Ten Years Later (29 page)

While Burt, the unconventional face of the product, continued to make store appearances
several days a month, Roxanne was in charge of every dollar and every product. In
1998, with $8 million in annual sales and a new life a thousand miles from home, Roxanne
had a moment. For the first time, she allowed herself to take her eyes off the road
ahead and sneak a look in the rearview mirror. She was all alone in the one-hundred-thousand-square-foot
production warehouse.

“It was quite late at night. Everybody had left, and for some reason I needed something
out in the warehouse,” she recalls. “I went out to the warehouse from my office and
started walking back to the shipping area, and I was looking at these racks, and I
thought,
Wow! I just can’t believe this!
It looked like a great big old factory, and
I just had this moment when I just stood there and looked at it, like
When did this all happen? Where did this all come from?
And I felt at that moment that we had kind of turned a corner, and we were now a
mainstream company with departments, and we had a couple hundred employees and a lab.
We were getting pretty sophisticated in the way we were doing things, and at that
point I felt quite gratified that we had taken it out of a little kitchen and put
it into a mainstream factory.”

The wonder of all she’d achieved made Roxanne sentimental. In the days ahead, she
picked up the phone and called her father, whom she hadn’t spoken to in decades.

“I felt like,
I’m probably the one who should call him because I’m younger and have more flexibility
and he’s kind of stuck in his ways, and I’m just going to reach out
. He was very happy that I had. He was very proud, and I don’t think he knew how to
bridge the gap,” she says, “but when I reached out to him, he was really happy that
I did.”

Roxanne says that she never tapped into the pain caused by the rift in their relationship;
she instead used it as a motivator.

“I tend to move on and take my lumps. I don’t tend to dwell on the upsets of life,
but on some level I think my ambition was a way of proving to myself and proving to
him that he was wrong about me,” she says. “And it could have been that if he’d been
more accepting of me all along, I wouldn’t have had this need to prove anything to
him or myself, so in some ways I was clearly affected by his hard-line approach.”

By 1999, annual sales approached $14 million, and products became readily available
with the launch of an e-commerce website. Roxanne was weary of life away from her
beloved Maine, so she moved back to the coastal lobster village of Winter Harbor and
bought a 1,600-square-foot house on the rocky shore. She also bought the adjacent
lot for privacy. E-mail and overnight shipping allowed her to oversee the company
from afar, with bimonthly visits
to North Carolina. Roxanne made the company her own the same year; she bought out
Burt’s one-third share. The buyout came in the form of a trade. Roxanne bought Burt
a $130,000 house in Maine, which he sold just a few months later and returned to his
treasured turkey coop. The next year, revenue soared to $23 million and Roxanne began
to receive offers to sell the company. She wasn’t ready yet but knew the day would,
and should, come.

“I knew it was just a phase in my life, not my life,” she says, “and so I ran the
company as if it were the last product I would sell. I positioned it in a way that
would make it very attractive to an acquiring firm. I had a bottom line that was very
attractive; good, steady, healthy growth; I never took a lot of money out; I never
cooked up any fiction with the books—it was just really solid.”

While she continued to grow the company, Roxanne began to consider how her mounting
profits could honor her environmentally conscious customers and her love of nature.
In 2002, Roxanne established Elliotsville Plantation, a private operating foundation
for the acquisition and conservation of thousands of acres of wild land in northern
and coastal Maine.

“Buying all the land that we bought felt like I was still serving our customer,” she
says. “I had taken the profits that all of our customers had allowed us to earn and
was investing it for them.”

As Roxanne managed the large-scale success of the company, she also navigated the
similarly sized business challenges. One involved the delivery of more than a half
million dollars’ worth of face cream to a major national retail chain. After the shipment
was made, Roxanne received a call from the chain’s warehouse manager. Blue mold was
growing on the top of every single jar.

