The Things I Never Told Anyone

In 2004 I was on vacation in Greece when the phone rang and someone read me a letter that had arrived at the office.

Nortel had terminated our dealership.

Sit with the logistics of that for a second, because I never fully have. I was on the other side of the world, in the one week of the year I was not supposed to be reachable, and the end of my company was read aloud to me down a phone line by a person holding a piece of paper I could not see.

The arithmetic took about four seconds and it was not complicated arithmetic. Nortel was one hundred percent of our new business sales revenue. Not most of it. All of it. I stood there in Greece and did not think we would survive the year.

They Didn't Cut Us for Selling Badly

They cut us because I complained.

The product had quality problems. I said so. I said so to anyone at Nortel who would take the call, for long enough and loudly enough to become known for it, back when they were still the largest thing in Canadian telecom and did not have to listen to anybody, least of all a dealer in Toronto with opinions about their engineering. Rather than fix the equipment, they removed the man describing it.

My grandfather gave me one sentence and I ran a company on it for twenty-seven years. If you do something, do it right. Never cut corners, because the truth always comes out in the wash. In 2004 I told the truth about a product to the company that manufactured it, and the truth came out in the wash, and it took my business with it.

What I Actually Did Wrong

It was not the complaining.

Nobody decides to put one hundred percent of anything in a single place. It happens to you slowly, like a frog in a pot. Every year Nortel was a larger share of the business and every year the reason was a good one: best product, biggest brand, customers asking for them by name, and the number going up. The number going up is what hides it. If you had asked me in 2003 to name the largest concentration risk in my life, I would have talked to you about the stock market.

The competitors heard within days. I have never known how and it has never mattered. They went straight to our client list, one call after another, offering to take over the contracts of a dealer who had just lost the line. Like a cat on a ball.

Over that year we lost about a fifth of our client base. I am estimating. I do not have records going back that far, and I am not going to invent a number for a year I would rather not have lived.

There Was Nobody to Tell

Not the staff. They had mortgages of their own, and the one thing a company that size runs on is the belief that the man at the front knows what he is doing. Tell them and you have not shared the load, you have distributed the panic, and now you have a resignation problem sitting on top of a revenue problem.

Not the clients. They were being called by competitors telling them we were finished. My job that year was to be the calmest man in every room I walked into, which is a strange job to hold when you privately agree with the people saying you are done.

Not the bank. Banks do not lend into fear. I would find out exactly how much four years later.

And my friends.

This is the one I have thought about the most, and the honest answer is not flattering. It was probably pride.

I did tell some of them. That is the part that took me years to understand, because I was not sitting in silence. I had friends. I saw them. The subject came up. But there is a difference between telling someone what is happening and letting them see how frightened you are, and I could do the first one all day. Saying the second part out loud, to a person who has known you as the guy who built the thing, is a different act entirely, and I could not perform it. I am not sure I ever tried.

Here is what I have noticed since, and I offer it as the most useful thing in this chapter. The people carrying the heaviest loads often look the calmest. Not sometimes. Usually. Calm is what the load does to you in public, because the load itself is the reason you are not permitted to look like you are carrying it.

Fourteen years later, when I had sold the company and had all the time in the world and nobody left to be steady for, the first thing I built was a room where entrepreneurs who had sold their companies could tell each other the truth.

What It Actually Was

I have spent twenty years trying to name the thing that made it unspeakable, and the closest I have come is this. It was not fear. Fear you can say out loud. It was responsibility.

I was responsible for the staff and their mortgages. For the clients who had bought a system from me and needed it to keep working. For the bank that had lent against my word. For my wife, who married a man with a lease and an idea. For two kids who had no idea any of this was happening and should not have. For my parents, who were proud of me. And somewhere at the bottom of the list, in a spot I never once looked at, for myself.

Every one of those is a person who needs you to be fine.

That is what responsibility feels like from the inside. Not the hours, and not the work. It is being the one person in the building who is not allowed to be afraid out loud, in a room full of people whose lives are arranged around your steadiness, for as long as it takes.

I still cannot tell you whether that is the job or a failure of the man doing it. I have asked a lot of founders and none of them can tell me either. It is bigger than any business I ever built, and I am still working on it, and I have started to suspect it is not a question with an answer, only better and worse ways of carrying it.

The Exception

Except that all of that is not quite true, and the exception is the reason there is a company to write about at all.

My wife knew everything.

Not a summary. Not the version with the numbers rounded off and the timeline softened and the worst of it left in the car. Everything, as it happened, for twenty-seven years. The letter read down a phone line from Greece. The competitors working through our client list. The nights in 2008 when I did not sleep, with a hundred thousand dollars of our money sitting in a stranger's hands and no bank in the world lending. The state of the unions, the holiday parties, the tears. She had been in a parking lot in 1992 while I un-installed my own product from a customer's wall, before the press, before the first big deal, before there was any evidence at all. She was there for every quiet catastrophe after it that nobody else was permitted to know about.

