Ending and beginning

After over 30 years of getting up every morning and going to work in the family business, one day this week I will go into Burlington Chemical, and the place will be owned by someone else. We signed all the papers Friday to sell the company because we were unable to overcome the challenges of managing a community based company in a globalized market. It has been a sad 10 years, riding the bike backwards, leveraging the assets of the firm, trying to find the key that unlocked the value that we knew, just knew had to be there. Unfortuately, we failed. Not due to lack of effort, imagination, or even in the beginning cash flow, it was a lack of understanding of one of the fundimentals of market economics and indeed of life itself. Sometimes, somthing must die for others to live. Our company lived within a community that had been the lifeblood of a region, that being the textile community. It was a community that was not without problems, poor labor relations, a history of environmental and social exploitations, cotton dust, toxic chemicals, but it was a community that had survived and improved itself over hundreds of years, and now it, along with our company, it has moved on to someone or somewhere else.

I suspect that somewhere over in China, there is a person that sees the opportunties in the growing textile industry there, and I hope that the chinese textile community can support this person and perhaps his family through several generations, granting the boon of success and teaching from the failures and nurturng these families through the business of life. My Dad went to church each day he set his foot in Burlington Chemical. The place he built and the spirit and the opportunity that grew there was felt by most that labored for our customers.

He died a couple of years ago, knowing that unless something radical happened, the two generations of our family that worked to build that firm, would be the last to find success there. The world had changed. We could not change fast enough to find our new community. Oh, we are in good company, Interstate 85 is littered with the ghost of plants and the textile museums telling the stories of the good old days, in fact, one of the most successful textile mills in Concord has been torn down and a biotech research center has been developed. From the splicing of cotton yarn to the splicing of genes, same old process, one just being done at 10 to the minus 9th and one being done of the back of macro industial technology.

Just as I know that I and every person I know will die, the old ways are also dying. I do not have a good value judgement for that. Is it good? Is it bad? Does it matter? Damned if I know, but I do know that lots of good folks and some part of my heart and reality are gone. They teach us now that change is good and that change and the ablity to change is the only true competitive atvantage. I suspect that with technology cycles in acceleration and trade cycles mimicing technology, that the race will keep getting faster and faster and success will be based on being able to change. This leaves all of us with one simple reality, and that is the relationships we have with other people and with the planet are our only constants.

I do not know how to feel about the business going to someone else. I can only hope that the company will florish and that under a new leadership and with new financing, the firm will find a new value proposition that works. It will not be ours. We will not create the heroic turnaround story we were all working so hard for. This will be someone else's story and someone else's success or failure. For me, there must be a new reality, a new reason to get up and get going in the morning. There will never be another time and another slice of life that is what was. All that is left is memories, ghosts, and good stories.