With graduation come and gone, the three partners hadn’t decided where to locate their corporate “headquarters.” The leases on their apartments were finished which left Johnny and Maverock sleeping on the floor of their office.  They showered at the gym and kept their belongings at the houses of friends who were still students.  Abe was fortunate because his girlfriend, who had graduated the year prior, was a nurse at the University’s hospital and Abe lived with her.

In a way, there was a side of Johnny that liked the hardship.  If he was going to be really rich at a young age, he wanted to earn it.  Sleeping on the floor was going to be part of the story he would tell guests on his yacht some day.  It made good fodder for the lectures he would give at the University after they begged him to come back as a guest speaker.  

In fact, the three partners began talking about their ultimate success like it was their manifest destiny. All of the time they spent in their offices together had isolated them from the rest of the world.  They were a case study in “group think,” the phenomenon whereby everyone conforms to the consensus of the group and no one challenges popular opinion anymore.  They each became mesmerized by the same mantra – do whatever it takes to grow the business.

Johnny proceeded to lose all balance in his life and he lived and breathed the company with his partners.  In many ways they had become like brothers to Johnny.  They were the ones with whom he had the most in common.  After all, it took way too much effort to explain his life to other people who weren’t involved in the business.  Johnny didn’t watch TV; he didn’t go out and drink beer anymore; he didn’t really do much other than work.  He began to lose the art of small talk.  Sometimes, Johnny almost felt as if he was losing his personality to the company.

Old habits remain and a favorite activity for Johnny, Maverock, and Abe was to sit in front of their computers at night and modify the scenarios of their financial models. They would sit there at 4 A.M., drinking sodas from Wawa and eating pretzels, as Maverock would say, “Let’s see what happens if we get 3% of the schools, and average spending per student increased by 10%!” Johnny and Abe would nod their heads repeatedly, while digging their hands into the pretzel bag.  Invariably, Maverock’s answer would sound something like “CHA-CHING! YOU ARE A RICH MAN, PAL! U2 IS GOING TO BE PLAYING AT YOUR BIRTHDAY PARTY!”

Johnny and Abe would both laugh. It was that old joke that gets you every time, no matter how many times you’ve already heard it. However, they were tweaking those models so much that they started to believe some of the scenarios.  While they may not have put much stock in the best-case scenario, the numbers in their base case looked real to them.  It became as if they were already rich, except they didn’t have access to the money yet.

In many ways, Johnny used the belief that he would become wealthy to justify his behavior.  That’s how he rationalized living such an unbalanced lifestyle. He reckoned his company needed to get “established” and then he would slow things down and enjoy himself.  Meanwhile, he was making himself miserable by working around the clock, brooding over potential problems, and obsessing over outcomes beyond his control.  It was as if he had forgotten how to relax.

For some reason, Johnny felt guilty about spending time away from the office.  He always felt the need to be “productive” for the business.  Unfortunately, clearing his head would have been more “productive” for the company than working 7 days a week. However, being at the office gave him the illusion of control and momentum. It made him feel like he was doing everything possible to help his cause.

Johnny’s relationship with his girlfriend was also suffering. He had no money and couldn’t even take her out on a date. He had been dating her for three years, but she came second to his company and he expected her to understand.  Johnny didn’t dress any better than he did in college, he didn’t have his own apartment, and he was sleeping on the floor of his office. Despite his talk of future success, he had nothing tangible to show for his efforts.  To make matters even worse, Johnny stopped exercising and wasn’t in-shape any more.  Because he showered at the gym, he stopped shaving unless he had a business meeting. Johnny wouldn’t have been surprised if his girlfriend was secretly hoping for his company to fail.

Johnny’s parents were also concerned about him. Whenever they saw him, he looked like hell.  He was sleep-deprived, grumpy, and generally unkempt.  All he wanted to talk about was whatever was going on with his business, and he had little patience for criticism.  At this point in his life, the only people Johnny connected with where Maverock and Abe.

The three of them suffered from the same sickness.  It was contagious and they infected each other.  Their group dynamic had changed after spending so much time cooped-up together in their office. Their interactions had lost some of their professionalism and they weren’t always pleasant. That’s what happens when you work together 24/7 under a lot of pressure.

Different sides of their personalities emerged. Maverock was hotheaded and prone to fits of anger. He would yell and scream in arguments.  At times, he could be impossible to work with. Books would fly across the room in the heat of battle. The strange thing was that after the hollering, he had no problem forgetting about it an hour later, whereas Abe and Johnny carried grudges for days.  Maverock almost never held grudges.

Abe was perpetually grumpy and bitingly sarcastic. They nicknamed him “Mr. Salty,” because he could be such a jerk sometimes for no reason. He had the ability to push your buttons for his own pleasure.  The unique thing about Abe was that he didn’t stop. Once he found your button, he kept pushing it until it didn’t work anymore. The more you got mad at him, the more he pushed it and the funnier it was for him.

Johnny learned to adapt to whomever he was arguing with at the time.  If it were Maverock, he would scream back at the top of his lungs.  If it were Abe, he would say mean things and try to get under his skin. The point is they ceased having conventional professional relationships with each other. They spent so much time together that they were like three brothers sharing bunk beds in the same room. They became a dysfunctional family.

On the one hand, the three partners also knew how to motivate each other. When it felt like they were doing battle with the rest of the world, Abe used to joke about the list he was making of people who wouldn’t help them, so he could rub it in their faces after they were successful.  Since it became “us versus them,” they never blamed each other when they missed an RFP, or if a school didn’t want to work with the company.  All of that energy got channeled into proving other people wrong.

When things were bad, the Johnny, Maverock, and Abe made each other laugh, and pretty soon they felt better.  When it came down to it, they were a team.  With all its flaws, they were loyal to the vision of the business they shared. That stubborn loyalty through tough times was a double-edged sword.  When one of them got excited about something, it became contagious to the group and they lost all checks and balances.

Copyright  2005 by Chris Cononico
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