APRIL

DATE: MONDAY, APRIL 2, 2012

BANK BALANCE: $136,260.92

CASH RELATIVE TO START OF YEAR (“NET CASH”): -$893.40

NEW-CONTRACT VALUE, YEAR-TO-DATE: $543,003

This is the twenty-fifth April since I opened my doors, and the weeks before tax day have always been quiet. But Nick and Dan, who haven’t experienced this swoon, are confident that something will arrive soon. The phone rang steadily in March, and we have a lot of solid proposals out there. And there are always clients who say they’ll place an order if we’ll revise our earlier quote.

Nick is preparing his twenty-third proposal for a buyer at the Kaiser Family Foundation—a new record for us. His first quote went out a year ago, and now he’s racking his brains to come up with another variation. He’s stuck with the same basic design, a ten-foot round table with some combination of wood and marble on the top. Every couple of weeks, the buyer in Manhattan calls back, swears that his bosses are about to make a decision, and asks for one more change—a different wood, or a different number of data ports, and always a lower price. It isn’t a cheap design and it won’t be a cheap delivery. We’ve bottomed out at twenty-two thousand dollars for the whole thing, but the buyer won’t stop. Nick has asked me repeatedly if he really needs to send another proposal. Patience, I tell him. I have been through this before. Usually they disappear, but sometimes they end up buying, and we can’t let any potential jobs slip away through our own laziness.

Nick has been on the same merry-go-round with an Air Force facility in Virginia. They’ve been very specific about what they want, and it looks like a forty-thousand-dollar order. Again, he’s submitted multiple designs and spent significant time responding to requests for small changes. The flyboys tell us that they are very impressed with the proposals. Using their photos and our modeling software, Nick has made a perfect simulation of their room and finally come up with a table they love. They reassure him that he’s doing great, but that they need to put the job out for bid—federal contracting rules. I tell Nick that this won’t be an issue if we can persuade them to let us help write the bid specifications. That way we can make it very difficult for anyone but us to fulfill the requirements. This trick has worked in the past. Not this time. When they post the job on the federal contracting Web site, the table is described in generic language. And there’s a requirement that bidders must attend a public briefing at the base—a six-hour drive from our shop. I tell Nick to make the trip. He’s done a ton of work, and we don’t want to lose the opportunity by not showing up.

Dan is working on his own big order, worth more than thirty-five thousand dollars: three tables for Cali Heavy Industries, a large engineering firm in California. Along with the designs, we have provided the buyer with a complete plan of our tables and offered to help him lay out the floor drillings for all the power and data wiring.

I’ve been communicating with the facilities manager at a local bank. They are renovating their headquarters and trying to decide whether to repair their existing table or replace it. Of course I have an opinion about which of these would be the wisest choice, but I can’t even get the guy to respond to my e-mails.

I do have one potential buyer ready to get started. A good friend of mine wants me to make him a bedroom suite. I am not eager to accept this order. I have built a fair number of beds and dressers over the years, and they are surprisingly complicated. I’ve warned him that I will have to charge a high price—about as much as a new car—just to cover costs, but he’s persisted. I didn’t tell him that I really, really hate working for friends. I have done it on a few occasions, without any problems, but I don’t like the exchange of money tainting what should be a purely social relationship.

He’s been after me for almost a year, and I recently sent him the designs for review, but I haven’t given him numbers yet. He’s asking for a lot of work—a large sleigh bed with matching nightstands, two large dressers, and a bookshelf, all built of solid cherry with details in anegre, an exotic veneer from Africa. Aside from the materials, this is a job that only my foreman, Steve Maturin, can complete in a reasonable time, so my labor costs are going to be very high. I ran the pricing and, even cutting him the best possible deal, I’ve come up with a shocking number: $28,797. I’m worried that my friend will be horrified by the price, but also too embarrassed to back out.

Signing any of these jobs would bring us back to where we need to be for the year, and signing two or more would put us ahead. And these aren’t the only prospects. My gut tells me that something is bound to come in. Eventually.

I hope that orders arrive sooner rather than later, and not just for the cash injection. I’m also starting to worry about our backlog. That is the amount of work that we have lined up to produce. We don’t start building a job the day it’s ordered. It would be very bad to rush ahead and build a table before the client has stopped making design changes. So we have a procedure: we send a final set of drawings and images to the client with the warning that these documents show exactly what we intend to build. We accompany this with finish samples: pieces of wood of the species and color that the client had discussed. Then we wait for them to either confirm that everything is correct or suggest alterations. Sometimes it takes weeks while their company goes through whatever internal decision making is required. It always takes at least two weeks after order placement before anything hits the shop floor. And if the client is slow, it can take a month or more.

At the beginning of April, our backlog is just over five weeks. That’s a rough calculation—my formula, which I run each Monday, doesn’t make any compensation for jobs that are burning more or fewer hours than we estimated. It’s an approximate view of reality at best. But I’ve found that flawed measurements, if performed consistently, can be helpful—it isn’t the result itself that matters, but rather the change from week to week.

At the start of the year, our calculated backlog was a little under four weeks. We sold enough in January and February that we now have more work than we started the year with. But the trend is down—we had maxed out at seven weeks at the beginning of March. Our sales slowed down and the shop started working faster.

At least I think it did. I can easily see the total value of the jobs shipped each month, but not how much of that amount was labor, as opposed to materials. It looks as though we’re building at a $40,000-a-week pace. If we have a week where we sell less than that number, we are eating backlog. With a little more than five weeks of work queued up, and assuming the shop runs at the current rate, we will run out of work in early May.

A shrinking backlog also means that incoming cash is drying up. We aren’t getting any deposit payments. The total amount of cash we can expect in the future is dropping as well. At the end of the first week of April, the cash we will collect by completing our entire order book is just $107,410. It will take us five weeks to fulfill our commitments, and that will generate only three weeks of funds. In the other weeks, we’ll need to pay for materials, rent, advertising, and electricity just as we always do. How can I cut our spending?

My biggest expense is payroll. Payday is every second Tuesday. The amount varies depending on the exact number of hours worked, but it has been averaging $36,000. This covers hourly wage, pension contribution, and payroll taxes for fifteen people, including me. It doesn’t include the cost of health insurance, which is $10,140 a month (to cover nine of the fifteen workers and their families, including me). The pay rate for each worker ranges from thirteen dollars an hour to thirty-six dollars an hour. Add them up and the cost to employ all those people for one hour is $317. (That number excludes my own salary.) That’s before payroll taxes, workmen’s comp insurance, and unemployment insurance, which vary in complicated ways but add another 18 percent or so to the cost.

Payroll is a very difficult number to reduce, unless I get rid of some employees. I can’t simply have everyone work fewer hours—not at this point. We lost a lot of time with Company S, and we are behind on our other work. And if we don’t complete jobs, we won’t get the preship or final payments, which is the only cash I am sure to receive.

