Liz, Inc.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 1

The Meeting

It had been several weeks, since I had the occasion to wear a suit. My meeting this morning was with an old friend, however, I make it a point to dress in business attire when conducting business. Discarding the cello-wrap from the cleaners, I donned the gray Hickey Freeman and tied a red power tie. Even though it had been over twenty years since reading the book Dress for Success, it still dictated many of my dress habits. My imagination conjured the image of a Medieval Knight putting on his suit of armor and riding off to adventure.

I strode to the garage and raised the door to reveal my midnight blue Cadillac with blue leather interior. When I was a teenager delivering newspapers, I had always wanted a Cadillac. Entering the car, I strapped on the seat belt and keyed the ignition. The Northstar engine in the Sedan DeVille roared into life, and I drove the mile and a half to Don’s Enterprises.

Don Smith had been my best friend, for as long as I could remember. We had met years ago, at one of those Chamber of Commerce networking events. They call them Business After Hours.

Don had built a chain of women’s clothing stores and had sold them for around five million dollars, before the recession of the early 1990’s. Since he had signed a no-compete clause, Don decided to go into the wholesale ladies’ clothing business.

Don’s home is in an older section of Valdosta, Georgia. The homes were built in the 1960’s. His is a two-story, old southern plantation style. It has Doric columns across the entire front of the building and is painted the traditional white. The front porch is slightly raised and is floored with marble quarried in North Georgia. Don painted the front door red, to give it his personal touch. The grounds are heavily planted in azaleas and camellias. Tall, stately pine trees are scattered throughout the estate. On the edge of an old millpond behind the main house is a boathouse with adjacent screened dock area. Several rocking chairs occupy much of the screened dock. The screening is necessary to enjoy the evenings, because of the mosquitoes that come out at dusk.

The view across the fifty-acre-or-so millpond is spectacular. Don’s home is on a five-acre tract and is the only one on the south side of the pond. The north side of the pond is lined with homes on one-acre lots. A major road borders the west side of the property. People living on the north side of Valdosta use the road to get to the Valdosta Mall. The dam that forms the pond is at the northwest corner of Don’s estate. Its water cascades over the dam, then immediately goes under the road through a series of large pipes.

One of the things Don and I share is the love of fine, hand rolled premium cigars. Many evenings we have enjoyed the setting sun over the millpond, while smoking an aromatic Churchill or double corona cigar. There’s something about the lit end of a cigar in the dark that brings visions of earlier times in America. Times when Native American hunter-gatherers sat around a campfire in the evening and enjoyed fellowship while smoking tobacco. Over the years, and many cigars, Don and I had become friends.

Don’s family consists of a wife and two children. The son and daughter are both students at the University of Georgia. Don is 6’ tall with a full head of Red Hair and weighs about 200 pounds. Don can make people laugh with his ability to remember jokes and humorous stories. He easily fits into groups and becomes the center of attention. Dressing casually, yet stylishly, is Don’s dress code. He only wears a suit when absolutely necessary.

I came into the world at the end of World War II and was baptized Joseph J. Hall, Jr. Since my father went by the name of Joseph, they called me Joe to prevent confusion. I was born prematurely and almost died at birth. From my earliest days, I can remember being called by the nickname Lucky Joe.

My mother’s family is Irish and my father’s is Welsh, so St. Patrick’s Day was a major celebration in our household. There were plenty of shamrocks, the color green, and beer. While our family was not wealthy, we were not poor, either. My father was an engineer on the railroad, and mother’s role was that of taking care of the family.

I worked my way through Valdosta State College, which, at the time had just gone coed and had about 1,000 students. Valdosta State has since become a university and grown to some 10,000 students. My wife and I graduated from Valdosta State together and got married the same week. We immediately moved to Atlanta to embark on our careers. She went to work in the bookkeeping department of a large insurance company and I took an assistant-manager job with a chain of furniture stores.

The retail furniture business was interesting. It required long hours and most weekends. After several years, I was promoted to store manager and learned a lot about retail. In 1977 we had saved enough money, with both of us working, to move back to Valdosta and open our own furniture store. We wanted our two children to grow up in Valdosta as we had. My wife, Suzanne, did the bookkeeping. I did the buying, advertising, hiring and firing. Business went well and we opened other stores in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. We called them Lucky Joe’s Furniture.

