MANI CASE Dick Beamish’s Pottery Corp[oration
Following a restructuring of the marketing division of Lever Brothers, a large consumer soap and detergent corporation, Dick Beamish* was one of the early victims to the downsizing syndrome. While he had p[performed exceptionally well as a product manager for its industrial soaps product line, the criteria used to eliminate jobs—the fact that-Dick did not have a business degree—was applied and he found himself on the street with a modest severance package.
Try as he might over the following months he was not successful in getting reemployed. Either his experience and maturity were factors that overqualified him for lesser openings in sales, or his lack of a graduate degree in sales, or his lack of a graduate degree in business knocked him out of the running for more senior positions.
What compensated for Dick’s continuing failure to get a job, to say nothing of his self-esteem, was a small mail –order operation his wife had founded a few years before. An avid putterer in pottery, Sheila Beamish had built up a small inventory of clays, tools, glazes, compounds and other supket. By the end of one year without finding a suitable position Dick had, when he was not out pounding the pavement, taken over the mail-order business and built it up to a thriving small business. It now had a significant inventory that included kilns, glazing kilns, pottery wheels, storage equipment and material handling equipment. He was now grossing more than his old job had paid at Lever Brothers.
Up to this point the Beamishes had what could be termed a very profitable hobby or presumably a successful small business. Two years after losing his job, Dick realized there was an opportunity to be exploited by becoming a distributor for pottery and related products in the southern Ontario market he raised the money to build a brand new ware house, complete with delivery vehicles and computer scheduling system. Following this entrepreneurialprocess, which took almost a year from start to finish, the Beamish family now owns and runs a growing million dollar enterprise.
*Disguised case