I cannot ask people to work more hours without pay. That is illegal for unsalaried workers. And a reduction in pay rates is a drastic and morale-crippling move. In the fall of 2008, I cut my workers’ pay by 15 percent, and it was not popular. I got away with it because it was obvious to everyone that we were in serious trouble, and they had no place better to go. In 2012, the woodworking economy is still rocky, but it’s a lot better than it was. If I cut everyone’s pay again, some of them will leave—most likely, my best guys. We still have work to do, and I’m hoping that we will turn this thing around, so I don’t want to risk defections.

Fortunately, there’s one worker who will never quit. He’s getting a good-size paycheck, too, so stopping his income will have an effect. I know from long experience that this guy will put up with anything I give him—work longer hours, do multiple jobs, reorder his personal finances, even loan money back to the company if necessary. Who is this patsy? You already guessed: the boss.

Over the years I have raised and lowered my pay countless times, using it as a throttle to increase or decrease our cash burn rate. Do I have enormous piles of gold coins in my basement, a vast store of personal wealth that I can tap when needed to fund my business? Not at all.

I’m not broke, but my business has not generated much wealth for me. Manufacturing custom furniture is not known as a lucrative profession, because it isn’t. For example, take a look at how my company performed from 2003 to 2011. Sales for that period totaled $16,352,367. The profits? The total for those years is negative. The vast majority of those losses happened before the crash in 2008, when The Partner and I were doing a very bad job of trying to grow the company. From 2003 to 2008, our losses totaled $1,086,648. The Partner ate much of that when he left. My father, my brother, and I—the remaining shareholders—made emergency loans in those years just to keep the doors open. Since 2009, I have managed to stop the bleeding, and the company has made profits totaling $210,114. That still leaves an accumulated loss of $872,084.

I have managed, during some very rocky years, to pay my bills. First and foremost, all the employees who have worked for me got paid, on time and in full. All the taxes were paid, on time and in full. All the vendors and my landlord were paid in full (not necessarily on time, but I used most of the post-2009 profits to gradually eliminate the debt). While the company owes my partners and me a pretty good pile of cheddar, it owes nobody else.

Between 2003 and 2010, my annual salary averaged $78,484. That number includes the amount I had to pay for health insurance—taxable compensation for a company owner. My cash wage was lower. Each year I loaned, on average, $29,363 of that back to the company (after I had paid taxes on it). That left me an average of $49,121 a year. I’m hardly one of those predatory CEOs making millions while my workers starve.

I have a lifestyle to match my income. My wife and I live very modestly. We don’t travel much. Even if we wanted to, Henry’s unpredictable behavior keeps us from anything but family visits. I own two crappy cars: a 1992 Toyota Camry and a 1999 Honda Odyssey. Nancy is very frugal and gets most of our clothes at the thrift shop. And we don’t eat out. Nancy is a very good cook, so we eat at home every night.

I’m not destitute, though. Leaving aside whatever the business might be worth, because it’s not in any shape to sell, my net worth is a little less than $400,000. The equity in my house is worth about $165,000. My cars are worth nothing. I have $92,356 in a retirement account that I have been contributing to since 1998. I have $48,525 in emergency cash in a Vanguard account. And I have $78,525 in my checking account, as a result of my success in 2011.

That windfall came right on time. My oldest son starts college in September, and my wife, in preparation for the empty-nest experience, is getting a master’s degree so she can teach. Her schedule will match Henry’s so that she can be at home when he is, and I can continue to work myself. Tuition bills for both of them will start in September. The first year will eat through all my savings.

I’m not complaining. I am doing better than the vast majority of people in the world. But I do not feel secure. I have pledged my personal wealth to cover debts that the company has incurred. Aside from the $387,098 that the company owes me, the lease on our shop space requires payment in full, even if we fail. I currently have twenty-six months left to go before I renew. At $9,250 a month, I am committed to shell out $240,500. The business has two credit cards with a $65,000 line of credit—we generally have about $30,000 a month in outstanding charges. If I get behind, they will come after my personal assets. And, realistically, there is a minimum level of spending just to keep some employees on staff and the lights on. If I have to lay everyone off, and there’s nobody to do the work, I am done. I have too much overhead to start as a single-man operation again. I need to spend $5,000 a day to be in business. If I have to reach into my pocket to do it, after sixty days I will have lost all my cash, and my house will be heading into foreclosure.

So owning a business, even one with millions in revenue, has not made me rich. I feel a great deal of shame at my lack of success. I can’t tell you how many times I have attended parties and felt humiliated when doctors and lawyers describe fancy trips to Africa, rounds of golf, and nice cars. If I had joined my contemporaries who went to law or business school, and stepped onto the corporate treadmill, I would at least have a high salary to show for my efforts. Sure, you can live that life and fail in any number of ways, but you also don’t have to invent the profession as you go.

Do you know any wealthy woodworkers? I didn’t think so. If they exist, nobody is talking about them. I’d really like to know how to convert my business into one that does great work, and pays its people well, and makes its owners rich. I haven’t figured out how to do this on my own. I need to look elsewhere for guidance.

Where can I get good advice? This has been a problem for me from the start. I opened my doors when I was fresh out of college, back in 1986. I didn’t even know anyone in the business. And there was no Internet back then, no magic universal library that answered every question. My nature is to try to figure things out on my own, which, in retrospect, has been bad for me. I stumbled on the most basic business problems: Where do I buy materials? How do I keep records? How do I pay taxes for my employees? How do I advertise? It was very hard to find answers. There were books about running a business, but none about my business. I never imagined that anyone would be interested in helping me, so I never asked for help. And I was always so strapped for time that I would implement the first idea I found, even if it was bad practice. I just muddled along for years and years.

When you get right down to it, nobody cares how I run my business, or whether I am competent or not. As long as I pay my taxes, my workers, and my bills, I am free to be as good or bad at business as I wish. This is the main reason that I took the risk of entering a partnership in 2002. I was desperate for some guidance. I presumed that The Partner, since he had money, knew a lot about business. It didn’t turn out that way. He had been successful with previous companies, but we found out the hard way that what had worked for him previously would not necessarily work for my business.

The Partner was my sole source of advice for many years. He taught me a lot, and also led me astray. Not because he was malicious, or dumb, but because his experience didn’t match the problems we were having. He was not good at identifying situations where the old ways wouldn’t work. And we never found a way to identify the issues he had overlooked entirely—if he didn’t focus on a problem, I would not do anything about it. This caused a lot of cash flow issues and management problems on the shop floor.

Fortunately, The Partner is an honorable and reasonable man, so our relationship did not descend into personal animosity. But our ideas as to how to proceed diverged, particularly in the fall of 2008. He wanted to shut us down, take his losses, and move on. Without telling me, he used most of our operating cash to pay down a line of credit in order to limit his liability. The company owed him a lot of money, and from his point of view it made sense. But I was counting on those funds to keep the doors open. Without my company, what would I do? We came to an irreconcilable difference in opinion. After that, I stopped listening to him.

