On an October day in 1985, in Muskogee, Okla., Bill Bartmann--company founder, father, community leader--stood on the floor of his factory and wept. So did his 71 employees. Their final work shift complete, they filed past Bartmann to shake his hand, return his embrace, clap one another on the shoulder, and cry some more. "I've been through some deaths in the family, including my father's," Bartmann says quietly today, "but nothing was more traumatic than that afternoon. It was the most tearful, soul-wrenching experience of my life." Bill Bartmann's business had failed.
The demise of Hawkeye Pipe Services Inc ., a manufacturer of pipes for oil rigs, could not have been swifter. On July 25, OPEC's oil cartel all but crumbled. Prices dove as crude flooded the market, bringing drilling in Oklahoma to a near halt virtually overnight. For thriving Hawkeye Pipe, it was an unequivocal death sentence: July sales were $1 million, August sales were precisely zero. As Bartmann puts it, it was as if a hand had reached out from 10,000 miles away and turned off the faucet. He snaps his fingers: "It was just that quick."
And so, once the company's assets had been auctioned off at yard-sale prices, Bartmann found himself in that most dreaded of entrepreneurial circumstances: ensnared in his personal guarantees, more than $1 million in debt.
That's when the telephone calls started. Surly collection agents rang at all hours of the day and night, promising lawsuits, hurling insults, demanding money the family didn't have. Bartmann's 7-year-old daughter, Jessica, once fielded a call. "Your dad's not there, huh?" the voice growled. "Well, you tell that deadbeat if he doesn't pay his bill, we're going to repossess his car."
As the collectors appeared friends and business associates seemed to vanish. "It was like they were all made of smoke on a windy day," Bartmann says. "People who