“Their chemist was just quality-controlling it before they sent it out to their stores.
It was devastating. It wasn’t just the fact that we had six hundred thousand dollars’
worth of product that was molding; it was a credibility issue, too. We were incredibly
embarrassed.
This was a major chain and here we had completely disappointed them and we looked
really bad,” she says. “It turned out to be a natural preservative we were using,
and the company that made the preservative had moved from one factory to another and
had used a new source of water in their manufacturing process, which had some kind
of different formula than their old water, and it created this problem for us. We
had to take the blame because it was our problem. It’s our name on the jar. That was
humiliating and devastating and it made us feel horrible, but we kept soldiering on.
It’s not like you can just quit. I had a little saying on my office wall that said,
Success is going from one failure to the next
. These kinds of things happen all along the way, from the very beginning, like when
you run out of gas before you get to the craft fair and you miss the first three hours
of the day because you miscalculated, all the way up to having hundreds of thousands
of dollars of product go bad in a major customer’s warehouse. There are lots of setbacks.”

That same year, with sales topping $60 million, Roxanne hired a female business broker
and began entertaining offers from New York equity companies. Her plan was to sell
the majority of her shares but to also keep some.

“I was feeling my creativity was being compromised, because a lot of my time was being
spent as a manager instead of as an artist, managing a lot of people, a lot of meetings,
and I just was feeling really limited and I was just restless,” she explains. “I wanted
to try something new. I had proven to myself that I could do it, so that thrill was
over. I just felt it was time for someone else to take over.”

Roxanne knew that as a minority owner she would be vulnerable, so she wanted to make
sure she had a strong feeling about the firm she ultimately chose as the buyer. A
student of metaphysics since she was nineteen, Roxanne did tarot card readings on
each suitor. She paired the guidance of the universe with her own instincts.

“I rely on it, especially with things that I don’t know enough about. I had my gut
feelings about who I trusted and who I didn’t. But then, when I had an angel card
or a tarot card that affirmed my gut feelings, then I would feel like,
Check! Okay, that’s another check.”

The angel card came up for a private equity firm out of New York called AEA Investors.
Check!

In 2003, AEA paid Roxanne $141.6 million for an 80 percent stake in . . .
drumroll, please
 . . . Burt’s Bees.

Yep. The company Burt and Roxanne started in 1984 was named after the words Burt stenciled
on each of his hives:
BURT’S BEES.

“I always thought it was so funny, like, these are Burt’s bees, like, they know it.
‘Oh, yeah, we’re Burt’s, not someone else’s,’ ” Roxanne says, chuckling. “It was easy
to remember. I started putting it on the labels, and I would push them toward people
as they walked by the booth and they would all want to say,” she singsongs, “ ‘Burt’s
Bees! Burt’s Bees!’ There was something kind of fun about that name, so it stuck.”

When Roxanne made the AEA deal, Burt asked Roxanne for money, since he’d traded his
shares years earlier for a home. She agreed to pay him $4 million.

“And I’ll bet he hasn’t spent a penny of it. I’m sure it’s all under his mattress
or hiding under his dog food bowl.” She laughs. “He hasn’t changed a bit. He’s still
living out in that little shack that he lives in. I haven’t seen him for a year or
two. He had a fight with the phone company over his bill, so they disconnected his
phone, so now you can’t even call him anymore. He’s just really eccentric.”

Burt did invest in some home improvements. He expanded his turkey coop from eight
feet by eight feet to eight feet by twelve feet. He also bought a classic motorcycle.

“And it was a used motorcycle, and it wasn’t running when he bought it.” With a laugh
she says, “It took him about three years
down at the shop to get the thing working again. That’s how he spends his days, fixing
lawn mowers that don’t work. Stuff like that.”

Roxanne admits she and Burt have grown apart but that she could find him at any time,
and they are friends.

After the first selloff, Roxanne still owned a 20 percent share in the company. She
also retained a seat on the board of directors; she knew a second sale would come
in the years ahead.

“I wanted to be sure I had at least some input, and I wanted to keep my ears open
and meet with the people who were running the company and owned the majority,” she
says. “Y’know, kind of protecting the investment that I had and watching over what
they were doing with it.”