During the years that I was getting advice from The Partner, the world was changing. With the arrival of the Internet, barriers to finding basic information disappeared. Now we are drowning in content. Unfortunately, quantity does not imply quality or relevance. I have found the business press to be useless. Pick up a magazine or paper, or read a blog, and you see one story repeated ad nauseam. Success! How this guy got it, how that gal got it, how this huge corporation got it, how you can get it. These stories are long on results and short on techniques, and almost always omit the really interesting details. There’s an overemphasis on software start-ups and way too much emphasis on outliers, like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve read a lot about those two, but never anything that stated the obvious: they were really, really lucky.

I have never seen a thorough, detailed account of a small business like mine. I’m looking for specific techniques for dealing with my particular problems. Many of those are complicated and technical and revolve around the personalities of the people involved. Given the format limitations that confront business reporters, and their own lack of technical knowledge, it’s not surprising that everything we get is brief and vague. Nobody wants to write about the multitude of challenges that a boss faces every day, in a way that captures the difficulty of dealing with everything at once.

My biggest problem is finding numbers. I have to make most of my financial decisions without a good idea of what’s normal. My competitors, like me, are all small, privately held companies. There is no single place where I can find any information on the size of my market, who the largest players are, or even what my competitors charge. We produce roughly $140,000 per employee each year. Is that good or bad? Is my second-best bench cabinetmaker worth $18 an hour or $21 an hour? What would this person be worth to another shop? The difference is substantial, both for me and for the employee. My AdWords campaign costs me $10,000 or more a month. Is that too much or too little? I’m paying a 2 percent sales commission to Dan and Nick, on top of a decent salary. I decided on that arrangement because it seemed reasonable. Was I wise or not? Would a different split be better? The cumulative cost of this uncertainty is hundreds of thousands of dollars each year—far more than I have ever taken out of the business. I’d love to know whether my spending decisions are high, low, or on target. For most of these issues, no information is available. For some, like the AdWords question, I can get vague answers from sources of questionable objectivity (Google itself, or consultants whose answer is always self-serving).

I miss The Partner because he was always willing to listen, and he knew the people who I was talking about, and his advice, even though flawed, was intended to help. It’s been lonely since he left. Sure, my employees and I discuss the technical issues that arise every hour in a small factory—materials, jobs, broken machines, whatever. But on the larger issues, particularly the thorny intersection between the particular personalities of my workers and money, I have nobody within the company who would understand my perspective.

There are certainly small business owners out there whom I would enjoy knowing, but I haven’t made their acquaintance in social settings. My wife arranges our social life. We go out regularly, but Nancy is an artist, so the vast majority of people we meet are in the art world. And from a business and manufacturing perspective, nothing they do makes sense.

At the end of 2011, I found a possible solution to my problem. It came in the mail: an invitation to join a group of business peers, organized by Vistage. They arrange regular meetings for groups of small company owners. Each group is vetted so that there is a similarity in company size but some disparity in business type—manufacturers, retailers, professionals like architects and accountants, software guys—enough variety to bring a broad viewpoint and avoid direct competitors in the group. Some of the members of each group are start-ups, some are multi-generational family firms, and some are like me—in business a long time, but stuck. A minimum yearly revenue requirement ensures that every member is a viable business. Each group is led by a trained leader. There’s a group meeting and an individual session each month. I could bring up my own plans and problems for analysis by the leader and the other members, and I would hear about their companies in return.

I liked the concept. If it worked, I would have a chance to interact with people who are like myself. I also liked the focus on taking each business to the next level. It would cost me twelve thousand dollars a year and some hours of my time—cheaper and easier than trying to get an MBA.

I responded to the invitation, and Ed Curry, the group leader, scheduled a meeting at my shop. We met in December 2011. Ed is in his mid-sixties. He was raised in a small coal town in Pennsylvania, went to Vietnam for a year, and then worked for many years at a manufacturing company that made precision measuring equipment for auto manufacturers. That company had a couple thousand workers, and he worked his way up to a high management position. When they were bought by a German competitor, he went to Ernst & Young, the accountants. After retiring, he got involved in Vistage. For several years, he had been the leader of one group, but it had grown and he was splitting it up and putting together another. We ended up talking in my office for about an hour. Ed asked smart questions and listened carefully to the answers. A week later, I went to the introductory meeting, thought it was good, and signed the contract.

As of April, I have attended three meetings with the group. It’s an interesting mix of businesses: an accountant, a software start-up, a trucking company, a coffee roaster, a house painting and repair company, a document storage company, two software firms, and three manufacturers. One does precision grinding of metal components, one makes prefabricated metal stairs, and one makes custom conference tables. The group is all male. Ages range from late twenties to seventy. Three businesses are multi-generational: the precision grinding company is run by the son of the founder, and the trucking and coffee companies date back to the nineteenth century. Every other company is run by its founder.

I’m particularly interested in learning more about the staircase manufacturer. It’s owned by Sam Saxton. He is the youngest member of the group. He graduated in 2003 and then went to South Dakota to make his fortune. He bought farmland and put up tract houses, and prudently saved his profits. After the crash, he came back to the East Coast and looked for a company to purchase so that he could get richer. He purchased an outfit that manufactured prefabricated staircases, and then bought out a smaller competitor and folded both into one operation. He borrowed a couple million dollars from a bank to do all this. He needs to grow his companies quickly in order to service his debt and build equity.

Unlike me, who wanted to make things and ended up with a business, Sam wanted a business and ended up making things. He looks at the manufacturing part of his operation from a more neutral perspective. To him, it’s just a cost center, like every part of his business. Administration, marketing, sales, manufacturing, shipping: they all need to pull their weight. If they don’t make him money, and he can’t repay his loans, the bank will foreclose.

Sam projects energy. He’s a tall, strong-looking guy. He talks fast and with absolute assurance. Everything he has done since high school is aimed at business success. He studied entrepreneurship at Babson College, made his first small fortune before he was twenty-five, and since acquiring his factory, the sales have doubled. He has positive cash flow and is paying off a significant amount of debt every month. His biggest problem is operations—a couple dozen workers in a good-size factory are a challenge to manage under the best of circumstances. Sam has weak operational systems and doesn’t have a complete grasp of how his product is made. He wants to get the manufacturing under control so that he can grow the company even faster. Or so he has told the group.

Since our operations are very similar, I approached Sam after our January meeting and suggested that we exchange shop visits. At the end of March, Sam and his shop foreman, Dean, came out to see my operation. They expressed polite interest as we toured the shop floor. Visitors are usually blown away by the action out there. Sam and Dean, having been in factories before, just weren’t as impressed. Then I took them to the office and showed how we produce our proposals, how we make shop drawings, and how we use Google Docs for spreadsheets that we all needed to see at once. None of this elicited any comment. What got them excited was our database software, where we track our manufacturing activities from contract to delivery. Every day, my workers enter the number of hours they work on each project. We can see where each job is in our production stream and how many hours have been used at each point. And we can see all the jobs in each link of our production chain. It performs a bunch of other functions as well. It’s an incredibly useful tool.

The Partner’s daughter spent two years writing it for us. Her wages cost me about sixty thousand dollars, a bargain. Comparable packages from Microsoft or other vendors would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and then require modifications to fit our processes. So I got an exceptionally well-crafted piece of software for very little money. Sam and Dean don’t have anything like this, and their operations suffer as a result. They have a hard time figuring out exactly where each job is in their pipeline and how much labor they are using on each order. They’re still using paper tickets to follow each job. Those get lost or damaged, and generate a lot of data entry work.

