In spite of his loyalty and big equity stake in the company, headhunters call him weekly, trying to get him to leave and take over one large public company or another. Frankly, I don’t think this is fair. I think that if the headhunters really wanted to earn their money, they should have to look in the sewers and cages like I did.

Eventually, of course, as we grew and succeeded, it became easier to attract top people, and the personnel process stopped being mainly a scavenger hunt. Still, though, the old rules continue to cast their shadow and our top hires still come from unlikely places rather than from the ranks of our competitors. Hal Brecher, our executive VP of operations and a member of our board, is such a person. We searched through the ranks of all the telecom firms we knew and couldn’t find a candidate as good as Hal. The only drawback was that he knew nothing of our industry, having run a very large family-owned mail-order business for a decade. When the family wasn’t going to let Hal have an equity position, it became clear to him late in the game that he’d chosen the wrong profession.

I certainly wasn’t one to discriminate against mail-order men, though. The field has turned out some of the best guys I know (if you know what I mean). The mail-order industry’s loss was our gain. Sure, it took probably three months till Hal had learned enough to function in his new role, but what’s three months when you’re hoping someone will stay a lifetime?

Jim Courter, our president, was surely our most unusual hire. By the time Jim and I first met in mid-1992, Jim was in my opinion a national hero. Congress and President Bush, unable to decide which of America’s military bases to close because of the political pressure exerted by each state and community to keep its bases open, had turned the entire problem over to Jim. He and the committee he chaired were to have sole discretion to decide in the interest of national defense what to keep and what to scrap. The job seemed undoable and was thankless. Editorial writers railed that this undertaking would surely succumb to political pressure and fall apart. Yet the blue-ribbon panel Jim assembled, the impartial inquiries and hearings they held across the country, the judicious and impartial manner of the deliberations, had won over all segments of the political spectrum. As a result, the country was able to save billions annually without sacrificing military preparedness. Jim’s stature was such that Bill Clinton, who would be elected that fall, reappointed him to the same crucial position for a second time.

This reappointment was remarkable because Jim was, at that time, the most popular Republican in the state of New Jersey. We couldn’t even walk down the street from my office to get a slice of pizza without half a dozen people running up to shake his hand. And small wonder; only a couple of years before, Jim had lost a hotly contested election to be New Jersey’s governor. The new governor’s disappointing performance contrasted starkly with the stellar reviews Jim was now getting. The citizenry seemed to be longing to reconnect with him. I was floored. It was like going to have pizza with a movie star. Jim, however, having already been in the public eye for decades, including a twelve-year stint in Congress, was unfazed. He wanted to talk about my fledgling business.