A Woman Entrepreneur Gets Divorced
By: Francine Hardaway
Tags: Autobiography

credit: JewishNews.com

John’s and my divorce, like mine from husbands #1 and #2, was friendly and involved no attorneys. We split the property and nobody got alimony or child support. We still loved and trusted each other, but just couldn’t live together while I was so busy. John had been an only child, and he wanted and needed more attention. I had been making his lunch and cutting his hair and building a house with him.

Now I had two kids and a business. I had no more to give. In fact our marriage had been rocky even before the business. Mothering changes a woman’s priorities, and by moving in with John I had also become the stepmother of a hard of hearing child and another very smart, devious child. It was a heavy lift, especially because John’s ex-wife moved the children across the country. For John to see them meant having summers off as teachers, and that all ended when I started my business.

I now advise women entrepreneurs that it’s better to be a single mom than a married woman, because a relationship is another demand on an entrepreneur’s time. Actually, I advise men that way, too. An unbelievable number of marriages and relationships crumble under the demands of entrepreneurship.

The most unusual thing about John’s and my divorce was the amount of counseling we had to go through even though we agreed on everything because we wanted joint custody of our daughters, The judge had never seen a case of joint custody work before. We, however, decided to show him. We never fought over the kids, never spoke ill of one another, and handed the kids back and forth easily by continuing to live within a mile of each other for their entire childhoods.

That woman John took up with proved to be a nutcase, and he got rid of her fairly quickly, while I engaged with still more mentors, with the emphasis on “men.” Leroy Paller, an entrepreneur I met while running on the canal banks in Phoenix, taught me several things, including: “just say yes. Then figure out how to do it,” and “deals are like streetcars — if you miss one another will come along.” He was in the construction business, and he also taught me about business cycles and recessions. I had never noticed them before, but I now realize that I started my first business in one. That recession was followed by inflation, which I didn’t notice either because I was neither borrowing nor saving money. The domes were always free and clear, and we had saved enough money to buy the condo I moved into when I moved out of the domes.

Leroy, who died recently, was a wonderful man, but he had a few quirks, one of which was to stalk me in his Cadillac when I moved out of the house into the condo. The domes were too much for a single startup entrepreneur to maintain, so I amicably deeded them to John, who continued to live in them for another 35 years.

One of Leroy’s tricks was to climb in through my second story window to “visit” me, even though he was married and he was a roly-poly middle aged man. His wife knew about his infidelity, but also knew he would never leave her and the children so she put up with him. He spent most of his life trying to convince both of us that we should live together in a menage a trois, but neither of us would ever grant him his wish. I was on her side; I thought he was nuts. He was probably just a future thinker. Polyamory is now all the rage.

I was incredibly busy. My other newly-chosen mentor was a real estate guy who was down on his luck when I met him during the high inflation days of the early 80s, but who would go on to become a very wealthy man, the well-known developer of several senior living communities. I met him while I was still married, and so was he. He was having an affair, as well. But it was the “me decade.” Sometimes on Saturday mornings while everyone was playing tennis at Phoenix Country Club, he and I would sneak away to a condo he kept nearby for his real mistress and have sex. We didn’t love each other, obviously, but we were both adventurous.

One day I told him I was starting a PR business and I asked him to meet me for a drink at a fern bar we all frequented for happy hour. He was flattered to be asked for advice, because he knew I was smart and a professor, and he was “just” a real estate guy.

His advice? “Don’t get an office. No one will ever come to your office; you’ll go to theirs.” And “get a Mercedes and a car phone. Then you will look successful.”

I followed his advice. It worked incredibly well. Because I still belonged to Phoenix Country Club when cellular phones — then called car phones because they were screwed into your car’s console— came out, I managed to become part of a group of men headed by who were putting together a bulk order to get a discount. I ponied up $3500 and had my car phone. I also imported a Mercedes from Germany on the gray market. Looking back on it, I don’t know how I found the guts to do all that, but I just followed the men from the Club and did what they did. They had experience and I did not.

Where did I get the extra money to fund my startup? In the stock market, where I day traded homebuilder stocks that I knew about because I lived in Phoenix where all the big home builders were building. Really all I had to do was listen to the guys at Phoenix Country Club.

