A Typical Evening |
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Kim Foglia has just created a batch of homemade chicken soup
with four-cheese tortellini. I’m sitting down to dinner with
her, her husband |
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Stuart and their two children Emma and Justin.
It’s about 7:30 PM and the family is discussing the day’s
events as many households do at the end of the day. Work for
these parents is put aside for tonight although both have their
plates full with responsibility. Kim is the Chief Creative
Officer of the Galt Corporation and Stuart is a molecular
biologist. |
Kim Foglia
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Family
life for this group appears very well planned. They try to
coordinate things at the beginning of the week. Kim makes a
large amount of food on the weekends, but they reheat equally
during the week. “We have a huge freezer and we joke that
it’s big enough to put dead relatives in,” Kim laughs in all
seriousness.
Sometimes
they actually create a menu. But there are drawbacks. “Justin
won’t eat anything unless it’s on the menu and Emma, well it
doesn’t matter what you put in front of her – she won’t
eat it,” comments Stuart.
With
two working parents there is a system to most everything. But
this is not a dry family. It is a juicy and dynamic warm
spontaneous bunch. Just
as dinner comes to a close little four-year-old Emma whips off
her clothing and throws on a costume portraying a character in
the Lion King. The family adapts and moves into action.
Justin has his take on how to play the Lion King drama,
Stuart lets in the dog to take a roll and Kim encourages the
children to be creative, without getting too much out of line.
It’s
a typical evening for the Foglia family but perhaps enjoyed just
a bit more than in the past. Even in the chaos there is a
semblance of calm. The underlying energy both Kim and Stuart
will tell you is governed by less stress since Kim sold her
company – Write Design – at the end of 2000 for a cool few
million.
| Pre-Merger |
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Kim began Write Design four years ago in her living room shortly
after her daughter Emma was born. “I always joke that Emma had
the imprint of a keyboard on her cheek,” Kim laughs. With a Masters in teaching and biology, business was |
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not her
forte. Despite her limited knowledge she birthed a creative web
development firm that took off almost immediately. |
By
her design it was a team of web creators and the business grew
so fast in that realm that it was attracting an audience of
distinguished clientele such as Symbol Technologies. Before long
it also attracted formidable competitive offers from larger
companies interested in purchasing Write Design. After four
years of creating a successful web development firm she says the
stress of the daily business grind was affecting her life
dramatically, and so she considered selling.
“Everything
was suffering. Time and mood with the kids, our marriage, my
health,” said Kim. “When somebody is carrying around that
stress continuously for years it’s a crisis, it damages the
equilibrium of the household,” adds Stuart.
It wasn’t that she needed to leave the working
environment to spend more time with the children, she needed to
work smarter. Things were taking a back seat to ownership. The
baggage or as Kim said, “privilege of ownership” became
overwhelming.
“When we talked
about selling I was in favor of it.
It didn’t matter to me what the deal was,” said
Stuart. “I was in
favor of her having a job, not running a business,” he added.
The final gut answer came at a weekend meeting of the National
Association of Mothers’ Centers where Kim sits on the board.
“There were long walks at night all by myself and it finally
hit me that I had to listen to my own voice.” Kim went on to
say, “I was the only set of hands on the steering wheel and I
realized that there were parts of the business I was doing by
the seat of my pants.” While she was well organized, she
realized that she had to come to terms with what she was good at
and what she wasn’t good at.
“There
comes a time in an entrepreneurs life that in order for your
business to get bigger or survive longer, you need to step aside
and let some business people run it, and I think that’s the
hardest thing for an entrepreneur,” Kim commented with a sigh.
The
Selection Process
“I had to be very selective,” says Kim of the decision
making process of choosing a company to sell to.
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She was looking
for an acquisition that would be based on the spirit of a
merger. She wanted to be sure that along with the acquisition,
she would have a stake in the company, its inner workings and
its team. It was
one web
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services company acquiring another web services company.
The working difference being that Write Design concentrated on
the creative, and the purchasing company (The Galt Corporation)
focused on the technical end of the development business.
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In
essence, she says she traded equity in her own company for a
mixture of equity and cash in another. But she had requirements
before signing a deal. After all, Galt would be buying her team
of experts and some of the client list. Her list of requirements
were:
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Stock
in the company acquiring Write Design.
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A
guarantee that her team would come with her.
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A
guarantee that her team would stay in tact and not
be
spread throughout the company.
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A
contract enabling her to hold a corporate position
at the Company.
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A
similar corporate culture for she and her team.
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Industry
competitive compensation for her and her team.
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After
much contemplation, a year of negotiation, and a lot of midnight
walks by herself she made the decision to sell. Colleagues, her
husband, friends, and family all had their individual takes on
what she should do but it was only after listening to her own
voice that she came to a decision to sell. The result a final
agreement comprised of a mixture of equity and a stake in the
company for a low seven-figure price.
| Post-Merger
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“No more calls in the middle of the night,” that’s
what Kim says is one of the advantages of her decision. Another
component of the resulting merged company is that Kim, while the
Chief Creative Officer of the company, the business decisions do
not entirely fall on her shoulders. There is a management team
that she can share ideas with. “All the answers don’t have
to come out of my head,” said Kim.
It’s
been less than two months, and Kim says she is still working
just as hard at Galt, but her worries are no longer about
payroll, or employee concerns, or the alarm going off at
midnight at work.
“There
is more of a freedom to having a weekend with the family,” and
she adds that “while the kids don’t necessarily see more of
me, the time we spend is more quality time.”
The
Ah-HA
I asked Kim why she hung in there so long instead of
selling sooner. She shared that it took her a long time to
understand that selling was not equated with failure.
She
questioned herself about the reasons for selling and finally got
to a realization that the company simply got too big to handle
with one person at the helm. It took her a long time to say,
“This was a success, in and of itself.
I can go do something else now and it can still be a
success and it doesn’t take anything from me. I don’t have
to have Kim’s name on the door.”
Editors
Note: Kim Foglia co-chairs the newly created LISTnet (Long
Island Software and Technology Network) committee, Women In
Technology.
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