By 1989, Superfund was in its ninth year of operation.  It was a major business opportunity for environmentally-oriented consulting firms across the country. Billions were being spent each year on cleanup.  And it seemed that the more sites they cleaned, the more new sites they found. Many major consulting firms’ – Dave and Amy’s among them – supported policy in Washington.   They then benefited from those policies when they worked on cleanup in the field.

That year EPA issued a dictum: support policy making in DC or win cleanup contracts in the field.  From then on, consulting firms could no longer do both. Dave and Amy realized their firms would leave the small stakes in Washington for the big stakes in the field.  This, they understood, would force their own consulting practices to shut down. They were going to lose their jobs.

Dave, ever the consultant, saw his chance to make a move. He approached me one day in early ’89 and told me he planned to break away from Booz Allen and start his own company. He surprised – and flattered – me by offering me a partner role. Then he told me he had also recruited Amy. He didn’t ask me to commit, he just invited me to a Saturday meeting to talk it through. When I arrived, I found that both he and Amy had their principle lieutenants’ in tow, Tom and Jim respectively. They were people I respected but didn’t particularly like.  They shared that sentiment towards me as well.

We continued to meet most Saturdays as Dave got us to think through what it would take to build a business.  He got us to create a Mission Statement that defined both the breadth and the boundaries of our work.  We said, for example, that we didn’t want Defense-related work.  That position moderated somewhat over time.  He had us define an organizational chart for a sixty person firm.  He had us draw up job descriptions, position qualifications, and salary structures.

Amy had a well-deserved reputations as one of the best marketers in the business.  She set about developing our government contract ‘capture’ strategy. It consisted of talking other firms into subcontracting their work to us while we grew.  Her goal was to make us strong enough to unseat Booz Allen’s position in Superfund.  They had maintained a strangle hold on the program since its inception.  Her plan was to unseat one of the world’s top consulting firms.  And she planned to do by winning one of their most highly prized contracts.  The plan struck me as outlandish.  I thought it over-confident enough to qualify as crazy.

On the home front, Nancy – ever the planner – crafted her next career move.  It had nothing to do with my starting a business in DC. She scouted opportunities for moving overseas.  She opposed my even discussing starting a company.  It was in clear conflict with my agreement to split careers and join her overseas.

Then Dave and Amy, both married to others at the time, began sleeping together. It seemed like a very bad way to start a company.  Dave then announced that we needed money to get started.  Each of us had to ante up twenty-five thousand dollars as the cost of admission.   I didn’t have that kind of money.  Between Nancy’s opposition, Dave and Amy’s affair and the need to find a bunch of money, I was ready to throw in the towel.

I scheduled a heart-to-heart with Dave.  I told him I had neither Nancy’s support nor twenty-five thousand dollars.  I also said I feared that when Dave and Amy’s relationship went south only one of the two would remain with the firm.  The real strength of the new company was the two of them.

What I didn’t say was that I had a personal plan I labelled ‘TFI’.  Total Financial Independence.   TFI was my path to attaining my cherished ‘writer’s life’.  As I mentioned, ‘TFI’ entailed making enough money to not have to worry about money anymore. I had made a decent start on that goal by growing my systems development team from just me to almost fifty folks.   And that had allowed me to negotiate with my current employer for a cut on any business I brought in. So I had a shot at TFI without the risk of striking out on my own.

Dave told me during our discussion that he had filed for divorce and settled accounts with his wife. He said he’d left her the bulk of the assets but that he was walking away with a hundred grand. “That’s how much I am bringing to the firm – every cent I have.  I’ve decided there is no one I’d rather bet on than myself. You might want to give that some thought. You might find you feel the same,” he said.

I thought about it for a moment and then said, “I couldn’t agree more. There is no one I’d rather bet on than…you.”  When I got home, I told Nancy I couldn’t follow her overseas.  Then I took out a second mortgage, wrote a check for twenty-five thousand, and joined the firm.

I have shut out the details of how Nancy and I worked it out.  I know she had to turn down a dream job in Africa.  I know too that she found a way to forgive me.  She went along with my starting the business, with a condition.  “Only for the next five years,” she said. “I swear if you don’t come with me on my next overseas assignment, I’ll divorce you.” I promised her I would.  I told her I had also let my new partners know the plan.