Which is why I was always so pissed that women weren’t allowed into the Men’s Grill, where men sat after tennis and golf drinking beer and doing deals with each other that I always wanted to be part of. I walked in there a couple of times when John was in there with the other men after tennis to test the strength of this rule. By doing this, I managed to scare the shit out of all the men, who had never seen a woman with the balls to do this. Or to bring the kids with her to the club on Saturday morning and shower them with her in the Ladies Locker Room. The other kids, you see, all had live-in nannies, now known as undocumented aliens. The moms, who supposedly spent the week with their kids while their husbands worked, took the weekends off to golf or play tennis without children.

Actually, they did that during the week, too, because no woman at the club worked but me. After I went into business they all hated me, because they knew I saw their precious husbands during the week and they were sure I was sleeping with each and every one of them.

I wasn’t. Most of them were dreadfully uninteresting. And I was working my butt off. I woke up at 5 AM, ran on the canal banks with a group of women with whom I also marathon trained, got the kids to school or not, depending on whose day it was, and sat down at the computer.

Being an entrepreneur took its toll: I had to give up tennis, a sport at which I had become adept beyond my wildest expectations. I actually won club tournaments. But I couldn’t make time for it anymore and had to replace it with running.

The computer at which i sat down every morning was the Apple 2e. Then the Compaq. And by 1984, the Mac. I became known as an early adopter right away, and also as a person who understood technology. This streak of interest has carried me through the last 40 years.

Even though my clients for the first decade were mostly real estate-related, when I got the car phone it was another inflection point in my life pointing me toward the tech world. After all, I had run a Futures Institute and was a futurist. I got the phone on the advice of one mentor, and I got the computer after a discussion with another who was getting a computer for his kids to prepare them for life. Early on, this other mentor figured out how important computer literacy was going to be.

That sounded good to me. I had two kids aged 8 and 10 when I started Hardaway Connections, as it soon came to be called. I followed my mentor’s advice and didn’t get an office, which meant I was home with the kids more than I would have been otherwise. I taught my older daughter to answer the phone saying “This is Hardaway Connections, how can I help you?”

I also got a voicemail machine. Since many of the people who called me in the 80s were either reporters or community heavyweights, and I didn’t want to miss their messages. But I couldn’t afford a secretary. Just like I turned not being able to afford an office into a teachable moment for the kids, I turned not being able to afford a secretary into one for my clients. I still remember my first outgoing message: “You have reached Hardaway Connections. We can’t answer your call right now, but if you’ll trust the technology, which is more accurate than your secretary, and leave us a message, we’ll call you right back.”

This was when phone messages were still being taken by secretaries on little pink slips or bound pads with carbon paper between them to make sure there was a yellow copy. Voice recorders were totally new. You connected your phone cord into the tape recorder, and you could listen to the message being recorded.

Those vanished when the phone companies introduced voicemail. Car phones vanished when cellular phones became mobile phones. One client from New York, the founder of a tax-free bond fund, insisted I get a fax machine. I’d never heard of it. I was at the beginning of an amazing shift in business productivity technology, much of it in hardware. Software came later in the decade. When you really think about it, the ‘80s were an amazingly disruptive decade. I only see that in retrospect, because I was so busy trying to keep afloat, but I pretty much adopted everything new and continue to do so.

When John and I finalized our divorce I was devastated. This was Husband #3, and also the Father of My Children. It was a big deal, unlike my brief marriage with Jess. I thought I’d never be in another relationship, and I thought I was dangerously close to failure. These turned out to be insecurities I carried with me through my entire business career. No matter how much money I made, I always thought of myself as on the brink of disaster, or at least bankruptcy. No matter how many men came and went from my life, I envisioned a future of profound loneliness. Part of me still had a “Cinderella Complex” and thought I should be saved by a prince. None of the men in my life were princes, although many of my early clients were willing to pay what I thought were big fees for the services of someone who knew nothing about what she was doing.

These fears and the imposter syndrome sent me to the emergency room multiple times with panic attacks.

But I also had a wonderful girlfriend at the time who was one of the first commercial real estate agents. She, too, was divorced. Her former husband was a doctor, and like me, she had two daughters. Like me, she wanted independence. She made me feel somewhat better when she said “you won’t feel so bad about any of that once you’ve made your first $100,000.” That only took me a year. It was more than twice the money I had made as a professor.