I tell them that fancy software doesn’t solve all my problems. In particular, our estimates of the hours required to build each project aren’t very precise, and there is a fair amount of error in entering data—my guys will often choose the wrong job from a drop-down list. Then their hours get charged to the wrong project. On a computer, bad data looks just like good data. It can be very difficult to tease out whether the numbers are a good reflection of actual operations. But I never want to go back to paper. We did that for many years, and it’s much worse.

I make my visit to Sam’s place in the first week of April. He’s a few towns over, in the most non-descript building in a non-descript industrial park. There’s no sign, just a couple of doors on a long, blank wall. The first one I try is locked. The second one opens into a small room with an unused reception desk. Behind it I see a dimly lit kitchen space, and then another door. Nobody in sight. I open the door and find myself out on the factory floor. It’s very large and gloomy. There’s a steady roar of machinery. A couple of guys are packing a spiral staircase in cardboard off to my right. “Sam Saxton?” I shout. One stops wrapping and leads me to a staircase. “Go up there, through that door. They’ll help you.” I climb and find myself in a small room with six cubicles. Each holds a person wearing a headset, looking intently at a small screen, focused on their conversation. Eventually one of them looks up. “Sam Saxton?” “Sure, follow me,” he says, and takes me to the other end of the space. He knocks on a door, then opens without waiting for an answer. The inner sanctum, at last.

Sam is behind his desk, on the phone. He waves at me, holds up one finger: wait. I sit on the sofa and take a look around. Sam’s office is dark—only one small window overlooks the dismal parking lot. Walls painted light gray. The carpet is dark gray. There are a couple of large holes in the drywall. No art. No photographs of family. All the furniture is cheap, old, and well-worn. Sam’s desk is covered with paper, in a semi-orderly fashion. His computer dominates the space.

The phone call ends and Sam springs to his feet, coming around the desk with a big smile and hand extended. “Sorry about that—consultants!” Short pause. “Sorry about my office. Not so nice as yours.” He gestures to the holes in the wall. “Sometimes I get mad and need to punch something. How about we tour the shop and then talk?” Sam stops at one of the cubicles and tells the woman there where he’s going. We descend to the shop floor.

I take in the expanse. It’s a large space, with eighteen-foot ceilings. Sam answers my first questions before I ask. “Thirty-eight thousand square feet. I have twenty-nine guys right now. I’m hoping we do four-point-two million dollars this year.” It’s the beginning of a very informative tour.

Sam’s operation is very similar to mine. He uses machines to cut parts and workers to do assembly. There are a lot more welders in our economy than skilled woodworkers, so he pays his workers three to five dollars less than I pay mine for comparable jobs.

Metalworking isn’t as dusty as woodworking, but it’s grimier—there’s a thin layer of black sludge on every surface. Once you get beyond that, though, the shop is neatly arranged. The workers move around at a decent speed. Sam knows everyone’s name and tells me a little about each one. Half of them are American citizens, of all colors, and the rest a grab bag of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Mexico, and Central America. No women. Sam tells me that some have been in the military, some to trade school, and some just picked up skills at other jobs.

We head back up the stairs and pause at the cubicle cluster. We have been discussing AdWords, which Sam also uses to connect with far-flung customers. Sam says, “Those proposals you e-mail to the client? They’re very nice but we would never do that. We always make an appointment to review our proposal with the client. We get them on the phone, make sure they are in front of a computer, and then fire up a program called ‘Glance.’ Clients can see on their screen whatever is on our screen. We go through their quote line by line, show them the proposed design and the numbers. Then we ask for a credit card. They don’t get the document unless they buy.” I think about that for a moment. It seems very aggressive. “Who designs the stairs?” I ask. “Does the client see any drawings, or an image of what they are going to get?” Sam tells a young man to bring up a quote. The stair set is shown in a simplified drawing. There are clear photographs of similar stairs, but not an exact representation of this particular one. The numbers in the quote are in a large font, easy to read. This approach is very different from ours—the design itself isn’t highlighted as much as the numbers. It doesn’t sell itself. The salesperson is doing the actual persuasion. I’d like to see a screen-sharing session, but nobody has one scheduled until the evening.

Over lunch, I focus on the question of who designs each custom staircase. Do the salespeople do it? Do they actually know enough about building staircases to do a good job? Sam tells me that this isn’t really a problem. Staircases are not that complicated. Even a spiral staircase can be worked out using simple algorithms, as long as the height to be traversed is measured correctly. All the construction details are simple and are deployed the same way in every job. It’s similar to our approach—a limited set of construction details used to make a wide variety of items. But the overall complexity is orders of magnitude less than ours. A much smaller set of choices will satisfy the vast majority of his buyers. On the few occasions that he gets a request for something complicated, one of his people with an engineering background can solve the problem.

I ask how he finds salespeople. “We put ads on Craigslist.” That works? “You get a lot of bozos. But I get a few who have done some sales before. I do phone interviews first—you can tell a lot from that. If they sound good, we bring them in for a face-to-face. And if that’s good, then we start them training here, and also send them out to be trained. I have a consultant—he’s great—Bob Waks. He’s been working with me for a year now. Our sales have doubled. You should meet him.” My first instinct is to recoil at the mention of a consultant. Doubling my sales would be good, though.

Sam tells me that when he bought the company, “There were a couple of sales guys here, not very good. Just stuck in their way of doing things. After I brought in Bob to train them, they weren’t happy with new ways. I had to get rid of them.” I’m sympathetic; firing people is difficult. Sam shrugs. “Had to happen. I can’t have people selling who don’t sell. I’m constantly going through them.” I’m curious about pay. What’s the split between salary and commission? “I give them a monthly draw at first, two thousand dollars. Then it’s a hundred percent commission.” What if they don’t cover their draw for a couple of months? He gives me a look: you really need to ask me this? “I get rid of them, of course. I give them three months after training, and if they aren’t hitting their numbers—goodbye! They can’t do the job, I’m going to find someone else.” We finish lunch and he comes back to the subject of the consultant. “Look, you should call this guy. He’s good. He’ll help you.” I don’t know. We have our way of doing things, and it has worked well. Things are bound to turn around. I’m afraid that any changes will make things worse. But I keep thinking about it on my way back to work. Why am I so afraid to fire people when they don’t perform? Why do I put their interests ahead of mine? Is that really what a good boss does?

—

ON THE SECOND SATURDAY of April, I pick up my son Henry from his school. He’ll be with us for two weeks. Until he was twelve, he lived at home and attended the autism classroom at our local schools. In seventh grade, as puberty kicked in, he became very aggressive. We were lucky to find a residential school near us, Camphill Special School, which can handle him. The cost, $65,000 a year, is covered by our local school system until Henry is twenty-one years old. Then we’re on our own.

