Quit is a Four-Letter Word

When Murphy carved his famous law, "whatever can go wrong will,"he probably didn't

mean all at the same time. He also didnt know three Southwest Florida business people who refused to quit despite the odds.

Gail Markham, CPA

Gail Markham, president and founding partner of Markham, Norton, Stroemer &

Company in Fort Myers, launched the firm in 1979 with a staff of one-herself.

Today, the full-service accounting firm with an emphasis on business consulting has 12 CPAs, three paraprofessionals and a team of six support people. Gross billings for 1997 will be in the $2 million range. She

and husband, attorney Dennis R. White, welcomed baby Curry Madison White in November, 1996. Before the end of September, the firm will be in its newly constructed office and, as Markham says, life is good.

'Twasn't always thus.

In 1989 she, her former husband and seven others-almost all of them

professionals-invested in a development project that went sour. The project was good, the developer's management skills weren't. Five of the partners took over the project, and the lawsuits started coming in, including ones from subcontractors who hadn't been paid. Even one of the former partners

sued.

"In the middle of it, on March 23, 1989, the ex-husband says at two in the morning he was stressed and needed to get away. I said, 'A fishing trip?' He said 'no.' What about this project we're sorting out, she asked him later.

"He said to me, "You'll finish it. You finish everything.' "

He was right. "When I get in trouble, I work my butt off," Markham says.

This time, trouble was "a couple of hundred thousand in debt at least. I had

totally extended myself with all my lines of credit," she says. "But I never

missed a payment."

Markham helps validate the "things happen in three's" maxim. "During all of

this, my billable hours dropped from about 2,000 a year to about 1,200."

With her financial belt pulled to the pinch point, two key people in the firm approached her partner, Joni Norton. They told her they thought she

should leave the firm because, they said, "with the financial need for the development project, I would clean out the firm and bankrupt us."

They underestimated the trust relationship Norton and Markham had-and have. "Joni and I have been together since December, 1981," she says. "All we have to do is look at each other, and we have a conversation." The two key people are now former employees.

Today, all debts are paid. "Bankruptcy would have been the easy way out in the short term, but I could never have lived with that. It was a Harvard education at a Harvard price," she says.

What she learned she offers to

others:

* "The builder/developer had too much control. Today, I would have total

control over the checkbooks."

* "You can't stop trusting people, but you had better know what's going

on."

* "There are no guarantees just because you're doing things the right way."

Mike DeMas

Mike DeMas is a pilot. He talks about a column in one of the flying magazines that reports "how people almost killed themselves and how to

prevent it from happening to you."

Then he draws the analogy to his business, INTERCEPT of Florida, Inc., a telemessaging firm now based in Bonita Springs. DeMas bought the Naples-based business in July, 1995, with the expectation

of buying others "to be a great 'conglomerateur,' " as he puts it and scheduled the physical move to Bonita Springs for November 7. He wanted to locate the 13-employee business between Fort Myers and Naples to tap both markets for clients and prospective employees.

Broader than just an answering service, telemessaging takes calls for clients and acts as a fulfillment house.

His background includes 22 years at AT&T plus time with three smaller companies running high-tech projects of up to $30 million each, many for Fortune 500 companies.

"I was egotistical," he says. "I said, 'I can handle

a little project like this easily.' I was dead wrong."

The phone company failed to meet cut-over deadlines. Lines failed. Equipment failed. And clients were without service from November 7 to November 25, when the system finally came up.

On the same day the cut-over was scheduled and failed, DeMas did, indeed, purchase one more small firm and tried to cut those 100 clients over, too.

"I had no information about these clients, no idea what their needs were,

because the other company had such sketchy information and records."

In between July and the cut-over date, he discovered the two key people who

came with the original purchase lacked expertise in the market, the product

and the equipment. "It wasn't their fault," he clarifies. They hadn't been trained. He had to replace them.

Attracting and keeping employees was and is a major challenge. Geography

hasn't helped as he thought, he says. "For the first six months I owned the 13-employee company, or the second half of 1995, I sent out 60 W2 forms."

Fort Myers residents refuse to travel south, and Naples people refuse to travel north, even for competitive wages plus benefits. "I'm literally

hiring all the time," he says.

DeMas's lowest point came in February, 1996, having lost 35 customers the month before. Still, the company was turning a profit. Retaining clients

required major public relations work during the dust storm that didn't settle until March.

"I lost scads of customers during season and probably should have lost more,

because we were performing terribly," he says. "We didn't have enough people answering phones, and the ones we had made mistakes."

He visited each large client, told each "how screwed up we were," then laid out the improvement plans already being implemented. While it didn't work across the board, DeMas believes that strategy earned one last chance from

the clients who stayed.

Today, the firm employs a trained staff of 22 led by a wiser DeMas, who conservatively estimates the company's business billings will more than triple by the end of 1999. His learning curve includes:

* "If business owners don't get mired in details, they won't survive," a departure from his delegating days with larger companies.

* "Every time I'm doing due diligence in purchasing another company, I make

sure I talk to existing clients."

* "Don't do too much at once. Pure ego (made me think I could do all this at

once)."

* "Learn firsthand how good employees are."

Elmer Tabor

Elmer Tabor races offshore power boats. "A friend once told me you aren't a

good racer until you've been hurt once. I blew a boat over backwards at 100 miles an hour once, and I got all kinds of hurt," says the owner of

Wonderland Realty. "From then on, I knew where my threshold was. Here, there was no threshold."

"Here" is the Cape Coral Shopping Center, a 53,000-square-foot, 21-tenant

downtown strip that boasts 100 percent occupancy. It and Tabor were swept up in the S&L stor