As vacations go, it was nice and went well, although I would have preferred more alone time with my wife. We hadn’t done a parents-only vacation since before the girls were born. Still, there were a couple of nights we wanted to go out on our own, and her parents played babysitter, and they went out a night or two on their own also. If we were trying to impress them, it worked. Yes, I know they had been to our home in Hereford, but that simply looked like a nice suburban rancher. Hougomont was a lot more impressive, and we obviously owned it. For one thing, they came with us one day to buy some furniture; the furniture in the place wasn’t ours, but was the demo stuff from when it was still a demo unit.
Big Bob and I talked business and politics several times. He was a die-hard and hard core liberal Democrat; I was a much more moderate Republican. He didn’t think much of Reagan. I think Big Bob was hoping for the return of FDR! I was more ambivalent on the subject, and kept my mouth shut. If you want to keep your friends, don’t talk religion or politics. Some of what Reagan did I liked, some I didn’t, and the guy tended to invent the truth he wanted to believe in. Maybe that’s just part of being a politician.
On business I was on a lot firmer ground. For one thing, back on my first try, I had spent as much time in the trailer business as he had, and could speak with some authority. I knew a lot of the history of the business and how it operated and why, and could speak intelligently, and my money made him at least consider my opinions.
It was still strange, though. Way back when, I had first started working for Lefleur Homes in the summer of 1984. Back then, I had been an industrial chemist. That was what my degree was in, and even my MBA was geared towards running a factory. Unfortunately, my specialty was in specialty organics and pharmaceuticals, and I ran head first into an industrial nightmare.
A few years before, Congress had decided, in its infinite wisdom, that Puerto Rico needed more jobs and that the best way to do that was to give tax breaks to pharmaceutical companies who put up factories in Puerto Rico. Well, that certainly sounded good at the time. Puerto Rico is a part of the U.S. and jobs are good, right? Enter the Law of Unintended Consequences! Cue the drum roll. Half the pharmaceutical companies in America built brand new factories in Puerto Rico, got them running, and then shut down all the old factories back on the mainland! New factories could be depreciated faster and had lower operating costs, and the new employees got paid peanuts compared to older (now unemployed) unionized employees in the northeast.
Lots of Congressmen got free vacations to Puerto Rico courtesy of the pharmaceutical companies, too. They were called fact finding tours. It’s surprising how many facts are hidden in the beach sand and at the Bacardi refinery.
I bounced from factory to factory, company to company for seven years, getting laid off as companies shut down. Eventually I landed at a German chemical company as a junior foreman, and worked my way back to the top of the QC department. I was the only guy on the line with one college degree, let alone two, but since German chemical companies are run and managed by chemists with PhDs, I was told I would never rise higher than a senior foreman.
I threw in the towel at that point and got out of the business, selling insurance for a brief period. Big Bob offered me a job at his Cooperstown office, his first satellite office, and I jumped at it. I was never sorry, at least not until the Great Recession hit, and even then I knew that if I was an employee and not an owner, I wouldn’t have survived.
I worked for Matthew in the office as a salesman for that first year, learning the business, with the understanding that if I worked out, I would eventually run the office. I worked out better than they expected, and took it over in January of 1985 — right now, in fact. Matthew went back to being the dispatcher and driver. On this trip through, Matthew was still running the office and unhappy about it. Big Bob’s problem was that he didn’t trust anybody but family to run things (for one thing, he could treat family like shit and get away with it!) and all the older boys had been put into the delivery and setup sides of the business. Only Mark had gone into sales, and he ran the Utica lot. The next available boys were Gabriel and Rafael, still in college, and Michael, still in high school.
Big Bob asked me what he should do, and I told him he would either have to hire outside sales professionals or promote an existing salesperson. He nodded and agreed, but I already knew what would happen. He ended up doing both over the years, never trusting a one of them, and would fire them all within six months. Eventually his younger sons got through school and he put them in, treated them like shit, and was happy. Hell of a way to run a railroad!
House trailers are not necessarily a good product or a bad product. Like most things in business, it comes down to a question of who you’re dealing with. In that regard, the trailer industry has nobody to blame but themselves! Some of the homes are built as nicely as any stick-built home, and some of the dealers are as honest and trustworthy as you can ask for. Big Bob had a good reputation in that regard, and he only sold high end homes. However, as a whole, for most of their past, trailers had been rickety death traps sold by salesmen who failed the ethics qualifications to sell used cars. The factories all knew it, but they didn’t care; they just pumped out tin boxes as fast as they could and as cheap as they could to whoever lined up at the back door with a truck and a check. The death trap part ended in 1976 when Congress began to regulate the business and put in a building code, but the damage had been done. They were still being sold by dealers who were crooks and that never really changed.
A big part of the problem was the ridiculously low cost of entry into the business. It was entirely possible to become a trailer dealer without ever actually having to make an investment. You could lease the property. The homes would actually be floorplanned by a bank or the manufacturer and all you have to pay would be the interest. You use one of the homes as an office, so the bank owns that, too. You lease or rent all the office equipment. The factory will ship the homes, and you can subcontract out the installations. You’ve got absolutely no skin in the game!
A cure existed, but Big Bob and I didn’t agree on it. The industry needed to consolidate around a handful of major players, and most importantly, begin taking responsibility for their product with the buyer. A trailer factory didn’t sell to the buyer, it sold to the dealer and the dealer sold to the buyer. However, if you bought a home and it was a lemon, the dealer had no legal requirement to even answer your phone calls. The warranty was through the manufacturer and the dealer didn’t even need to have a service department. You would have to call some company you might never have heard of to ask for help, and they would get to you the next time they had a truck in the area. Since you might live in New Hampshire, and most of the manufacturers were in Indiana or Pennsylvania, you might be shit out of luck for six months or more! This totally skewed the dynamics of the industry. Manufacturers didn’t want to deal with buyers, only dealers. Dealers didn’t want to be held to any kind of requirement to service what they sold. Buyers were totally screwed unless they found an honest dealer like Big Bob. That was just one of the many problems in the industry.