She Let Her Guard Down

Sometimes during the crisis period, at the end of a torturous long day, Rivers would reveal her humanness to her direct reports, particularly her chief accounting officer (CAO) and her chief operations officer (COO), Sharolyn Clark. Clark vividly remembers one evening when Rivers came into her office and slumped down on the couch. “Suddenly this very attractive woman with the most beautiful skin in the world looked like she had aged 20 years in one day. It shocked me to see her like that.” Rivers shared that she had not been sleeping at nights and said that there were days when she was physically ill and did not know whether she would make it through. “When I got home that night, I practically shook,” Clark said. “I realized this wasn’t a big corporation with huge, deep pockets like the one I’d come from. This was a person’s livelihood.” Clark always felt that she had “treated the money like it was important,” but after that conversation with Rivers, Clark became a “bulldog” about going after companies that owed Andavo money.

She Kept Her Promise

Even with severe belt tightening, the expectation of a new piece of business a few months down the road, and a fully committed workforce, financial ends were not meeting, and cash was drying up. In November—almost 2 months after the terrorist attacks—Andavo could not meet its payroll. Tapping into a bank line of credit was not an option; when Andavo’s credit line had come up for renewal in September, the bank backed out, saying that the travel industry was no longer viable. Determined to keep her promise to Andavo employees, Rivers funded the business with several hundred thousand dollars from her personal assets, borrowing from her retirement fund, and taking second mortgages on real estate investments.

She Delivered Bad News

Meanwhile, the California office was feeling neglected. While Rivers spent one full week a month at their office, the 20-person team wanted more; they wanted a full-time person to manage them. At first, Rivers had to tell them that a manager’s salary simply was not in the budget and that they would have to manage as a team for a while. When it became clear that that approach was not working, Rivers hired a manager. Six months later, Rivers had to deliver more bad news. The new manager was not doing the job and had to be terminated.

She Admitted Her Mistakes

“ It would have been easy to just say she was a bad manager, but she wasn’t,” Rivers told the group the next morning. “I made a hiring mistake.” Calling it an “error in judgment,” Rivers said that she was sorry but that she could not afford to hire another manager. She encouraged the group to work out their differences and try the team approach again. “You guys can make this work. I know you can.”

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