It was an amazing change to get Henry out of the house. Until then I hadn’t realized how much energy he was sucking up, and how it distorted my relationship with my other boys. The timing was also good for my business. Henry left in 2006. I was doing all the design, selling, and administration for a company of eighteen workers. I can’t imagine how I would have managed with Henry at home. It would have been a perpetual emergency for me and my wife as he battled with the storms of puberty. I strongly believe that without the federal legislation that forces the local school board to pay for appropriate schooling, my business would have failed. Having Henry home all that time would have broken me.

Henry’s school is part of a farm. There are easy chores for him to do. He is very well cared for, well fed, and kept busy. We can’t replicate that. The school runs on a normal school calendar, so he’s home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break, and summer vacation. While he’s back, our lifestyle changes. Like all teenage boys, he’s always hungry. We have to keep our kitchen cabinets and refrigerator under lock and key. Henry will not wake himself at night when he needs to pee, so I get up at two and six a.m. and take him to the bathroom. When Henry is not eating or sleeping, he listens to music. He likes to hear the same disc over and over at top volume. When he eventually gets tired of that, he throws the CD player across his room. Henry also demands to go for a drive at least twice a day. It doesn’t matter where, but anything shorter than an hour, and he has a huge tantrum.

It’s an exhausting regimen. My wife runs the day shift; I step in when I arrive after work. Long office hours are out of the question. He’ll return to school on April 22. And the next day I fly to Germany to visit Eurofurn.

With Henry home, I have a good excuse to delegate more work to others. Emma takes up the urgent administrative tasks, Dan and Nick decide who will take each incoming lead. While I’m out driving Henry around, I can stop at the shop. He can tolerate a short visit, but he has figured out that the fridge is not locked. If I lose track of him, he helps himself to sodas and sandwiches, and then I have to buy someone’s lunch.

—

WHILE HENRY IS HOME, I’m watching our bank balance, contemplating the dollars that are not coming in as we fail to collect deposits, and the amount going out to fund operations. My projections predict a zero bank balance early in May. I can delay that day only by slowing expenditures. It’s time to stop paying myself.

I set my pay depending on how much I think the company can afford. No employee would put up with this, but I am used to it. From 1999 to the beginning of 2008, and in 2010 and the start of 2011, my salary was $70,000 a year. In November 2008, I had cut my pay by 50 percent, while cutting my workers’ wages by 15 percent. I restored my people’s wages a year later. I only restored my own pay in March 2010. That’s thirteen years without a raise.

We pay biweekly, twenty-six times per year, so $70,000 a year works out to $2,692 per paycheck. Adding on taxes, each of my paychecks was draining $3,230 from our working capital. Not too expensive for a worker who was producing all the sales and designs, running HR, doing all marketing, answering the phones, and covering any administrative tasks. By the middle of 2011, which was a good year, I decided that I could afford to give myself a raise. I bumped my pay rate to $140,000 a year, or $5,384 every two weeks. Add the taxes, and now each of my paychecks removes $6,461 from our working capital. If I went out and hired someone who could do everything that I do, it would cost me at least this much.

At the end of 2011, we suddenly found ourselves awash in cash. I decided to pay all my workers a nice bonus and give myself a much larger one, a small compensation for all the lean years. So my last paycheck of 2011 included a $70,000 year-end bonus. I decided at the beginning of this year to raise my salary again. I wanted to see whether we will still have positive cash flow if I pay myself the same amount as in 2011 but at a consistent rate, not a small regular check with a giant bonus at year-end. So I increased my pay rate from $120,000 to $180,000 a year, or $8,307 per check. This put my pay at 7.5 percent of our target revenues of $2.4 million a year. That’s on the low side of what $2.4 million should produce for the boss. Ten percent would be a decent yield for the owner of a business of this size. Reasonable or not, my salary costs more than $16,000 a month. If we make our sales targets, it’s not a problem. But if we don’t, it hastens the day when we run out of cash.

Well, we have not made our sales target, so I decide that April 9 will be my last payday for a while. Our biweekly payroll for the whole company, including myself, had been in the $34,000 to $39,000 range, depending on overtime worked. Stopping my pay will buy some time by bringing that down into the mid- or upper twenties.

Now I have to consider whether to stop the interest payment to myself as well. I wrote the first check, for $3,225, just last month, and it was two weeks before I could bring myself to cash it. I decide to continue for a while so that I can at least cover my mortgage. Outgoing interest payments incur no additional taxes on the company, and I won’t have to pay personal taxes on interest income until next year. And I can cut them off at any time. I don’t want to do that, though—it feels like the beginning of failure. As long as I’m taking something out of the company, I haven’t hit rock bottom.

—

I’VE BEEN FOLLOWING Emma’s ongoing e-mail exchange with the Commerce Department guy in Kuwait. He’s lined up five companies that would like to meet me, and he wants me to commit to dates and an itinerary. I’m horrified. I never thought that he would get much of a response. Emma is excited and presses me to schedule the trip. I don’t want to go. I’ve already missed a lot of work, watching Henry, and I’m about to go to Germany for a week. But Eurofurn and Middle East exports have the potential to fill our schedule when domestic sales are slow. I start looking for tickets. I can’t fly directly to Kuwait, I’ll have to pass through Dubai. I may as well see what that town has to offer. I have Emma get in touch with the Commerce Department again, and she sets up a Gold Key for Dubai. I will be in the Middle East for the entire first week of June.

—

MY SON PETER has decided to look for a summer job. When I was his age, I went to the local Roy Rogers and filled out an application. A week later, I was making French fries for $2.65 an hour. Times have changed. Peter knows how to write computer code. He’s posted some of his projects to a coders’ forum, and now he’s getting job offers, from start-ups desperate for programmers. An e-book publisher in San Francisco has offered to fly him out for an interview. He leaves on Friday the 13th and returns on Sunday with a job offer in hand: summer work, and a permanent position if he wants to defer school for a year. The pay is, to my mind, stunning: $54,000 a year. This for a kid who hasn’t even graduated from high school yet. Apparently his coding is pretty good. He’ll never need to make French fries for a living.

Peter is very excited. It’s an amazing opportunity. Nancy is not happy. She wants him to go straight on to college in the fall. She’s worried that he’ll get caught up in the start-up lifestyle and abandon his college education. Wasted youth, twenty-first-century version.

I’m not worried. I have two sisters in the Bay Area, so he won’t be alone in a strange city. Next week we go up to check out MIT. Peter already knows some people there, and they plan to put him up and show him a good time. I think he’ll have enough information to make a good decision about whether to work or study next year.

—

SALES HAVE BEEN SLOW. Nick has sold three jobs totaling $30,665. Three orders from Eurofurn come in, another $16,297. Dan has been told that his bid for the California engineering firm, worth more than $35,000, has been accepted, and the purchase order will be issued soon. But we can’t bank or build on promises. At the end of the second week of April, we have added just $46,962 to our total.

At the beginning of this year, I set up a Google spreadsheet to record our calls and e-mails every day to see if there are any patterns. It appears that we get about the same number of inquiries each day until Friday, when the rate drops in half, and on the weekends, when hardly anyone calls. We have been averaging 16.25 inquiries per week through the end of March. In the first week of April, we have chalked up twelve inquiries, and the second week of April, just nine inquiries. We have only had one week so far with as few as twelve inquiries, in February, and that included both a federal holiday and a big snowstorm. Nine inquiries is the worst week we have had all year.