I was hooked. I was in business.

Becoming an entrepreneur, which was not the term of art in 1980, necessitated more changes in my life than just giving up tennis. It meant giving up entire aspects of my old life that were no longer relevant, like Phoenix Country Club and most of my friends. For example, when Jess and I divorced and I became John’s wife, Jess went on to marry Stephanie Rucker, one of John’s former students, and we all continued to be friends. Jess and Stephanie were involved in our lives during most of the 70s, albeit in a minor way. But when I went into business, they also faded into the background of my life. Stephanie was a teacher, and Jess still worked on cars. They lived a simple life, and neither of them had any interest in business.

I moved very quickly into civic leadership and all the marketing events and relationships characteristic of businesspeople. Phoenix in the 80s was very focused on growth, both in the downtown area and in the suburbs, and real estate was the major preoccupation of most business people. It was all about getting freeways and planned communities prepared for the “Sunbelt Shift” that took place during that decade. Most of my clients were banks and developers — the biggest players in the city. They gave me my lessons in economic development. Gradually I assumed the role of token woman on tens of committees devoted to bringing things to Phoenix that it needed, from independent films to theatre companies and sports teams. It was very good for business and at the time it looked like success to me. I was focused on growing the business so I’d have the money to send the kids to Ivy League schools.

The city, my children, Hardaway Connections, and I grew together.

Two other clients of mine for instance, had syndicated a lot of land on the west side of Phoenix, and it was imperative for their land that the I-10 freeway be extended right into Phoenix and out the other side. Way on the other side of the Valley, my mentor was developing senior communities. Other land barons were developing North Scottsdale and Chandler. I worked for them all. I became a champion of economic development around the Valley of the Sun, as Phoenix was called by its residents, driving miles and miles to visit vacant tracts of land that were destined later to become cities.

A large restaurant group hired our firm for PR, but couldn’t pay cash. Instead, they gave us food trade. The kids and I ate out every single night, and we still couldn’t use up the food trade. But it did teach all of us to love restaurants.

As a person whose business depended on growth, I forgot about the solar hot water heater and the drought tolerant landscape and the organic vegetables I cared so much about in the 70s. I was involved in the PR for just about every tall building in downtown Phoenix and every masterplanned community on the outskirts. I led my clients into Arizona Forward, a civic organization largely devoted to what we now call greenwashing. Looking back on it, I inhabited a world of cognitive dissonance. No wonder I had panic attacks.

I also never gave a thought to the friends I left along the way until in 2017 I got the surprise news that our old friend Stephanie had died. Stephanie was Jess’s wife. Jess was husband number two, the person who brought me to Arizona. He was the laughing fun-loving beer drinking man who loved to go to Watkins Glen and fix up old MGs until the moment he died. I had transformed into a “community leader.” I hadn’t seen them in years.

How did I even get back in touch with Stephanie? On Facebook, of course. Just a few months after I reconnected with her, long after selling my second business and about fifteen years into my third, Stealthmode Partners, I learned Jess was in a hospital. Stephanie had been taking care of him for nine months, since he had a seizure and broke his shoulder and then got sepsis in a hospital. They had been driving back from New York where they had a farm. He had had the seizure in Ohio. Since October, she had shepherded him from hospital to hospital, complication after complication. She finally got him back to Phoenix.

Consumed by guilt, I started visiting him (them) in his hospital room, until Stephanie got sepsis herself, did not respond to treatment, and died. She had been sending email updates to Jess’s friends and relatives about his condition, but it was only about a week since the last one when I get an email in the middle of my entrepreneurship program that said only,

“To all the people on Stephanie’s list. Stephanie passed today.”

Jess was still in the rehab hospital when she died. I didn’t know what to make of this. It was so complex on so many levels. I had just gotten back in touch with them through Facebook because we lived in such different worlds.

From this I learned that sepsis had become a “thing” in hospitals.