In 2004, Roxanne used half of her Burt’s Bees shares to form the Quimby Family Foundation,
a nonprofit organization that supports fellow nonprofits of like mind. The forest
and the arts would be the benefactors; the tax shelter was gravy.

“Because it was a nonprofit, it was not a taxable transaction, which was fabulous,
because that was a lot of money that would have had to have been paid in taxes,” she
says, “so I was able to shelter quite a bit of money from taxes by creating this nonprofit,
and that allowed me to take up a social mission, and the mission was the environment.”

Lucas and Hannah, at twenty-six, joined the foundation’s board of directors in 2005.

“Oh, yeah, they love it. They feel very important,” she says through a smile, “and
they truly are.”

Roxanne’s entrepreneurial burnout didn’t last long. In January 2006, she founded Happy
Green Bee, a company that manufactures all-organic clothing for children and babies.
One of the collections is called “Oxanna,” Russian for Roxanne.

The final sale of Burt’s Bees came in November 2007. Potential buyers swarmed and
made offers, eager to grab market share in the lucrative “green” products sector.
AEA sold Burt’s Bees to Clorox for
$925 million. Roxanne’s remaining 20 percent share netted her close to $183 million.
The unemployed mom who realized she wanted more for her kids had banked a whopping
total of $325 million.

I ask Roxanne if she ever envisioned that large a payday in her wildest dreams.

“Never, no, never. It’s strange. I just had a very indifferent attitude about money
because I had always understood way back when that it didn’t buy happiness, it couldn’t
buy you peace of mind, it couldn’t buy you love, it couldn’t buy you the most important
things, which is why I moved to the country and lived such a simple life,” she says.
“I think my indifference to money allowed me to make decisions that were not based
on emotions, so those decisions were better. If you’re making decisions based on fear,
or want, or greed, or pride, or some of the other things that accompany money, your
decisions are compromised by those emotions, and you don’t make the clearest, best
decisions that you could. I didn’t have a lot of emotions attached to money; it was
just there. I didn’t covet it or fear that it would go away, or that I wouldn’t have
enough.”

Roxanne viewed the dollars as a pat on the back, not as a way to pad her wallet.

“I never really was all that interested in money for what it could buy. The money
for me was more like the score, and business was the sport,” she says. “I prided myself
on playing the game well and the skill was measured by dollars. The money I was able
to make by selling the company was more like gratification that I had done a good
job as opposed to,
Oh, good. Now I can go out and buy stuff
.”

Lucas says his mom instilled the same view of money in him and Hannah. Their lifestyle
never changed even as the company grew. Boarding school was the big splurge. Lucas
says his mom, while she values education, has never lost sight of the learning that
takes place on a hiking trail, rock wall, or trip across the globe.

“She’s given us amazing opportunities, but it’s always really
focused,” he says. “It’s never like, ‘Hey, y’know what? You should have a Maserati,’
or ‘Here’s a bunch of money to go do something.’ It’s always, ‘Let’s go as a family
to Africa,’ and we would experience that culture, and it was an amazing thing that
we’ll always remember as a family.”

Roxanne has traveled to Hawaii and Antarctica and all the places she’s always wanted
to go. She studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and bought multiple homes in Florida
and Maine. But the majority of “stuff” Roxanne spends her millions on is acreage.
For years, she’s been purchasing large tracts of forestland in northern Maine with
the ultimate goal of creating a new national park. She hopes to give the National
Park Service seventy-four thousand acres of her northern Maine woods to create the
Maine Woods National Park. Her donation would ideally fall on the Park Service’s centennial
anniversary in August 2016. Roxanne’s dream is not shared by all. Her land acquisition
is not popular with many hunters, loggers, and outdoorsmen who fear their freedom
to work and play may be compromised by the creation of a national park. Her mission
is a work in progress.

Not surprisingly, Roxanne is sought after as a public speaker. Her story is so compelling
that she’s frequently asked to share her “secrets” of success. When she speaks to
young people interested in starting companies, she’s direct.