This conforms to my theory about the April Swoon, but seeing it play out in real time is distressing. A steady stream of incoming calls is required for healthy sales. I can look back at orders from the past three years and see that we close a large number of small jobs, a decent number of jobs in the ten- to thirty-thousand-dollar range, and a few whoppers. It stands to reason that more calls will yield more of each type of job. If there are fewer of them, it is less likely that we’ll make our sales goal.

—

ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, I make it in to work for a few hours, and Bob Foote updates me on the Company S situation. The CEO’s assistant told him that he can pick up the table any time after April 18, but it has to be back for their board meeting on May 9. This is a tight window for us.

Bob has looked into various options. Our regular shipper quotes us $2,955 for a single truck, including driver, who would pick up the tabletops and drive straight to us. I would still need to fly Bob to Company S so that he could supervise packing. The total cost of that option, including hotel and wages, will be close to four thousand dollars. Returning the table will be cheaper, but it will still be in the range of $1,000, and we have to pay the installers to put the top back on the table. Any option will eat up much of the $7,551 that Company S still owes us. The job has been running over budget from the minute it hit the shop floor.

Bob thinks that it might be cheaper if we rent a truck in Milwaukee and drive it back ourselves. And he offers to take his wife along. She doesn’t need to be paid, she can do a little driving, and they can stay in one hotel room. I’m convinced. They depart on Tuesday and return on Thursday. When we unwrap the tops, they look perfect until you get up very close. Everybody is disgusted that I knuckled under, but nobody can think of a better way to deal with it.

On the twentieth, I pack the family into my ’99 Odyssey van and drive to Boston to attend MIT’s new-student weekend. I’m hoping to get at least another two years out of this vehicle, but there’s a worrisome hesitation between first and second gears. This is the second tranny in a car with 145,000 miles on it. I keep my fingers crossed, and we arrive without a breakdown.

The lowlight of the weekend, for once, does not come from Henry. Instead, a financial aid officer provides unpleasant news. My income last year, $260,992, disqualifies us from any aid. It was the one spectacular year I have ever had. In the preceding twenty-five years, my total income added up to $888,331. Assuming a 2,200-hour working year, that’s $16.15 an hour. In 1994, when my twins were born, I took home $6,200 in wages. We qualified for welfare: WIC vouchers to help us feed the kids. We used those benefits for the next three years. And as recently as 2008, if you subtract the money I loaned the company to keep the doors open, I made only $8,357, or $3.79 per hour.

Financial aid calculations take none of that into account. As far as the aid officer is concerned, I’m a prosperous business owner with a substantial income and savings. He’s not interested in the fact that my income is very volatile or that Henry (who is in the meeting with us) will most likely be living with us for the rest of his life and will require expensive care. He doesn’t care that I have just stopped paying myself any salary. He considers only the numbers from 2011. When I paid out the big bonuses at the end of last year, I set aside enough cash to pay for Peter’s first year of college. Right now, I have $78,525 in my checking account and $48,525 in another account for emergencies. MIT will cost about $65,000 (!) each year. We’ll need the rest to live on. And in two years, my youngest son will be looking at colleges, too.

I suppose I could do what everyone else does and borrow Peter’s tuition. But that presumes future income to repay the loan, and I have no confidence in my ability to make steady money. I’m terrified by debt that can’t be discharged through bankruptcy, like student loans. No matter what happens to Peter or me, we could be stuck with that millstone around our necks for years.

I was very fortunate to start my adult life without student loan debt. School was a lot cheaper back in the 1980s, but my father and mother worked hard to put five kids through school without loans, and I’d like to give that same gift to my own children. If I had been saddled with loan payments, I would never have started my own business.

Driving home, I mull over all the numbers that don’t add up: the sales we have not made, the cash on hand, my income for the next year, and the cost of putting two children through school. The one redeeming feature of having an autistic son: he won’t be going to college at the same time as his twin. He will never need to go to college. He will be expensive in the future, but not right now.

—

I STAY HOME on Monday, since I am flying overseas after dinner. The long flight gives me plenty of time to reflect. Nick and Dan have sold a few jobs, but we’re still far behind our target. My bank balance is down to $115,229. On the other hand, this trip holds some promise. At the very least, I’ll see how an established company makes conference tables. And maybe this trip will initiate a flood of orders from Eurofurn.

I arrive in Hannover early Tuesday. Nigel told me that Eurofurn would make all arrangements for my stay. Sure enough, in the line of drivers holding cards, I see my name: “Herr Downs.” I am staying in Hildesheim, about fifty kilometers from the factory.

When I was in high school, in the fall of 1978, I visited West Berlin. It was the definition of “grim”—cold and foggy, and with plenty of war damage. Hildesheim couldn’t be a greater contrast. It’s a charming town with medieval walls and old half-timbered houses. My hotel is a restaurant with a few rooms on the second floor. I fire up my iPhone and find a text from Nigel. We will be joining Peter Baumann, Eurofurn’s worldwide head of marketing, for dinner.

Nigel and Milosz, who’s also here for the week, pick me up at seven. I am looking forward to real German food, but the sign on the restaurant says “Pizza.” And it’s packed. A mention of Peter Baumann’s name makes a table magically appear, along with some bottles of wine. We start drinking. About an hour later, Peter Baumann appears. He’s young, cheerful, and fit, with a shock of blond hair. Nigel has prepped me on Peter’s attempt to bring fresh air to the hundred-year-old company. Peter has led the expansion into Southeast Asia and the Middle East and is behind the move to start up in America. Everything has worked out well so far, but continuing economic weakness in Europe is raising questions about the wisdom of more expansion. The meal stretches on until midnight, but we don’t talk business, just soccer and politics. I get the feeling that the real purpose of the evening is for Peter to get a look at me. I hope he likes what he sees.

Nigel and Milosz drive me to the factory the next morning. It’s deep in the countryside. We’ll be taking a tour with two new hires from New York, both in their mid-twenties: Jeff, in charge of shipping, and Pamela, who tells me, to my relief, that she will implement a new IT system. We’re still having trouble with confusing job names.

The tour starts at the headquarters building. The walls are covered with large black-and-white photos of Eurofurn’s designers. The message: product design is a heroic struggle, performed by geniuses. The company’s head of design, Gerhardt, suddenly appears among us, dressed entirely in black. He talks for twenty minutes, explaining Eurofurn’s philosophy: the company exists only to make superior design. How lucky we are to be able to participate in bringing these precious objects to the masses! He’s mesmerizing. I’m both impressed and jealous. I’ve been designing furniture for twenty-six years, without much fuss. I take pride in my work and I hear from my customers that they like my designs, but nobody in the outside world has taken any notice. Will I ever have my own heroic black-and-white picture on the wall? Will I join the pantheon of form-givers? Maybe my relationship with Eurofurn will vault me from obscurity, and I’ll become better known as a designer. Gerhardt’s speech has inspired me to dream big.

