Not long ago a friend of mine, a successful entrepreneur, was crying on my shoulder. "Fred, he said to me, "when I started my company I knew I needed a Mr. Inside, and I knew a good one, my friend George. I offered him 50% of the company. He'd have jumped just as quickly for 20%, but I liked the fairness feeling of being 50-50 partners.
Today, after five years of hard work, we're nicely profitable on $10 million of sales. We're pulling really good money out in salaries. We have every fringe benefit we can think of. Best of all, we've only scratched the surface. I can taste $25 million in sales in two to three years. At that level, we'll be the undisputed king of the mountain in our industry, and making so much money we won't know what to do with it."
"Gee, Lee" I said, "I'd like to be of help, but I'm having a hard time figuring out where the problem lies."
"It's George" he said. "I went into his office last week and said to him, George, we need to get away from here for a couple of days and map out a new business plan designed to triple our size by 1999."
"And what did he say" I asked.
He said, "Gee Lee, that's nice. Right now I've got to leave for my golf lesson. I'll be back by two, however, and we can talk about this. Quite frankly, though, it sounds like a helluva lot of work to me."
"Fred", Lee said to me, "George hasn't been in here on a weekend in almost a year. He's never in before 8:00 A.M. anymore and never here after 5:30. We're losing momentum and I can't carry this company by myself. He doesn't want to risk the investment that would be required to pull the thing off. And being exactly a one-half owner of the company, he can and does veto anything he wants. I'm going absolutely nuts."
I didn't have a good answer for him. As I was ...