Grasshoppers and Ants

We’re having dinner in a restaurant and there’s a young man a few tables down who looks vaguely familiar. Mind you, at my age, everyone looks a little familiar. But this guy glances at me and then away to figure out where he knows me from. I’m thinking Biltmore Estate and can’t link the two. It’s like an Indiana Jones enigma, and I’m not breaking the code.

He gets the ah-hah expression first and wins. He comes over to the table and spares me the embarrassment of trying to guess. “Hi, I’m Frank Jr.”

Okay, I know who he is, but embarrass myself anyway. “Of course, Frank’s oldest.” Sounded even dumber, then.

After he goes back to his table, I give a few mental twists to the clues and the tumblers click into place. My excuse is that the reference points are almost as old as an Indiana Jones relic.

It was the 1980s and entrepreneurs were trying to ride the crest of an "economic wave.” There were those who caught it and those who were pounded into the surf. Such is the lot of an entrepreneur.

Some of us who caught it squirreled the coin away, feeling that for every summer, there’s a winter around the corner. But, most of my counterparts spent extremely ostentatiously. Not just spent, but leveraged great amounts into greater debt on homes, vacation homes, yachts and cars. Ants and grasshoppers, if you learned anything from Aesop. The ant spent the summer accumulating corn, while the grasshopper frittered it away.

If you had any degree of success, it was difficult to hide. You were targeted by every enterprise that thrived on new money. I received an invitation from a custom builder to tour a new “mansion” before he closed the sale to its new owner. I tossed it in the can.

He followed up with a phone call, and I politely declined. His wife just happened to invite mine to a social event, and there proffered an invitation to the house tour. The die was cast.

This was exactly what I hoped to avoid. She was more level-headed than I, but grand houses were her Achilles heel.

The reason I hoped to avert this goes back to one of my basic philosophies. Identify those who succeed, and emulate what makes them a success. The corollary is, discern who doesn’t, and take a lesson from that.

Years before, I attended a lecture by a local historian. It included an account of how Cincinnati had been a major beer producer and home to over 40 significant breweries. After the presentation, I approached the speaker and asked him what happened to all those breweries.

“One word,” he smiled, “wives.”

According to him, all the successful brewers knew each other and socialized. The wives would entertain each other and show off their homes, jewelry and cars. Wives returning to their own homes would demand luxuries better than they had just seen. This spiraled upward until the brewers went broke trying to one-up each other.

It sounded a bit apocryphal to me, but there was a lesson in it somewhere. So, I drove us to the home tour with no small amount of trepidation.

It was everything I feared and more. Not just a lavish entertainment room and a pool a little smaller than Lake Ontario, but hand-painted borders decorating the walls. Fortunately, my wife also viewed it as overkill. Whew. Dodged a bullet, there.

Or, did I? A few weeks later, we bumped into another business owner. He and his wife had just built a house that went well into seven figures. Would we like to see it? No. Yes. The first answer was mine and went unheeded.

If anything, this more expensive house appeared more modest than the first one. Maybe the premium cost was in the location.

But wait, the tour revealed more. The house was honeycombed with secret passages and other unique features. Frank had the fantasy about haunted mansions when he was a boy, and wanted his children to be able to enjoy the real thing. That’s just what Frank Jr. and his siblings did. When I had toured the Biltmore estate, I thought about Frank’s house.

Frank’s business survived the crash around 1990, but the other guy didn’t. So, the grasshoppers batted .500.

As far as I know, all the ants survived it.