Gerhardt leaves us—I’m surprised when he just walks out the door and doesn’t disappear in a puff of smoke—and we are joined by Jens, an engineer who oversees Eurofurn’s manufacturing subcontractors around the world. His job is to make sure that their products are identical to the work that comes out of the German factory. Jens is young and seems like the guys in my own factory: careful, diligent, and intelligent. He tells us the rest of the day’s agenda. After the group tour and lunch, the others will see another facility. Jens will spend the afternoon with me answering any questions I might have about making tables.

The tour starts with the upholstery facility, where leather is cut and sewn into chair seats. About half of the work stations are occupied. The workers appear to be in their late fifties or early sixties. Their skilled hands guide laser-cut pieces of leather through the sewing machines. The finished product is beautifully made, consistent, and precise. Modern craftsmanship: machines and people, each doing what they do best.

Next we see the office. It’s large, but the thirty-four people I see don’t fill all the desks. I peek over one person’s shoulder and see room plans with a table in the center. Jens explains that the tables are designed to fit the client’s space, just as we do. I see a printout with a 3-D drawing tacked to a wall. Jens confirms that this is what the customer will see after placing an order. The model is not all that detailed, isn’t in color, and doesn’t show the wood grain or the room. Our presentations are much more impressive.

Eurofurn gets work from furniture dealers and architects, and through an old-boy network. Its CEO and other top managers sit on the board of other companies and influence purchase decisions. In contrast, Google allowed us to grow without any relationships with the mainstream furniture industry. We bypass the normal sales channels and still have a very prestigious clientele. But our sales tend to be one-offs. We work with a client and then move on. We have no network of allies in the market. When I ask Jens whether Eurofurn sells direct to clients over the Internet, he looks as if he has never heard of such a thing. “You sell something to a total stranger? Why would anyone want to do that?”

I ask him how they keep track of the variations in a job. Pamela, who has been hired to solve this problem for New York, overhears and says that the whole company uses an enterprise software package. She will be getting special training in it later today. I hope she masters it soon, and that it’s actually capable of solving their naming problems.

We move into the woodworking facility. I can barely see the far wall. This building looks at least four times the size of my shop floor. Our first stop is a veneer cutting station, where a single worker, a middle-age woman, is fixing a manufacturing error. She is trying to replace the damaged section of a tabletop. That makes me feel better. We’re not the only ones who make mistakes.

We walk for an hour as Jens explains how tables are built. I recognize every machine. This plant is larger, better lit, and neater than my shop. Every step of the process has its own logically arranged area, full of the very best German machinery, and special assembly jigs to speed production. There’s a huge investment here. I see at least a hundred special lifters, to help a single worker move tops. They cost fifteen to thirty thousand dollars each. In the veneer glue-up area, there is a glue application machine. Last year, I looked into getting one, but was stunned by the price tag: sixty-five thousand dollars. It might make sense if we were doing thousands of panels a day, but we do only a couple at a time, using paint rollers that cost seventy-nine cents each. Three workers are hosing the machine down. I ask Jens how long it takes to prep the machine for work. Twenty minutes, and more than an hour for a three-man crew to clean it. “And we only had one order today. Fifteen, tops. The machine ran for less than thirty minutes.”

Jens’s comment leads me to ask how busy the factory has been. As it turns out, most of the workers have been laid off. The recession in Europe has been brutal, and even in 2012, the market is very soft. My business grew steadily from the beginning of 2010 until March. Is the weakness in Europe starting to spread to America? We continue for another hour, and everywhere I see the same thing: beautiful machines, spacious work stations, but very little work being done.

Before I left for Germany, I asked Nick and Dan and Andy Stahl, my engineer, what they wanted to know about a modern factory. We came up with eighty-three questions. After lunch, Jens answers most of them but can’t comment on build times, labor rates, or overhead costs. It turns out that, except for a couple of automated processes, we use similar machines, glues, and finishes. We are capable of producing most of Eurofurn’s tops in our shop. How much we should charge is another matter. We won’t know how long it will take us to make tops in quantity until we do it. And we don’t even have cost targets to aim for. We need those numbers.

Jens and I spend our last hour in the production engineers’ office. They receive plans from the sales office, check them, and then send them out to the shop floor. We have some difficulties doing this ourselves. Andy Stahl produces detailed drawings from our proposals, and Steve Maturin passes them to the guys working on the piece. These often have small errors that get caught only by chance, and I often see my workers taking the long walk back to Andy’s office with a question. Is there a better way?

Jens sits me down with the only engineer on duty that day, an older gentleman named Martin who does not speak English. He’s clearly uncomfortable, but I’m not sure whether he’s shy or he dislikes the idea of a foreign stranger learning his company’s operational secrets.

I start asking questions. Each results in a very long exchange between Jens and Martin, and then a very short English answer back to me. But I’m able to work out their process. Because they have only twelve standard designs, they send a single paper sheet listing the type of table, size, wood to be used, edge detail, and quantity desired. This would not work for us—our tables vary too much. We cannot avoid making a full set of drawings for each table, even though they are very expensive to produce.

I conclude the day with another long meal with the New York contingent, and a good night’s sleep. I return to the factory the next morning and head to Jens’s office to thank him for being so helpful. “I would not do this normally,” he says, “because I am the one to tell the outside partners what they must do. But I was told that you are special, and that I am to give you all the assistance that you require. And now you must excuse me, as I have spent more time with you than I can really afford.” How about that? I’m special! But what does that mean?

At lunchtime, Nigel introduces me to his friend Johann, whose job is to arrange financing for Eurofurn’s operations. We make a short drive to a nearby restaurant: pizza again. Johann makes it clear that this is not in honor of an American guest, but just because he really likes pizza. While we eat and chat, I’m thinking: since I’m special, maybe the steady stream of orders is going to begin. If they plan to keep me busy, it would be worth buying some equipment to do their work. All that will cost money. I ask Johann whether there’s any chance that Eurofurn would help, and he holds up his hand. “No, no, no. We are having enough trouble financing our own factory. We bought a lot of equipment before the recession and now we need to be very careful.”

After lunch, while we’re driving back to Hildesheim, I ask Nigel straight out what Jens meant when he said I’m special. Is Eurofurn going to commit to me? Will there be any contract specifying levels of production and investments required? Are we engaged, or just dating?

Nigel is evasive. Eurofurn is excited to have found me. Eurofurn wants us to work closely together. Eurofurn needs the highest quality, and we can do that. Eurofurn needs the lowest prices, like it gets from its other foreign partners. Eurofurn would like me to show my commitment by assuming the costs of the next phase of our relationship by myself. Maybe Eurofurn will formalize the relationship at some point in the future. Eurofurn is also, as an organization, not sure that it wants to work with foreign partners at all. The Eurofurn management team is not entirely behind the decision to send work overseas.