We used four leaf clovers on each end of the signs and in all our advertising. Our customers loved the concept. In 1994 a national conglomerate bought our endeavor for some two million in cash and four million in stock. Suzanne immediately retired and started spending her time with volunteer work and clubs. She also started spending a lot of time at the country club, dramatically increasing her consumption of alcohol.

Part of the buyout agreement retained my services as consultant for one year. I spent the year mostly playing golf, going to coin and collectible shows, and doing a small amount of consulting to fine-tune the buyout. After a year of taking it easy, I needed a challenge, but I also had a non-compete agreement, so I couldn’t retail furniture.

My friend, Don, also was operating under one of these contracts, so I decided to brainstorm with him about ideas.

Over the years, I had listened to dozens of motivational and educational tapes in my car while traveling between the furniture stores. I had also attended numerous seminars on business, motivation, and public speaking. While running the furniture stores, I talked live, on the air with the radio station disc jockeys or deejays as they are commonly called. They would broadcast, live, from my stores during big sales. They were the personalities and had the listeners and following. However, they didn’t know anything about furniture. We learned that the public likes to hear two people joking while giving sale information, rather than one person droning on about sale prices. It worked and I became a minor celebrity in the towns where we had stores. I also appeared in the television ads.

I had been thinking that I didn’t want to tie myself down to one thing for years and years on end, as had been the case in the furniture stores. So I got my attorney to incorporate Lucky Joe’s Consulting, Inc. My accountant had been after me to incorporate, after the sale, for tax advantages.

Now, I had a new consulting business and no customers.

Don and I were enjoying a Macanudo cigar on his screened dock. He happened to mention that a friend of his was having problems in the radio business. Between puffs, I told Don that I was starting a consulting business and that it sounded like an interesting challenge. As we finished our cigars, Don agreed to introduce us over lunch, and set up a meeting for the next week. It hadn’t been a week and I had a lead.

Our meeting was set at Muldoon’s restaurant where they serve great food and are a local watering hole. Over Muldoon Burgers, I met Sam The Man Martin. Sam had been in radio since he lied about his age in high school. He had become one of the most sought-after deejays in this part of the country, then had come into an inheritance. Based on this combination, he bought a local radio station with his money, along with that of some investors.

To conserve assets, he was trying to do everything himself. His forte was his air personality, musical programming, and building an audience. In just six months, he had taken the station to number two in the market, in audience share. However, it was near the bottom in sales, and was still losing money.

The number one station in the market had the same format and was getting the lion’s share of advertising dollars. Most people placing advertising don’t like to buy two stations with the same format.

We finished lunch and Don left. Sam The Man and I went to the covered patio area of Muldoon’s. We worked out a consulting deal where I would get a percentage of increased sales and a percentage of the sale price of the station, if and when it was sold. The investors and Sam were looking for some quick money in the deal.

I spent a year turning the station around. The first part of the plan was to change the format to oldies music from the 50’s and 60’s. We started a large promotion by arranging some advertising swaps with a billboard company, the local television station, and a free shopper publication in order to publicize the changed format. While we remained the number-two station in the market, in audience share, we went from near the bottom in sales, to number two in sales. The hardest part was recruiting and training a sales team.

The station sold for five million dollars. Sam and the group of investors had only paid a half million for it a year and a half earlier.

Now I had worked myself out of a job. The year I had spent turning the station around was one of the happiest of my working career. Unfortunately, that was not the case at home.

The 1996 Olympic Games were taking place in Atlanta while I was doing the consulting job at the radio station. I had been chosen to carry the Olympic Torch, in the crosscountry Coca-Cola Olympic Torch Relay. This was prior to the actual games in Atlanta. I guess all the volunteer work I had done over the years won the honor for me.

