Tireless. Kim Lorenz

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СКАЧАТЬ of his dreams: a black, fully loaded new Ford F-250 Lariat, complete with fancy wheels and big tires. I wore slacks and a tie every day, while John considered himself dressed up when he had on his jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. We ended up taking John’s new dream Ford F250 into the business and adding a big compressor and tools so we could use it to service customer trucks and make deliveries.

      Can you see the pattern developing here?

      John and I had different skills, different personalities, different lifestyles, and different experiences. Is one more important? Is one better than the other? Or are they complementary, both important parts of the equation? I’d say the latter. That said, when choosing any partner, it is best you both possess valuable skills needed to operate a business.

      My day would start at 6 AM every day, and often away from the office or even out of state as we operated in both Washington and Alaska. I worked hard all day, and often would not be home until after 7 PM, or out even later with customers or employees.

      One day, I needed the service truck (John’s dream truck) to deliver some tires to a customer on my way home. The tires were too large to fit in my car. This truck was our only service vehicle at the time. It was needed 24 hours a day if any customer called with an emergency flat repair. We had to be available to quickly respond to any emergency if we hoped to keep the customer. So, off I went with our only truck, hoping a customer did not call that evening. It was December, so it was cold, and it was starting to snow lightly.

      Of course, the inevitable happened. I got home late, well after dinner time, and was in the house a short time when our service person, Dave, called me and said, “The answering service called. Darigold has a milk tanker truck on I-5 with a flat!” Dave was in bed and lived 30 miles south of me, and the truck with the flat was 15 miles north of my home on the side of the freeway. The customer was huge—they ran trucks 24 hours a day. The milk tanker was a 105,500 pound, 9-axle, huge vehicle that was on a tight schedule to make it to the dairy processing plant. We had to perform. This was a new customer to us, and the largest customer for us at that time with hundreds of trucks. We would lose the account if we could not service them properly.

      So, off I went. No dinner, tromping in the snow, heading out at 10 PM to fix a flat tire along a busy freeway. The bigger problem was that I had never done this from a truck before! I can change the big tires. I had done it in the shop over the years. I thought I knew what to do, but had never really done it by myself. I had been an executive. I wore a tie every day. Now I found myself on my back with a hydraulic jack, on the side of the freeway under a huge truck changing a tire and wheel that weighs more than 150 pounds. I had a tire gun that also weighed about 80 pounds connected to a huge airline that allowed me to remove the big bolts. The Darigold truck was back on the road in short order, and I packed up the tools and headed back to our home just after midnight.

      Jill, my wife, was up, worried and in tears for lots of reasons. It seemed to her that I had to do all the work. This is the point of this little story. As I entered our home through the garage to remove my now wet and filthy clothes, I apologized to Jill, and explained it was all part of building this new business. She understood the hard work, respected that, and knew starting and growing a business would be hard, but she still couldn’t help but blurt out, “WHAT IS JOHN DOING?!”

      “Jill, for all you know, John is doing everything I am doing and more.” I left it at that even though I knew it was not the case, but also knew there was nothing more John could be doing at that time.

      A partnership does not have to be fair or equal, or anything else. Both John and I needed to do what we were best at doing at that time to grow our little business venture. I was not proud that a year earlier, I wore a suit, drove a new car, had a great office and expense account with many employees and here I was getting out of wet, dirty clothes doing hard physical work. John would be building our manufacturing plant soon and have his hands full, doing work I was not able to do, as he had a different skill set than me. I was hoping John would be holding up his end when the time came. While we do not know the future, I felt he was a man of his word. He wasn’t a slacker; he was a genuinely hard-working person.

      Think this through, though: at this early stage of the business, I was putting in many more hours than John. I started earlier, worked later, and was away from home more often. It might be I was doing 70% or more of the work to get the company started, but does that matter? Looking at Jill’s point of view, all she knew was that her husband seemed to be doing all the work in this new company. She could only make a judgement based on what she heard and saw, and at the moment she saw her husband having been on a service call in the snow at night. She was rightfully concerned. Not to mention my ruining a nice shirt and shoes. The Darigold driver did mention I was the best-dressed service person he had ever seen!

      After a few years, we all laughed at Jill’s question, “What is John doing?” and the story behind it. There was no way Jill could know all the details behind the current situation. The lesson here is that it is simply best not to bring work home. At that time, neither partner or spouse had any idea if we would succeed or what the future would hold. So, while I did want to reply to Jill that John was really not doing much at that time, my gut feeling was to simply say what I said, that he was “doing everything and more.”

      A few weeks prior, John and I had spoken about this at length. John knew I was carrying the lion’s share of the workload as we still had not moved into a space for the new plant that was sitting in storage. We were both in the office and he said, “I know you are working a lot more than I am, Kim. When we are able to build the plant, I promise I will more than make up for this.” There really was not much I could say; I was pleased he acknowledged my work and really hoping he would contribute his share when he could.

      Although I still had some reservations, I was smart enough to keep them to myself. More importantly, I did not share any of my thoughts or reservations with Jill, who could never fully see the other side of this story—at least not yet.

      A few months later, we finally secured a lease and moved into our first building. We were still in the industrial area of South Seattle, and thus were close to many trucking companies and industrial firms. As promised, John built the retread manufacturing plant we had purchased to start the business. He was in the plant around 5:00 AM every day, working weekends and late evenings as well. John more than made up for his share of the work, and to this day, we have both kept up our sides of the bargain. Nobody worked any harder than John did, and thankfully, we can look back and laugh at Jill’s frustration. After a number of years, Jill and I shared that story with John and his wife, Sharon. While it may be funny now, it is a good lesson on humility, holding back your immediate thoughts, and not bringing home any one-sided stories, especially if the outcomes are still unknown.

      Our different skill sets, when combined, added up to a successful partnership. I had knowledge, education, and skills John did not have. John had manufacturing skills, an education, and knowledge I did not have. We combined our strengths and weaknesses, had open communication, pushed through conflict, and watched our company succeed. Of course, as I mentioned in the last chapter, we grew way too fast for a small, privately-funded enterprise. We funded the company 100% on our own, with no outside investors, family funding, or gifts. We didn’t have a glamorous startup or enormous profit at the beginning. We were just a legacy-type business with knowledge and insight that our competitors did not have.

      The process of starting up our business provided several opportunities to test the mettle of each of us. These hardships are worth reviewing, as these instances are yet another area not covered in depth by schools or books as mentioned already. In school, we aren’t taught why partnerships fail, or why partnerships succeed. Perhaps because every story on success or failure has so many variations and twists. What makes a business fail or succeed is a different scenario in every case. Our story is a basic example that can go very deep and needs to be understood. If you only concentrate on how much each person is working, you can fail to see that СКАЧАТЬ