We had a blast at BLAST. And it introduced us to Pitts-boro, North Carolina, the community on the other end of the Pittsboro-Moncure Rd. upon which we live. Many of the hours I spent working for BLAST was in far away lands, on the floor of a trade show, or sharing exotic meals with distributors. I would pass through town on my way to and from work — always over dressed — but I was finally getting a chance to see things in the light of day.
I opened an account at the local hardware store — to buy the odds and ends necessary to maintain the business. Donnie and Joyce ran the place, and whenever I walked into the store in the early days, I did not look like the other patrons. Nonetheless, they came to accept me over time, and I found myself drawn to their wisdom and advice.
I opened a bank account on the corner, at a place that has never been able to comprehend foreign currency exchange. I moved all of my travel to the local travel agency two doors down from the bank. My introduction to Pittsboro was that of an absentee property owner, occasionally stopping by for meetings or to run errands on behalf of the property. With BLAST, we shifted from absentee members of the community, to identifiable merchants in its midst.
I occasionally went to lunch about town, and sometimes stopped in at Mimi’s General Store. She was selling a slim selection of organic vegetables and a whole bunch of health food supplements. Mimi and I became friends. She had been retailing in Pittsboro for many years, and I was the new guy with a software company.
On one occasion we were sitting on the front porch of my ramshackle home and Mimi was discussing a bold move. She was contemplating moving out of the ground floor of the Blair Hotel and into the abandoned car dealership next to the courthouse. More importantly, she was thinking about serving lunch.
I told her that the highly paid people of BLAST would pay a premium for organic lunches, and that the demographic shift in Pittsboro was under way.
Along the way we had befriended Clyde Jones, a legendary “outsider artist” who cuts “critters” out of cedar logs with his chain saw. We provided Clyde with rides, and cedar logs from our place, and he occasionally gave us a sculpture that he usually made on site.
One time I helped Clyde negotiate a royalty deal with the New Orleans Museum of Art. Clyde sat on one side of the kitchen table and listened to my phone conversation. I attempted to represent his best interests on my side of the table — taking visual cues from him. When we finished the deal, they emailed me a form to be signed, and I suggested to Clyde that we get him a copy for his records. To do that, we dropped in at BLAST.
At the time BLAST was right next door to the Post Office, and it boasted a long brick wall. As Clyde and I were entering the building, I suggested the wall was ugly, to which he agreed. We decided on a whim that if I were to get the wall painted blue, and provide some scaffolding, he would paint a mural on it.
Which we did. Tami rounded up school children, the local hardware store’s paint vendor donated the paint, and off we went.
The mural went up in fine fashion. Someone called the police, thinking it was a violation of the local sign ordinance, but when the chief of police came to inspect, he thought it looked fine to him.
I miscalculated the amount of media attention the project would receive. It seemed like every camera crew and newspaper in the state arrived to cover the famous Clyde Jones doing a mural, and BLAST failed to get a single mention.
Later I heard through the small town grapevine that the project had been self-serving, since it made such a big media splash. Before the project I had very little experience with the local media, so I learned from the rumor, and thought, “That was just a big ugly wall — if you want self serving, I’ll show you self serving…”
We tried to capitalize on the event by publishing a “Greetings from Pittsboro” postcard, which we used for correspondence with customers all over the world, but at the end of the day the mural was an object lesson in how not to garner publicity for ourselves.
Today the muralized building is one part government office, and one part hairdressing salon. Both of my sons got Mohawk haircuts there last summer. The Post Office has moved to the edge of town and its old residence is abandoned.
BLAST’s future was wiped out by the Internet, and as a property it is remembered fondly by Information Technology folks everywhere. Tami left to have babies, Mark and I were swept away by our growing distribution enterprise, and those who were left behind never figured out how to retool the company for the current day.
Something I learned along the way is that all business is difficult. One moment you are distributing computer memory in Canada, and you find that you are operating on razor thin margins and that the business is tough. Since you naturally want to be in an “easier” business, you look around at customers and suppliers to see who has it easy.
In the computer business the vendors with the highest margins are in software. It costs them a dollar to print a compact disc worth of software, and they sell it for sixteen hundred bucks. BLAST was my foray into software. What is not included in the compact disc printing cost is the million dollars worth of research and development that goes in to produce un-saleable products that do not go to market. And we did a lot of that at BLAST. We would work for years on products that would miss the market entirely. It turned out that being in the software business was hard.
And I think the same lesson applies to biodiesel. On the surface it is the process of taking waste fat, oil, and grease and converting them to fuel. Easy money. It’s a business where you can sell every drop you produce without trying.
Except it appears to be exceptionally difficult to make any money doing it.
Which has left me with the conclusion that all business is hard.
Which is the opposite message from what John would tell me. And both messages are correct. Business is hard. It takes work. And when you are in business you get everything you want or something better from your endeavors.
I should note that earnings are not the only yardstick I have used to measure whether or not something is a success. Once when Tami and I were riding horseback to the lost Jordanian city of Petra, I was not reflecting on how much money had been lost or wasted along the way.
Rather, I was vigorously celebrating the global economy that had been so kind to us.
THERE’S A METAL SCULPTOR in Rockwood, Ontario named Andreas Drenters. He worked with his brother to assemble a remarkable sculpture called Pioneer Family. It was a larger-than-life Conestoga wagon, complete with children and dogs that made its debut in Montreal at Expo 67.
I remember Expo 67. When we went as a family I was five years old. We believed in World Fairs.
And I later became friends with Andreas. He worked out of a tiny shop in Rockwood, Ontario, and filled the grounds of an abandoned nunnery with magnificent pieces of scrap metal sculpture. He was an inspiration to me.
When I bought my farm in Moncure, it was covered with trash. In a time before landfills, tradition dictated that you tote your garbage to the property line and form a pile. When your neighbor did the same thing, everything was clear. Which means the busted subsistence farms which dot these woods are demarcated by trash. While some has decomposed over the years, the metal remains.
I came along in the era of public landfills, but the instinctive recycler in me would not let me throw metal away.
I sorted glass by color. And I bagged aluminum cans by the ton. And whenever I could, I would load my pickup truck up with ferrous metals, and drive