“But they're slow and stuck in their old business model,” Lenny pushed back. “They have to support all that brick and mortar with high margins. That's what I said in the meeting. They won't cannibalize their current business. Besides, when the brick-and-mortar guys finally get it and decide to go ‘click and mortar,’ they'll buy us. Maybe they have money now, but they're not hip to the Internet.” He glanced at me to see if he registered any points.
“I'm not sure,” I started to say.
“How smart do you have to be,” Allison jumped in, “to sell caskets cheap on the Internet? Come on, Lenny.”
At first embarrassed, Lenny then glared at her. His entire face glowed red.
She looked at me again and made some sort of decision to go ahead. “Selling cheap caskets isn't what we started out to do,” she confessed.
“Wait a minute. We'll get to all that later,” Lenny cut in sharply. “Once we land the money and Funerals.com is up and running, then we can evolve the business to content and community. One step at a time. We've talked about this.”
“What if we never get to it, Lenny?” she asked. “Things change. Priorities change. The market changes. We'll have our hands full just delivering the e-tailing business. Now is our opportunity.”
This turn of discussion clearly made Lenny uncomfortable, but he did nothing to stop it. He knew he needed Allison.
“Let the funeral homes dispose of the remains,” Allison continued. “The Internet's never going to take care of that. Let us focus on the emotional needs of the people left behind. That was our starting point for this entire idea, and that's still what we should focus on.”
In their early brainstorming, Lenny had convinced Allison that the Internet provided an opportunity for them to address those emotional needs, especially for survivors and friends spread around the world. Many of those people, Allison claimed, want a way to communicate with each other, to remember their loved ones, to come to terms with and sort through the meaning of the death. There were ways to do that on the Internet. Just because family and friends live apart, doesn't mean they have to grieve alone. The core of the business that excited Allison was community, and into the community areas of the site they could build content—information about funerals, about the process and arrangements, the law and regulations, information that would demystify all of it as well as arm consumers.
“Right,” Lenny said sarcastically when Allison was done. “And how exactly do you make money with that?”
“If we provide information about counseling services, referrals, places you can go to talk about grief,” she added, “that's real value.” She hesitated. “Maybe there's a way for family members to share their memories on-line, and some way for people even to address the person who's gone. If we make the site useful, people will return and rely on it, and advertising and commerce opportunities will follow those people.”
“On-line séances,” Lenny commented, looking at me. “What a great idea.”
“Lenny.” She was impatient. “Say what you want now. But we talked about all of this, and I thought we agreed.”
“I just don't think it's a business,” Lenny said.
“And I am not interested in selling cheap caskets and liners,” she retorted.
That got Lenny's attention. I suddenly realized he had assumed, despite Allison's reservations, that she would come along if they could raise the money, that she would suspend her hopes indefinitely while they nibbled at a morsel of the original idea.
“I don't think, if we pursued all those ideas we talked about,” he said almost belligerently, “we would have gotten even this far.”
She was talking about some sort of social agency, he claimed, some not-for-profit meant solely to help people, not make money. They couldn't get funding for that. Who would put up money for that? he demanded to know. She had no ready answer.
“For all the problems with Funerals.com,” he went on, “they didn't laugh at us, and we would have been laughed out the door today if we'd come in saying we were going to help people, we were going to fill needs that churches used to fill. How are people going to pay for that? What's the economic model for that?”
He waited for an answer.
“What's it cost to run a site like that?” he went on when she clearly had no answer. “What's the content cost, the infrastructure? How do you find customers? What's your relationship with funeral directors and funeral homes?”
I smiled inwardly because his litany of questions probably echoed the very questions Phil had shot at him that morning.
Allison simply listened to all this with jaw set, shaking her head in incredulity. Obviously she knew Lenny well enough to let him run down a bit before jumping back in.
“Al, I'm not saying we will never do what you want,” he offered finally, in what sounded like a closing. “I think we can do it eventually, but I don't believe we can get funded by promoting a business aimed first and foremost at helping people. We have to focus on products, revenue, growth, profits. Your ideas are too squishy. You see this utopia, this company with no structure and a bunch of eager beavers who work for the love of it. What you want is unrealistic. If we win on the bottom line, then we can consider new ideas and directions. Hey, if we're a big success we can even endow a foundation to deal with the virtuous, people aspect of death and dying.”
“Lenny, I'm not going to wait a lifetime to bequeath some foundation,” she said. They had known each other a long time and didn't pull punches. That could be a good trait among cofounders.
“Besides,” Allison continued, “I'm not interested in funding a service. I want to spend my time being involved. I want to work in an organization that cares about people in trouble, that”—she waved her arm—“that cares about people, period. This is a chance to change what we don't like.” She paused for a moment. “And you're right. I want to build a legacy company, a place we can be proud of, where people work hard, and care about what they do and respect each other. I want a place I can believe in, in every way—what it does, what it stands for, how it works. I don't want to wait for my ship to come in before I can afford to start. Why wait when we can do it now?”
Clearly Lenny had failed to sell her one of his Deferred Life Plans.
They were an even odder combination than I had imagined: Lenny with his one-dimensional, bottom-line view of business, and Allison with her lofty ideals about people.
Lenny glanced at me—clearly fishing for support. Now, as Allison finished her rejoinder, he simply turned to me, shrugged, and held his hands out, palms up, as if to say, “Hopeless. What can I do?”
“I don't think I can help you with this one, Lenny,” I said. Maybe ten years ago. Not now.
It was another instance in which, were I still Lenny's age, I would have agreed with him. Sure, business was about money. That's what makes it business. But first and foremost, to be successful, business is about people. It took me a while to learn that lesson.
I STARTED MY BUSINESS career as a negotiator, a deal guy. I was trained to take advantage, to get the upper hand, to beat down the other side. I was an assassin. My job was to win at any cost, and I took some satisfaction in doing it well. I didn't understand much about the human side of business. In my mind, there was not much room for humanity on the bottom line. That point of view didn't particularly comfort me, but that's the way business worked, I thought. Given those constraints, I also figured my days in the world of business were numbered. But before I decided to chuck it all and become some freelance tour guide, I met Bill Campbell.
I was working at Apple, but was on the verge of leaving the legal department because it was restructuring. My boss encouraged me to meet Bill, who, at the time, was leading a spinout of Apple's software applications business. The purpose of the spinout was to reduce Apple's dependence on Microsoft software.