Dave and Amy both wanted their names associated with the firm. I knew that banks took working for a company with your name on it as a marker for being self-employed.  And that was the last thing I wanted any mortgage lender to think. We ended up calling ourselves MNG for the Marasco Newton Group.  Dave joked that the ‘G’ in MNG was a placeholder for when I had a change of heart.  Though we all had equal Board votes, we made Amy the President.  Dave was Senior Vice President.  Jim, Tom and I were Vice Presidents.

We ran into trouble from the very beginning. We leased office space and computer equipment sufficient for twenty-five or thirty people. We only had a third that many, tops. One evening the security company called me to let me know that the afterhours alarm was going off.  They told me I needed to get back into town to shut it off. When I arrived after midnight, I found the office door was jimmied.  Thieves had stolen all our newly-leased computers. When the police arrived, they said there was very little chance that we’d ever get them back.   That was when it dawned on us that we’d overlooked getting any type of insurance to cover the firm. We now owed forty-thousand dollars to the leasing agency for the stolen computers.  And, after only two months of operation, it looked like bankruptcy might be our only out.

The police dropped by the following day to let us know that we were living under a lucky star. “Some good Samaritan in DC saw a couple of guys hawking personal computers off a little trolley in the street.  He called them out and they fled the scene.  Lucky for you, they left the computers.”  We ended up getting all but three of the computers back and we didn’t have to close the company down.

Six months into operation, June, 1990, the first MNG baby was born.  My amazing daughter Kate.  We had about thirty employees by then.  Many of our old customers had followed us to the new company and work was flowing in.  By outward signs, we were already a success.  But my partners and I were at each other’s throats.  And we didn’t seem to have the skills needed to resolve the differences that constantly arose.

Some of the issues were trivial, like whether Amy should get her own secretary while the rest of us shared one.  Some were difficult, like how many shares of stock each of us was entitled to.  No matter the importance of the issue, the discussions led to squabbling.  And the squabbling led to each of us trying to tear the others down.

In fairness, both Dave and Amy remained above the fray.  They were also growing weary of being the only adults in the room.  What was clear was that there was some sort of functional imbalance in our group.  Well, ‘dysfunctional’ is probably the better word.  We agreed that something had to change, but we couldn’t identify exactly what.

The problems grew worse and worse over a period of about two years.  Then, at some point Amy came into my office and asked if we could have a chat. She said that she had been thinking about our difficulties and it had become clear to her that I was at their root. She fingered my behavior during our weekly board meetings.  She said I was unprofessional because as she put it, “You argue until you wear everyone down. You force your point and you won’t let up until you’ve worn us out.”

Now recall that Amy brought her favorite – Jim – from her old shop, just as Dave had brought his top producer, Tom, from his. As far as I was concerned, both were bigger problems than I was.  And they were building their businesses – testing, training and the like – on top of my systems work.  Assuming this was only Amy’s position, I suggested that we discuss this as a group.  That’s when she told me that wouldn’t be necessary.  She said they had all already discussed it and, “They asked me to have this talk.” It struck me that Dave and Amy had made a deal to each protect their own.  I was the odd man out.

I was floored – and I was scared. Two years in it looked like I was about to be forced out.  I admit, I was well aware of the behavior she was talking about. I just didn’t think it was all that big a deal. But apparently it was because it sure felt like I was about to get the boot.  I decided to own up to it and let the chips fall where they may. I scheduled time with each of them and promised that I would do my best to change my behavior. Then I sat back and waited for my pink slip. But my dismissal notice never came. Instead, the ‘problem’ spot light shifted to Tom and within a couple of months we’d forced him out.

During this same period, Nancy and I went to Guatemala.  The trip was partly intended as a break from the tension at work.  It was also partly a get time away from the challenges of balancing having a new-born baby in the house.  The trip didn’t start well. We arrived in Miami to reports of a tornado at the airport.  That caused our flight to divert to the Bahamas. By the time we returned to Miami, we’d missed our connection to Guatemala.

The airline offered to put us up at their expense, offering a room at a nearby hotel. Unfortunately, the room overlooked an eight lane highway.  It had a sliding glass door that wouldn’t close and smelled of stale urine.   I called the front desk to ask if we could pay for an upgrade. No, they told me, airline provided rooms were not eligible for upgrade, regardless of who paid.