The torch is the symbol for all the volunteers involved in the Olympic Movement. The sacred flame is kindled in Greece then it is transported around the world and carried to the stadium, where the Opening Ceremony for the games takes place. Each Local Hero torchbearer, like me, carried the torch for one kilometer. We were supposed to jog slowly, allowing, everyone along the route to get a good look at the Olympic Flame. That was easier said than done. When you actually carry the flame and have hundreds of people screaming, you want to run like the wind. The adrenaline surge and elation I felt while carrying the Olympic Flame was awesome. I was proud to be a small part of the Olympic Movement. It is the one organization which tries to bring the whole world together in understanding, through competition.

I spent two weeks in Atlanta while the games were going on. Every day, I made live broadcasts to the station’s listeners back in Valdosta. My press pass gave me access to many places the general public could not go; I got media tours through Coca-Cola’s Olympic City, A.T.&T.’s Global Olympic Village, Budweiser’s Pavilion, Swatch’s Pavilion, and many other places. I informed our listeners of parking situations, transportation, and anything else of interest.

It was awesome to be in the middle of a million people in downtown Atlanta during the games. The Centennial Olympic Park was a magnet to crowds, day and night. Olympic pin trading was the spectator sport. Each sponsoring company made commemorative pins. Each contingent from all over the world had pins. Even the law enforcement groups had pins. Virtually everyone got pin fever and bought and swapped these brightly colored, enameled, metal pins. By understanding merchandising and having access to some highly sought after media pins, I turned a handful of pins into a sack full.

My senior year at Valdosta State College I had attended an Amway presentation. I learned about networking and residual income at the presentation. I didn’t join, as I was too busy at the time. However, I liked the concept. After the station sold, I was looking for another consulting job. I bumped into an old friend while having breakfast at the local Shoney’s restaurant. He asked me if I was interested in nutrition. I told him I was, so he gave me a cassette tape, which I threw in the car. It stayed there a week or so, until I made a trip to Atlanta.

On the trip I got bored with the radio and remembered the tape on nutrition. It turned out that the tape was on a new product to the United States called Pycnogenol. It had been in Europe for years. A Doctor of Chiropractic had made the tape. He had gotten interested in natural medicines and spoke of the different positive things Pycnogenol had done for his patients. The most striking thing to me was that many patients had used it to eliminate hay fever. I was in the middle of one of my two miserable times of year. The spring and fall brought miserable bouts with hay fever allergies.

I stopped at a health food store in Atlanta and got some Pycnogenol. I took one milligram for each pound of body weight. The next morning, miraculously, my symptoms were gone.

The tape was designed to be an educational recruiting device to attract people to enroll in a new networking company. Having some spare time, and a curiosity about networking, I sought out the friend who had given me the tape.

He went over the program and also showed me that the Pycnogenol was slightly cheaper from the networking company than at the health food stores. I enrolled and started working it as a business. Over a six-month period my network grew to over 500 people. The company scheduled a national convention in June of 1997. I was invited to attend, receive an award, and be recognized for my accomplishments.

Over the six months spent building my network, the public’s awareness of the product had increased dramatically. It was now being sold in discount stores at a lower price than the Network Company’s was.

I attended the convention in Dallas, Texas with a friend who was in my network. Everyone had a good time with all the hoopla!

I met a dozen or so people who were making some big money with the company, having gotten involved when the company started two years earlier. I saw that there were two thousand people at the convention, but only a handful were making any serious money.

The motivational speakers explained some new products coming out, and at my turn, I got up on stage, received my award, and gave a short talk.

When I returned home, I had only put in two weeks of actual networking time for the month. When I got my check the next month, it had dropped by hundreds of dollars. People were dropping out almost as fast as I was enrolling them. Even though I was making several thousand dollars a month, I was spending at least half of it on expenses. Realizing I was not building residual income, I ceased to network for the company. Now I was out of work again.

Don had been in my network. He had gotten results on the products, as had I. He had not been networking on a full time basis, as I had, because he was too busy running his own wholesale company. We went over the decision together to stop networking. Those visits on his screened dock brought about a lot of business decisions, while enjoying fine cigars. These were H. Upmann Coronas, Habana.

One of my attorney friends had received a box of the Cubans, from one of his clients. He was from the Miami Area and had gotten caught on I-75 with something he shouldn’t have. It has been illegal to import Cuban cigars into the U.S. since President Kennedy signed papers banning imports from Cuba. However, it’s been said, he held up signing the papers until he procured over a hundred boxes. For some reason, the Cuban Cigars are the best in the world. It has something to do with the soil and climate. I guess it’s sort of like the Vidalia Onions, for which Georgia is noted.

