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Two months before David Silverman's 32nd birthday, he went to the Charles Schwab branch in the basement of the World Trade Center to wire his father's life savings for the purchase of the Clarinda typesetting company in Clarinda, Iowa.

He and his business partner and mentor, Dan Coyne, a late-middle-aged professional manager, planned to turn around the 50-year-old typesetting company, then raise venture capital for a "roll-up" of the then mom-and-pop industry scattered over the farmlands of the Midwest that were crucial to the big textbook publishers like Pearson, Harcourt and McGraw Hill in New York City. They would then take the company public and make millions.

It wouldn't be easy. Clarinda had been losing money for years and was essentially in receivership. India-based competition was driving prices lower every day. Publishers were merging and needed to cut costs to cover their self-inflicted debts. And morale among the aging workforce in Iowa was at an all-time low.

This was no dot com play. David believed in the moral ideals he had learned from his father, which in turn came from the "old" IBM - the one before layoffs at which point it had become, as his father said, "just like every other company." He wanted to succeed while respecting the employees.

When David had met Dan, he had found a mentor who sounded like his father, but who knew how to run a business. He had taken three companies public before and espoused "benevolent capitalism." While every other typesetter in America was either while firing their US employees and secretly sending their work to India, or simply being bought out by Asian-based companies, Clarinda would, under Dan and David continue to hire Americans and even open new plants - including their own Manila plant that paid triple the going wage for out-sourced "cheap labor."

In a year they had doubled the revenue and staff of the company and were well on their way to purchasing two competitors. So could they buck the "offshore" trend, deal honestly and open with employees and customers, and turn their and their employees dreams into millions?

Absolutely not.

Typo tells the true story of Clarinda company's last rise and fall. And with it one entrepreneur's story of what it means to take on, run, and ultimately lose an entire life's work.

Typo is an American Dream run aground told with humor and moments of tragedy. The story reveals the impact of losing an entire industry and answers questions about what that means for American business.

The reader sees in Clarinda's fate the peril faced by Everycompany, and the lessons learned are applicable to anyone who wants to have their own business, to succeed in a large corporation and not to find themselves stranded by the reality of shifting markets, outsourcing, and ultimately, capitalism itself.

David Silverman moved up the ranks from tech geek to owner and president of Clarinda, the largest American owned typesetting and publishing company before it ceased operations due to overseas competition in 2003. He has been captain of his college computer programming team, worked in a deli, written computer manuals for IBM, designed electronic publishing systems in London, and sold "offshore" keyboarding services--he thinks he liked the deli best. He has spent a decade and a half working with the Philippines, India and China, and has a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science with a minor in writing from Drew University. He has published articles on technology and publishing in industry publications, including Wired magazine and Publishers Weekly. In addition, he has been a consultant in the industry, a frequent speaker at publishing conferences, a member of international publishing technical committees, and been a guest lecturer on the typesetting industry at New York University's master's in publishing program. David has studied writing with William Zinsser, Bill Roorbach, and Susan Shapiro, attended non-fiction writing workshops at Goucher, Marymount, and Manhattanville Colleges, performed a one person show entitled "American Loser". He has recently had a non-fiction essay accepted by Snake Nation Review and runs a monthly reading series at the Drama Book Store in New York City. He currently works as an executive at Citigroup where he is responsible for, what else, disaster recovery.

FROM CHAPTER TWO:

"I noticed the janitor spends a lot of time cleaning up my wastebasket. When I came in this morning, it must have taken him ten minutes to empty that bucket," Dan said at the start of the second day of the executive meeting, and chuckled. "It's OK, I've got nothing to hide. If anybody here wants to go rooting through my desk, go right ahead. Although, I don't know what you're going to find other than a lot of Maalox." He rubbed his hands along his yellow and black tie. "I encourage all of you to leave your doors open too, and leave your desks unlocked. It's the new kind of company we are."
"I can't do that," Minnie said. "I've got everyone's payroll information. We have laws we have to follow."
Instead of Minnie, Dan winked at Connie, "You're absolutely right, Minnie. There's definitely information we have to keep private and protected. You know I respect whatever you do." He put on his glasses, cleared his throat, smiled, and said, "Applebee."
I listened to the names being read over and over, while I rubbed an impression of the routed edge of the table into my employee list with my pencil.
"Jessie is someone we could let go."
"No, Jessie is the only one who can run the Dylux machine."
"What about Rob?"
"We were going to let Rob go."
"Rob's been with the company a long time, he could learn how to run the Dylux."
"Jessie could learn Rob's job also."
I didn't know these people, and each name wasn't a personal friend, someone I would recognize at the supermarket, or my son's friend's parents. On my mind were the loans that we had used to buy Clarinda. Financing had been maddening-banks had defined us as an existing business or a startup based on which definition meant they couldn't lend to us. Instead, we had to get credit from the company we bought Clarinda from: Household Finance. We owed Household both a $1.2 million term loan from the purchase and the $1.5 million revolving line of credit that we were burning through, as Dan had pointed out, at $750,000 a month. The term loan we had a few years on, but the revolver was due to expire at the end of 2000, only fifteen months away. Household had established the due date because they didn't want to be our bank forever, but this meant we had the combined pressure of reducing cost and getting in revenue to stay within the line while trying to find another lender.
Dan assured Household another bank would give us credit by then, but privately he told me that only amazing gains in revenue and profit would bring in a new lender. "We have to snap this place into shape to convince another bank to let us keep it," he had said. "Or that revolver goes off against our head and we lose."
On my list, I doodled all the other debts we had taken on to buy Clarinda: State of Iowa, $400,000, the city of Atlantic, Iowa $50,000, the Southwest Iowa Coalition Foundation, $50,000. I'd spent the past year stumping around Iowa meeting John-Deere-hatted councilmen to get those loans. And then there was all the money I owed my father. I drew a stick figure with a smiley face holding a bag of cash.
What really bothered me though was that Dan and I had been forced to personally guarantee the loans. "Why couldn't we borrow the money like any other company?" I had asked our lawyer in Omaha while signing page after page as he notarized away.
"Nobody just gives away anything in this country," he'd explained. "Without the guarantees you can hide behind the corporate shield. And if the company fails, you could just walk away. They want to know that you have a personal incentive to stick around."
"Losing my job and my father's inheritance isn't enough? They want me bankrupt too if we screw up? I thought that was the whole point of incorporating and hiring lawyers."
"Only because in this instance they're calling you a startup," the lawyer had said.
Two hours into day two and the no-hire list, as our attorney called it, or the fire list, as the employees called it, was up to eight names.
I thought about the competition. There were four or five typesetters as big, or larger, than Clarinda and at least a hundred smaller companies. Looming on the horizon were low-cost typesetters from India. Dan and I reminded ourselves and our customers over and over that the Indians' quality was poor and they didn't understand the publisher's needs, but we knew it was only a matter of time before they caught up. I drew a stick-figure map of India-nothing more than an upside-down triangle.
At five o'clock, we had eleven names.
"I know you know what you're doing," Dan said. "You are the executives and this is your company as much as mine, and I trust you. So I say we stop." He put down his list. "You all have places to be, but I'd like to spend a little more time and go over the incentive plan I'd like you to help me design." He went to the board and started talking about a bonus pool to be made from profits and a stock option plan. He was determined not to let the meeting end on the negative note of the eleven people "not to be employed."
"Stock options?" Minnie asked. "For everyone?"