Rather than accept this dictum, I hoofed it across the block to the main hotel.  At the front desk I mentioned (in a bald faced lie of blatant self-interest) that I was on my honeymoon.  Could I not pay this once for an upgrade? The clerk went off and soon came back with another key. “Don’t worry about paying for the upgrade,” she told me, “we comp’ed you the room.”

When Nancy and I got to the new room, we found they had given us the gorgeous Presidential Suite.  It came with floor to ceiling windows that looked out across the Miami skyline.  On the opposite side, the view was of the southern Atlantic. There was a hot tub so big that it took 30 minutes to fill.  And they had placed complimentary champagne in the spacious living room.  I felt like a cad.  And we were thrilled.

We arrived in Guatemala and made the more or less mandatory stop at Lake Atitlan. We were both runners in those days.  (Nancy still is, but I am more of an ass-sitter now).  Nancy asked around for anyone who might be on hand to act as a paid running guide. The immediate response was ‘Caballo Blanco’.  It was a name we remembered forever because of the memorable run we had.

Caballo Blanco – meaning White Horse in Spanish – was a tall thin American about my age.  He had white-blond hair to the middle of his back and a very laid-back demeanor. We told him we were looking for a good six to ten mile run around the lake and he said, no problem, he knew the perfect one.  The lovely run ended at a small lakeside town.  This was during a bad period in Guatemala and in Atitlan in particular.  Only the year before, government soldiers had wiped out an entire village right next to the one we were in.

As we shared a beer in the village, Caballo told us that he ran the lake route every day.  It was clear from the cheers that went up to greet him at every town he passed that he was something of a local treasure.  Before he left us to complete his run he invited us to stop over at his place that evening.  As he departed, I asked how much of the run he still had to go.  “It’s about fifty miles total,” he said with a grin, “so I’d say I have a little more that forty left to go.”

A few years ago, I read that a world-renown ultramarathon runner was found dead in a canyon in New Mexico. The article said that the runner – the fabled Micah True – was better known as Caballo Blanco.  It went on to say that he died while living among a Native American tribe, the Tarahumara, who are revered for their almost super-human running feats.

When I mentioned the article to Nancy, she said it couldn’t possibly be the same guy.  In fact, she said, she was pretty sure she’d seen Caballo on a trip back to Guatemala earlier that year.  But when I googled it, his picture came up – running on Lake Atitlan, no less!  Turns out there is an outstanding book about him called Born to Run.  It is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read…and not because it is about him.  It is a seriously a terrific read.

As I write this I googled Micah and Atitlan again.  Here is what I got (and I swear I had already written what you’ve just read before I ever looked this up): “Micah True was given his nick-name meaning White Horse by the Mayans who inhabited the highlands of Guatemala during the time of their civil war. While spending a few winters circling the volcanic crater lake of Atitlan, True would run into a village, greet the Indigenous people, buy some tortillas and bananas, then move on from village to village. Eventually as he entered the outskirts of each village, the women and children would line the streets calling out “El Caballo Blanco,” and the kids would follow him, laughing. He thought this sweet so he carried this name throughout his travels in Latin America.

In his article Meeting the Tarahumara at the Leadville 100 (www.caballoblanco.com) he writes “The image of a Caballo Blanco must be rather endearing to Latin and Indigenous people, because I have always been greeted warmly, bringing a smile when I introduce myself.” [Sue Berliner, http://www.sweatmagazine.com/index.php/news/517-micah-true-known-as-caballo-blanco]

Here is a link to a more complete bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micah_True, and be sure to read that book!

During this same period, my business took a turn for the worse. Before starting the company we partners devised our ‘recruitment strategy’. We wanted to lure some of our key people away from our former employers.  But we wanted to do it in a way that would annoy our firms as little as possible. Towards that end, each of us approached our key recruits.  We explained our business goals, staffing plan, and benefits.

As a new company we didn’t have the resources to compete with our former firms’ non-financial benefits. So we got creative. In 1990, we were one of the earliest firms to implement a ‘casual Friday’ policy.  We added a ‘half-day’ policy for Fridays…get your 40 hours in by noon and you were free to go. We did a lot of things to make the firm vibrant and attractive.