A few days after our discussion on getting out of networking, I got a call from Don. He said that he had been thinking about something and would like for me to meet with him. I didn’t know what the meeting was about, but looked forward to seeing Don, as always.

At a few minutes before our agreed meeting time, I steered the Sedan DeVille onto the entry road and into the office/distribution park off North Valdosta Road. Upon seeing his building, I remembered that he had been the first one to build in the park. It turned out to be a good investment, as the property had increased greatly in value over the years. The building has a modern front with more than adequate parking. There are 5,000 square feet of office space and 15,000 square feet of warehouse.

Admiring the huge oak tree beside the parking area, I got out of the car. Don had planned the layout around the several-hundred-year-old oak tree. He likes to take a break occasionally and smoke a cigar under his ‘cigar tree’ as he affectionately calls it. I wondered about the history that it could tell if it could talk. It had probably been there before the United States came into being.

Checking my watch, I noted it was five minutes to 9:00 AM. August in South Georgia is noted for stifling, sweltering heat. The humidity gets up near 100% and the temperature stays in the high 90’s. From midday until sunset, just walking about will bring about abundant perspiration. The invention of air conditioning brought about the rise of the Southern United States. I checked my suit pocket to make sure the pocket humidor, with the two Dunhill cigars, was there. It was, and I entered the building.

The receptionist chirped, Come on in ‘Lucky’ Joe. Don’s expecting you. I smiled and told Sally how lovely she looked and how good it was to see her again. The reception room is fairly large and rectangular. It has comfortable office chairs along the walls, is expensively carpeted, and the room is well lit. The walls are hung with numerous watercolors.

The artist, Mary Carlon, did the watercolors. She and her family now reside in Valdosta, having lived all over the world. Her husband retired in Valdosta after serving his final tour of duty at Moody Air Force Base. He had been in a special unit that spent time in sensitive political areas. They had fallen in love with the South Georgia area and decided to stay.

Mary Carlon had studied art in her youth. The time the couple spent in Europe was a boon to her. While her husband was on assignments, she had time to spend in museums and study the techniques of the Old Master Artists. Befriending the museum workers also paid untold dividends. They taught her many of the secrets used by the famous artists. One was how to paint eyes so that they seem to follow you across the room. So much in art has to be seen to be completely understood.

During one three-year tour of duty in Florida, Mary raised tropical fish for resale to pet stores and wholesalers. Having always loved tropical fish, the time she spent raising them taught her how fish think. She now intuitively knows how they move, how they rest, how they blend in with their surroundings, and other qualities peculiar to them.

Mary used the knowledge she learned in Europe and merged it with knowledge she learned raising fish to come up with her own style of underwater watercolors. She uses a technique with watercolors to paint coral so that the coral is vibrant with color and jumps off the canvas. Other artists have tried to copy her, in vain. Her paintings are like a salt-water aquarium. One can sit and look at them for long periods of time and feel a calming effect. In many of her paintings, she blends small sea creatures into the background. As in nature, they are camouflaged and hard to find, which creates reality and continuing interest, even after seeing the picture numerous times.

Don had met her at an arts and crafts show and had fallen in love with her work enough to start investing in some of them. He introduced me to Mary, and I too, started investing. We had both advised her to raise her prices. After doing so, her sales doubled. A year ago she doubled her prices again. Now she can’t keep up with the demand for her originals. If it weren’t for prints, she wouldn’t have much to sell. The quality of her work demands a lot of time.

The door opened and I saw six foot, red-haired Don Smith. His grin was wide as a stretch limo. Don hollered, ‘Lucky’ Joe! Come on into my office. I followed Don down the hallway. We walked halfway through the office area. His office is right in the middle and has two doors, which allow him to quickly get where he wants to go in the building. A private bath and storage closet are connected to the back of the office. The indirect lighting around the walls at ceiling level gives the room plenty of light. He has a large power desk, with built in computer setup. The wall behind his desk has floor to wall bookshelves, filled with books, audiocassettes, and souvenirs. In front of the desk are