The rest of the drive to my hotel passes in silence, and I eat dinner alone. My flight out is very early the next morning. I’m watching TV in my room when a text arrives from Nigel. Peter Baumann would like to take me out for a drink. Can I be ready at nine? Peter picks me up and we head to a non-descript bar in town. It’s crowded. I’m introduced to a bunch of Peter’s friends, local farmers. After a couple beers, I’m given a sinister-looking concoction: a wineglass half full of vodka. Perched on the rim, a slice of lemon is topped with a pile of dry instant coffee. “Luftwaffe Special!” exclaims the man. “My grandfather drank these in Russia! Keeps you happy, but not sleepy!” He demonstrates. You fold the lemon around the coffee, eat the whole thing in one bite, then chug the vodka. I master it on the first try, to applause from the guys. Then I have another—they’re tasty.

Peter has been drinking, too, and we lean close to each other. “I love your factory,” I tell him. “Very clean. Very good machines. Nice people. Very impressive.” He drapes an arm across my shoulder, very friendly. I decide to ask him the question that has been bothering me all day. “What do you want from me? Why don’t you do the work at your factory?”

He answers slowly. “It is not so good there. Business is very, very bad. Everyone is old. We cannot get young workers to move to the country. We have too many machines. We are losing money. We need to move the work to places where it is cheaper and where we can grow. And it takes too long to ship product. Many weeks on a boat does not work. We need to be close to our clients.” I can see the sense of this. My biggest doubt is whether I’m the right choice for them. We will never be as efficient as a factory. Can we create an assembly line and deliver work at a lower price? It would be a drastic change in our operation.

I’m home on Saturday after a hellish, hungover flight. Can’t sleep. I go down to my kitchen and log in to Dan’s and Nick’s e-mails to see what they’ve been up to. They’ve been busy. We have a lot of potential work hanging out there. If even half of it comes in, we’ll be swamped.

We each sold one order while I was away. Dan finally scored with a sixteen-footer worth $9,106. Nick sold a smaller table for $7,413. Emma sold some power/data units for $453. And a purchase order worth $24,111 came in from a local insurance company I’ve been working with. Sales for the month so far: $88,045. And for the year, just $631,048. There are two business days left in April. We need a miracle: $170,000 in three days to put us back on track for the year.

Our cash is melting away. I started the month with $136,261, and today I have $105,294. Cutting my pay has slowed down our weekly expenses, but we’ve averaged $34,440 a week for the past two weeks. That might be OK if we were making a book profit. I have explained at the weekly meeting that we need to keep production up, to collect cash from final payments as soon as we can, but the shop guys know that this speeds the day when we run out of work and I lay them off. They’re slowing down production, maybe unconsciously, maybe deliberately. And we’ve been distracted with the Company S debacle. So far this month, we’ve shipped $145,236 and built just $125,036. Both of those are far below my target of $200,000 a month. And far below our cash outflow.

Inquiries are jumping all over the place. The first two weeks of April were slow, but the third week was higher than average: twenty-one people contacted us. The next week, when I was in Germany, was the worst I have seen in years: just seven incoming calls. The total for the month so far is just forty-nine, far below the totals in January (seventy-nine) and February (sixty-six). The missing inquiries give me a very bad feeling. As the number of possible buyers shrinks, we’re less likely to hit our targets.

Well, there’s one deal ready to go. I e-mail my friend who wants the bedroom set. If I can see him this weekend, I can review the final designs with him and hopefully get a deposit check. A $28,797 order will help. My friend is happy to meet me late in the afternoon. I go upstairs to tell my wife that I’m leaving. I need to go to the shop to pick up some checks and then go see my friend. “Well, be careful,” she says. “The van has been acting funny.”

I back the Odyssey out of the driveway and shift into drive. The engine revs up, but the car doesn’t move. Shit. The transmission has finally given up. I let the van roll to the curb, then I try the Camry. The engine runs very ragged, and I see to my horror a huge cloud of white smoke behind the car. I turn it off. Peter normally drives the Camry. I go upstairs and shake him awake. “What happened to the Camry?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. There’s a lot of smoke coming out the back, but I got it home from school yesterday.” “When did that start?” “I’m not sure, I just noticed it yesterday on the way home.” We have an excellent auto mechanic a block away, and a car rental shop within a short walk, but both are closed on the weekend. I ride my bike out to the shop, and on the fifty-minute trip, I try to figure out what to do. The Camry is twenty years old, has 135,000 miles on it, and just two months ago, I spent $2,800 replacing the power steering. The mechanic told me then that I was most likely throwing money away. I’ve had the Odyssey for thirteen years, but it has even more miles. Neither car is worth more than the repair costs.

I bike out to my friend’s house and show him the latest version of the designs. He takes the news that his new bedroom set will cost as much as a car without flinching and asks me what he can do to get onto our schedule. That’s easy: hand over some money. He writes me a check for $12,500.

On Monday morning, I pull the Camry into the mechanic’s lot. White smoke is billowing from under the hood. The diagnosis: “Head gasket, maybe a cracked block. Junk it.” And I’m not throwing more money at the Odyssey. I’m carless. I coast the Camry back home, park it in my driveway next to the van, then walk up to the rental place and pick up the cheapest car that will fit my family of five (tall) people, a purple PT Cruiser.

The last day of April brings a surprise: two more orders. The first is worth $29,835. The buyer is a woodworker in Maine who was asked to make a very large table for a local company, but realized that it was beyond his capabilities. It’s an easy job for us. The next is smaller, $15,301, for a company that makes tools for auto mechanics. We’ve been dealing with their general contractor. We were initially asked to price five different tables, but the job has been whittled down to just the top of the largest table. The design calls for a mostly metal top, with some wood. I’m pretty sure that we’ll lose money at the price I quoted. The metal work will be a challenge, but I’ll take anything at this point to keep the guys busy.

Dan and Nick have a long list of jobs that they hope will come in. Dan is still waiting for the purchase order from the California engineering firm. Nick has sent off his formal submission for the Air Force base. And there are still other proposals out there. I feel discouraged at their report. They are so hopeful. And they are selling almost nothing.

I spend the rest of the day doing administrative work that should have been done the week before. I review the bills the bookkeeper paid, the payroll that Emma submitted, make a local tax submittal, and walk through the shop to review work in progress. Everyone asks about Germany. I took a lot of pictures and some movies of Eurofurn’s factory. I should put some kind of presentation together so that they can see what I saw. No time, though.

As I walk through the shop, the contrast between us and Eurofurn is stark. We can do most of Eurofurn’s work, and do it well. Our products are well made and appealing. But our shop is a mess. Not by American standards—it’s one of the cleanest shops I’ve ever been in—but compared to Eurofurn, it’s appalling. There’s no particular order to our machinery. We just set it down here and there as we acquired it. A decade’s accumulation of dust frosts unused horizontal surfaces, and there are heaps of scrap everywhere. The only bright spot is the finish room. Dust in there causes finish defects. Dave Violi keeps it spotless.

One other difference: my whole crew is working. Our backlog is shrinking, but it isn’t gone. I think back to Eurofurn’s unoccupied work stations, and Peter Baumann’s gloomy prognosis for that factory. Is that our future? How long before I have to lay someone off? Is the recession in Europe spreading to America? Is it 2008 all over again?