I recruited numerous people from Network Management Inc. (NMI) where I was working at the time, and I staggered their arrival to limit the negative impact. I also asked some of those who agreed to come on-board not to mention where they were heading for a while. George Mohrmann was a key lieutenant of mine at NMI and he eagerly accepted a job with me at MNG.

Of course, not all our recruits were from our former companies. Two in that category immediately come to mind. The first was my good old friend Ralph Parkinson from Peace Corps Togo.  I called his mother to find out where he was so I could tell him about the birth of my daughter, Kate. Mrs. Parkinson told me that he had been chasing some young Spanish woman around Europe.  But at the moment he was working as a handyman at a nudist colony in France.  She said she wished she could get him to come home.

I spoke to my business partners about Ralph, saying he was hard working and had a technical bent.  I thought I could get him to come in a help run our network infrastructure.  And I was pretty sure I could get him for minimum wage. They agreed to my hiring him after I promised I would cut it off in three months, after I found ‘real’ network people.

When I finally tracked him down, he rejected my offer out of hand. The next day, he had second thoughts.  He called back and said to count him in. After three months, I told him his time was up.  He told me to go talk to my partners.  They had all asked him to stick around. Ralph soon became a serious network engineer.  In fact, he built a practice around selling his network skills to many other companies. In the end, he stayed with MNG many years after I had already left.

The other person I found early on was another very talented guy named Ryan Magrab. Ryan, George and I started building software that attracted a lot of good business.  Within the first 18 months of starting out, we had a team of more than twenty systems people onboard.  And the company was approaching one hundred full-time staff.

George and Ryan worked well together from the start. So well in fact that my wife, Nancy, once had a dream that I told them about. She said she’d dreamt that George and Ryan had broken away from MNG to start their own business. Mohrmann and Magrab were unabashedly materialistic.  We all thought it funny that in Nancy’s dream they’d named their firm ‘GrabMor’.

George could be difficult.  But I always found that this was a small price to pay for his intelligence, loyalty and hard work. My partner Amy, however, never felt that way and her feeling towards him eventually drove him out. He landed on his feet, getting a great job with major stock options at the Oracle Corporation.  I told him I’d always be there for him and wished him all the best. Two weeks later he’d recruited Ryan Magrab. Then the two put a plan in place to steal all my best people.

They pulled person after person over to Oracle.  It was easy picking as Oracle was a first class company offering serious stock options.   And their stock was flying off the charts.  Mohrmann and Magrab were out to kill my business.  I was doing everything I could to keep my head above water but my clients were getting nervous. Then my project deadlines began to slip.  I took up a mantra that summed up my world.  “My life is in balance when my family, my clients and my business partners are all equally disappointed in me.”

George was angry.  He waged all-out war cherry picking my people.  In the end I told him to forget I’d ever considered him a friend; he was dead to me. Then I threaten Oracle with a law suit if they took another person.  At that point they agreed to cease and desist.

 

Five years later, George and Ryan actually did start their own firm. Here’s what I found about it on the Web:

“GrabMor Technologies LLC was founded in 1998 by two former Oracle Corporation employees, George Mohrmann and Ryan Magrab… Having worked not only at Oracle, but at several other companies specializing in Oracle consulting, we have developed a strong team of some of the best and brightest Oracle talent in the area.” Yeah boy – mine.

The last I heard of George was this sad article from July 2005 in the Washington Post:

“George Robert Mohrmann – Computer Programmer: George Robert Mohrmann, 44, a McLean business owner and computer programmer analyst, died July 24 of a head trauma after a boating accident on the Potomac River near Fredericksburg. He was a McLean resident. Mr. Mohrmann dived off a boat in shallow water near Fairview Beach and did not resurface, an official with the King George County sheriff’s office said. When friends pulled him out of the water, he was unconscious. He was declared dead at the scene. Mr. Mohrmann ran his own company, GrabMor Technologies. He previously had worked for a number of technology companies.” He was out swimming with Ryan when he died.

The loss of my top talent put me into and even more frantic hiring mode than our typical breakneck pace.  The typical pace was set by Dave.  Here is an example of how he set it: I announced that I had landed a small new piece of work – two people for six months.  He shook his head and corrected me. “No, that’s four people for three months’ worth of work. Better get busy hiring.”

