Let’s Put on a Play!

By Dick Cantwell

When we were getting ready to open our business several years ago our resources were scant. All the money in the budget, needless to say, had been apportioned (isn’t that why they’re called budgets?), and cuts had to be made here and there. That’s where I lost my filter, which I have to date never recovered (and actually haven’t missed in the slightest), and where our erstwhile kitchen manager lost her 20-quart floor-standing Hobart mixer (another loss neither rectified nor missed). Hiring the staff didn’t cost any money—not yet—but we devoted an enormous amount of time to interviews at which each of the three partners were present, invariably attended by whichever friend we had enlisted to act as manager for the appropriate department.

We had quite a number of friends on the payroll in those days—people with whom one or another of us had worked at various previous jobs; people with whom we had camped or hung out or played sports (or perhaps simply met); people in some cases with whom we, or maybe just I, had been vaguely romantically connected. It all seemed like the natural way to do things, bringing people together who cared about us and our project, people whom we could trust to act in our best interests as we all moved into this freer and more convivial part of our lives, in which we, all of us, controlled our destinies, together.

Naïve? I don’t know, what do you think? It really wasn’t so different from all those movies in which Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, or Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, or Judy Garland and some other rawly talented enthusiast decided that gee, wouldn’t it be great to get all the kids from the neighborhood together and put on a play in the old barn, or on the old haywagon, or down in the corral there, or better yet, to take it on the road! How could it miss, with Bix to work the lights and Missy to sew the costumes, and Geraldine and her dog to sell the tickets?

Of course there were problems. For one thing, when the star was sick—or, more to the point, when the dishwasher didn’t show up—one of us had to go on in his place. But beyond figurative nuts and bolts assumptions were made, by all of us, that had more to do with friendship than business; variances of expectation changed some relationships forever. And things became even more complicated when we became friends with the people we hired.

But it wasn’t a disaster. It worked tolerably well. And most of us are still speaking. This isn’t always the case, of course; we’ve all heard (and some of us have lived) the horror stories that being in business with friends can engender. We were able to pull it off without major mishap. Just the same, we now have managers to handle issues that one of us used to simply jump in and do, and the three of us are thereby able to work our wills a bit farther offstage. It still makes sense that it happened back then the way that it did. We were just three guys, and not an already solid corporate entity exerting its cold collective will on a staff that could have been made up of anybody and would have ended up providing the same service and offering the same product. We at least made use of the idiosyncracies and skills of the people we hired. In addition to formulating the menus and helping to make the beer, they hung the speakers and painted the walls and decorated the backbar. Of course two barbacks stayed all night once working on a chalk mural in the men’s room, and one of the bartenders showed up six hours early for her shift one midsummer morning thinking she was six hours late. Almost nobody got fired. The first was a dishwasher who threw a glass at the bartender when she cut him off, and it took all three of us to do it.

Corporate chains have their place, I suppose. They reach, serve and collect money from a lot more people than we do. In the great scheme of things brewery-related, they are still us; they aren’t the enemy. And a lot of good people brew in them and run them. I still can’t help thinking of the suppression of individuality, though, like the part in A Wrinkle In Time when the kids all come out of the houses at the same time and bounce their balls in unison—except for the one kid who doesn’t. Well, in this parallel, that kid gets fired, or at least told that we make our porter without rye, and you can take that kind of free expression to the corporate hippie brewery chain down the road.

Of course with two locations we’re a chain, too, and our management style has of physical necessity become somewhat more distant. It isn’t possible for any of us to occupy the same single space all the time. We have different challenges here than we do there, and different staff- and customer-types owing to the fact that we chose to be responsive to the neighborhood and didn’t simply go looking for another amenable spot to do exactly the same thing, again. In that way perhaps we’re not such a chain. And if we do another place, it will be completely different all over again. But will we hire our friends? Probably not. We’ll also need them as customers.

A variation on this theme was enacted for a time by an oddly-named friend of mine. Forced by the need for a job to move to a fairly remote spot away from his friends, he proceeded to hire a number of them to move there along with him. I suppose this isn’t without precedent—baseball managers often take their pitching coaches with them when they move to a new team. I was at first reminded of Charles Foster Kane hiring the hotshot staff of the Chronicle wholesale to come work for him at the Inquirer, but it really seems to me more like a Mendocino version of heaven—you know, you die and reawaken and there, with you for all eternity, are all the friends you’ve ever had, looking good and playing Frisbee golf.

There’s a lot of room for differences of management style. More than anything else, probably, it determines the feel and flavor of a business. It certainly affects profitability and the retention of customers. And once formed it’s important, I think, to maintain reasonable consistency; companies that change their strategies yearly only end up providing the rest of us with an album of amusing snapshots (and we all remember how much fun it is to look at old pictures of our parents’ hair). Of course there’s Hollywood precedent for that, too—all those Golddiggers and Broadway Melody movies were remade every couple of years with only vaguely different musical numbers. And I’m sure if Ruby Keeler or Joan Blondell walked into one of our places looking for a job we’d hire them whether we already knew them or not.