I had fallen down the rabbit hole in the 80s when I adopted all that early technology and passed entirely through the looking glass when the browser was invented. Jessie and Stephanie continued to live offline while I became an outlier, an entrepreneur and a geek. But there is a lesson here about old friends: people who have been in your life for over 40 years don’t just go away if you cease to see them all the time. They occupy a sacred space in your heart. I mourned for Stephanie, and for all the time I didn’t spend with her and with Jess, two of the nicest people I’ve ever known.

But I never look back. Why bother? It’s gone. I’ve spent most of my glorious life envisioning the future and helping people who are not change junkies like me get there. This has led to the founding of three companies and a charitable foundation, to parenting, foster parenting, mentoring, and traveling the world. On the personal side, it has also led to — let’s call it — serial monogamy punctuated by many other adventures I can’t keep track of.

Did I have a plan and follow it to reach my goals and objectives, as they teach you in business school? Of course not. Life’s not like that. I randomed into almost everything I did. That’s the beauty, for me. I suppose I’ve lived the life of the existentialists I admired in the 60s. No real reason for anything I did, although in retrospect it all has a pretty good gloss.

But truthfully, a gorilla could have run Hardaway Connections in the early 80s. The entire community was growing. Early in the business, realized the bookkeeping made me anxious, so I outsourced it. How did I know it made me anxious? I went for a biofeedback consultation, and the counselor gave me a bracelet that changed color when I got stressed. It always changed colors when I looked at payables and receivables, so my first hire was a part time bookkeeper, Debbie, who thankfully stayed with me for a long time. Half the world at that time thought biofeedback was voodoo, but I believed in that bracelet.

However, in the mid-80s just as the party was getting to be fun, something happened that I didn’t understand, nor did Debbie, but which affected my entire life. This was the Tax Simplification Act of 1986. It was designed to correct the problem of tax shelters, where the rich stashed their money to avoid taxes.

Many of the real estate investments in the beginning of my business career were financed by tax shelters. Syndication was the way to raise money to buy all those big parcels of land that would later be on a freeway route and become big communities. When tax shelters vanished, a lot of the money for real estate went with them. And then the banks and savings and loans went too, in a domino effect. My clients were almost all banks or developers. Within a few months, they were all broke. I got stiffed by some of them, too. Oh, and I also lost money in many of their land syndications. On paper, perhaps a million dollars.

Suddenly, I was in trouble. A lifetime of anxiety disorder and my status as a single mom led me to prepare for bankruptcy. Luckily one of my running buddies was a bankruptcy lawyer and throughout my business career she kept me ready to go bankrupt at any time, although I never did. But she taught me about trusts, and fraudulent conveyance, and stuff only rich people knew about. For a woman with a small business, I had big firm legal and tax assistance all the time.

During this recession, I had one client who was very interested in eastern religion and owed the banks a hopeless amount of money — like hundreds of millions of dollars. He decided that as he restructured all his deals with the banks he wanted to write a book about Buddhism.

If you know anything about Buddhism, you know it teaches that the reason for suffering is expectation and that the way to escape suffering is to let go of expectations. This is what my client was trying to do; it was his way of surviving. He was gorgeous and I was very attracted to him even though he was broke, so I said I would help him and he and I set out to do a lot of reading and research that — although it never resulted in a book — resulted in both of us feeling much better and being unafraid to go on. The Buddhism that I learned from my adventure with trying to help him has been a mainstay of my life ever since. He is a multimillionaire today and retired. Letting go of expectations worked better for him than for me.

My oldest daughter was scarred by all my bankruptcy talk and preparations. Until she was an adult and an attorney herself, she still actually believed we had gone bankrupt. But we never did.

I was saved by my tech interests, my fear, and my friends. I was looking around for industries that were countercyclical to real estate and I happened upon medical claims processing, which was just beginning to be automated. And I had a friend whose husband was a securities attorney, and he had a company about to go public. Because I liked technology and understood the stock market, both that company and an electronic claims processing company became my clients. I’m still not sure what the tech company does. The claims processing business blew up later, but not while I was involved. I’m convinced I was only saved by my fear, and my refusal to give up.

I just soldiered on, panic attack after panic attack. I was a frequent flier at the Good Samaritan Hospital emergency room, where they must have told me dozens of times that I wasn’t going to die.

What did I learn? Nothing lasts forever, and if you own a business, it’s best to have more than one customer, and indeed have more than one revenue stream.