One guy I brought on was a software project manager by the name of Gary Giordano who had just left Booz Allen.  I consider myself a keen judge of technical competence and Gary seemed ok at first.  But I started noticing that something was weird about the guy.  One time I joined him for a marketing call.  To my surprise, he was driving a pretty decent Mercedes. I knew how much he was making so the car seemed a little over the top. He pulled into a filling station and the cashier came out to tell him his credit card had been rejected. He asked me to hand him a box under my seat and when he opened it, I saw it was stuffed with credit cards. When I asked him about them he smiled and said, “If you keep enough of those in play you’ll never get caught.”

A short time later he gave me his time sheet to sign and I noticed that he hadn’t taken leave on a day he told me he was off. When I confronted him about it, he winked at me and said, “Come on. We both know how the game is played. You just bill the government for the time.  What do they know?  We keep this between us.” He was a large guy and somewhat intimidating, despite wearing a ludicrous toupee. It seemed he often tried to force me into compromising positions, ethical dilemmas. I knew I was the boss and that I had the upper hand but, even so, he made me kind of scared. It wasn’t a role I knew and it made me very uncomfortable.

This behavior continued for a few months.  And I began to puzzle out how I could get rid of him before things got any worse.  As the holidays approached, we scheduled our annual Christmas party – and as usual it was set up to be a gala affair. We’d rented a large fancy hotel ballroom at a plush downtown hotel and many people had also rented rooms. Nancy and I were comp’ed an amazing Presidential suite by my brother Bill.  He was the head of the Sales and Marketing team there, so he had gotten the company a good deal.  We partied pretty hard before the event had even gotten started.  Then I partied a bit more than I should have as the evening got under way. At one point during the evening, as I was speaking to two young women from the firm, Gary approached me.  He threw his arm around my shoulder and rubbed his knuckles into my hair.  Then he looked at the two women and said, “You’re talking to my bitch.”

I stopped his clowning and asked if I could have a private word.  We walked into the hall and I said, “You’re fired. Get out of here right now.”  Now I admit I had a well-earned reputation for letting people go.  But always before and since that involved a process I called ‘out-counseling’.  I’d let the person know that there seemed to be a misfit between what they were providing and what we were looking for.  Then I always gave people time to try to work it out.  I often also suggested they start looking for another job while they still had their current one.  I have had that conversation at least forty times and it has always worked out well for all concerned.  I felt bad about firing him on the spot – and ashamed it had been while I had been drinking – and particularly at the Christmas party.

My colleagues were of course duly shocked.  But to a person they all agreed he had it coming.  Just that it never should have happened at the Christmas party.  The story followed me for decades and wove itself into the Marasco Newton lore. In fact, ten years into our corporate history, the company unveiled a long banner at a corporate event.  The banner listed our major contract wins along with other key corporate accomplishments. There, under December 1994, someone had added, ‘Mike fires Gary at the Christmas Party’.

Gary resurfaced one more time later in my life.  In 2011, I was returning from a trip to Alaska when I saw an article like this one: http://people.com/crime/aruba-mystery-what-happened-to-missing-robyn-gardner/

Aruba Mystery: What Happened to Missing Robyn Gardner?

“Robyn Gardner was supposed to be in Orlando with her parents. At least that’s what she told her boyfriend, Richard Forester…In fact, the 35-year-old beautiful, blond Maryland woman with a radiant smile had traveled to the Caribbean with a man named Gary Giordano, a 50-year-old businessman also from Maryland with a disturbing past. Now, Gardner is missing and presumed dead, Giordano is being detained, and questions are mounting about what happened during their island stay.

The mystery has only deepened as authorities in Aruba begin releasing details from the investigation. The most recent shocker was the discovery of graphic photographs on Giordano’s digital camera. The images, a source tells PEOPLE are “beyond pornographic”…The leads have been provocative. Along with the photos, authorities revealed they’re looking into a $1.5 million accidental death insurance policy that Giordano reportedly took out on Gardner before their trip.

To this day, more than five years after Roybn’s disappearance, Gary remains a free – if followed – man. He was denied a payout for the insurance claim due to suspicions that he is responsible for her disappearance, and the U.S. police have arrested him several times on various unrelated charges.”

News of these developments quickly reached my old friends at MNG.  Many said to me that it proved my instincts were right.  I replied each time, “Maybe, but it still doesn’t justify firing him at the Christmas party.”