Read Online Where We Belong by Hoda Kotb - Free Book Online Page A

effective for its customers. The business model was unique (at the time) to the headhunting industry and would target emerging technology companies, starving for personnel and productivity during the high-tech heyday of the early nineties. The concept was solid but would take time to flourish. Craig found that his fourteen years in the hard-knocks world of football helped him stay resilient in the face of frequent setbacks. He found, too, that the team-building skills he’d honed as a quarterback translated well into the management of his staff.
    “We had a real culture of achievement. We did Outward Bound, rock climbing, white-water rafting, and ropes courses. We were always trying to deploy the very best of the human condition in the benefit of our customer and in the benefit of our company.”
    Still, the building process was taxing. The company nearly went broke one year into the restructuring.
    “I used to tell people that once you own your own company you start to sleep like a baby. You wake up every hour crying,” he says. “There was never any real relief as we got bigger, because we could have a victory in our Bellevue office but in our North Carolina office there was a crisis. There was always this corner of the attic that was on fire and you had to deal with that fire quickly or the whole house was going to burn down.”
    Even with seventeen straight quarters of company growth, Craig found the lows in the corporate climate to be more prominent than the highs.
    “In football if you won, you could walk off the field, relax, and enjoy the win for a few hours. But there were only a few Fridays I remember driving home from the office feeling pretty good, feeling like a winner. Those were few and far between. Most of the time,” he admits, “I felt discouraged and incomplete.”
    His relationship with Kathi was the bright spot. “She was the positive energy behind a lot of this process.”
    The couple’s relationship deepened. They shared a vision of the future with each other and without children. While Kathi loved kids and babysat her nieces and nephews for weeks at a time, she too would never have biological children. Several years earlier, she’d developed an infection in her reproductive organs that resulted in her becoming infertile. Kathi felt fulfilled by her loving family, good friends, stimulating career, and now her close relationship with Craig.
    “We fell in love and we had a goal together and we were the ultimate buddies,” Craig says. “We were very happy being consumed with each other. My goal was our goal, which was to sell the company and become ski bums. I think all of us have a real desire to embrace and understand freedom, and that’s what retirement is supposed to give you.”
    Kathi adds, “Both of us had similar backgrounds in that we were very focused from college on work; we never took vacations, we never went anywhere, we just worked. So, as we grew together and were becoming successful, we really dreamed about retiring at forty and being able to travel and not have so much stress every single day.”
    In October 1995, at forty, Craig sold Juntunen Inc. to Fort Lauderdale–based Interim Services Inc. for an amount that would allow him and Kathi to never work again. The eight months prior to the sale were exhausting; the process involved discerning which of three interested companies Craig would choose. He was clandestinely managing the potential acquisitions while also running the day-to-day operations of Juntunen Inc. He was physically and emotionally drained when the day of the sale, October fifth, finally arrived.
    “It happened on a Thursday and we had everybody in the conference room, their lawyers and my guys. You would have thought I was selling IBM, they had so much paperwork,” he recalls. “It was unbelievable how much stuff I had to sign. It took all afternoon. I remember when it was over, we all shook hands, and it was about eight o’clock at night. I took Kath