There is a version of this paragraph that every man in my position writes, and none of us mean it the way we think we do, and all of it lands as lip service no matter how completely it is meant. So let me put it as arithmetic instead, which is the only language I have ever been genuinely fluent in.

Fifty staff. Four buildings. A mortgage. Twenty-seven years. One person who got the truth.

That is not a thank-you. That is a load-bearing wall. Take it out and none of the rest of it stands, including the man.

What Happened to the Company

We survived on the service department.

That is the unglamorous sentence at the middle of the worst year I ever had, and I want it on the record because nobody writes this part down. New business was gone. But two decades of installed equipment was still sitting in office towers all over Toronto, and it still broke, and it still needed people who knew how to fix it, and those contracts did not care what Nortel thought of me. The boring recurring revenue I had spent years not thinking very hard about is the only reason there was a company left to be frightened for.

Then we moved. We brought Avaya on within weeks. The staff were trained inside a month. We had our first sale within six weeks.

And we brought on NEC as a second product, deliberately, for exactly one reason, which was that I had just learned in the most expensive way available what it costs to have one of anything.

Within five years we were the largest Avaya IP Office dealer in Canada. We took dealer of the year more than once.

Five years after the letter, Nortel filed for bankruptcy.

Would I Do It Again

Would I pick up the phone and tell Nortel their product had problems, knowing what the letter cost?

Absolutely. It was the right thing to do. I did not need hindsight to know that, although hindsight has been generous about it.

But I want to be careful about the shape of that answer, because there is a version of this chapter where the worst letter of my career turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to the company, and I have told it that way in rooms, and it goes over beautifully, and it is a lie of framing.

Six weeks is fast. It is also six weeks of standing inside a company you believe is finished, while competitors work your client list and your staff watch your face and the only person you can say it to is your wife. From here, with the awards on the wall, it reads as vindication. From inside, none of that had happened yet and none of it was going to be true until it was. If Avaya had said no, or signed somebody else that season, I would be telling you a different story with an identical first paragraph.

Disaster and opportunity are indistinguishable for a while. Sometimes the while is six weeks and sometimes it is the rest of your life, and you do not get to know which one you are standing in while you are standing in it.

Nobody Ever Asked

I have been asked hundreds of times how I built a business.

Nobody has ever asked me how I raised a family while doing it.

I have been on stages and podcasts and panels, and the questions are always the same questions. How did you find the angle. How did you get the first customer. How did you know when to sell. What was the multiple. Good questions, all of them, and I have answers.

Here is the one I would rather be asked. How do you build a business, raise a family, pay the mortgage, manage staff, and still show up?

Attendance Is Not the Answer

Here is what I have always offered, on the rare occasions it comes up. I never missed one. Not the rock concerts, not the gymnastics shows, not the tournaments, not the school plays. I was home for dinner. That is the record, and I am proud of it, and I have handed it over as the answer for twenty years.

The record is not the answer. The record is attendance.

The great illusion is that work and family compete for time. They do not. Time is schedulable. I always found the two hours; at fifty-five I found two hours a day for a pickleball championship I never entered. They compete for presence, and presence is not a scheduling problem, because you can sit in the third row of an auditorium with a perfect attendance record and be somewhere else entirely, running a conversation with Nortel in your head that you are not permitted to have out loud with anyone in the building.

That is what an unshared fear does. It does not keep you from the recital. It comes with you and it takes the seat.

What Made the Difference

I got to put it down at the door, because there was someone on the other side of the door who already knew.

When my son was fifteen he played a charity concert at the Ricoh Coliseum in front of eight thousand people. He plays guitar. I sat in that building and I watched him.

I was carrying the load that night. I carried it every night for twenty-seven years and there was not one night I did not. And I was a dad, proudly watching his son play guitar to eight thousand people, and there was room in me to be both.

There was room because I was not also holding it alone.

The Tours

There is one more scene from that stretch, and it is the one my son remembers.

In the summer of 2008 I took him with me to the apartment building I was about to buy. He was ten. We walked the property with the inspector for hours, the roof, the boiler, the driveway, the whole engineering list, and he came with me to other buildings after that, and I talked while we walked, because that is what you do when you are walking.

I was not teaching him. I want to be precise about that, because the version where I am teaching him is more flattering and less true. I was doing the work, and he was there.

Which is exactly what my grandfather did. He was not teaching me either. He was a butcher with a paintbrush, changing a bulb, laying a tile, collecting the rent, talking the whole time in that heavy accent, and I was in the room because I loved being in the room.

I asked my son recently what he remembers about those tours. He remembers them fondly. He remembers them as time he got to spend with his father.

Three generations. My grandfather gave me buildings and a sentence about doing things right. I gave my son a roof and a boiler and a capitalization rate. And the last thing I ever said to my grandfather was a business report.

Nobody in this family appears to have a second language.

I have gone back and forth on whether that is love or a habit of translating love into work, and I have decided I do not get to know. What I know is that he remembers the tours fondly, and I know it because I asked him.

That is more than I ever got to ask my grandfather, who died in 2002 with me assuming I understood what those visits were, and who never got the question, because asking was not in the language either.