Carlton Whitaker found rich rewards in good deeds and deep faith.
By G.D. GEARINO, Staff Writer
Carlton Whitaker takes care of business with his ever-present cell phone while visiting the Mitchell's salon at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh. Whitaker overcame an uncertain past to become vice president of the chain.
RALEIGH -- Carlton Whitaker drives a Mercedes these days, a 560 SL to be precise. That's a two-door model that goes real fast and will set you back an amount of money each month that's more like a mortgage payment than a car payment.
He dresses well, too. His suits are expensive; his ties are knotted with a surgeon's fastidiousness; his shirts are always buttoned at the neck. And while he hasn't left his barber much to work with, what hair is there is professionally short and trim.
Whitaker's office is practically a shrine to modern motivational utterances. There's a framed essay, on the value of persistence, titled "Don't Quit." There's another essay -- by the late football coach Vince Lombardi, a man famously incapa ble of coming to grips with the notion that his team occasionally might lose -- titled "What it takes to be number one." On the wall is a large photograph of an eagle, with a rumination on leadership that declares leaders "don't flock, you find them one a t a time." On the credenza are several dozen inspirational audio tapes from the Injoy Life Club's Dr. John C. Maxwell, a minister and motivational speaker from Atlanta.
Clever sayings and properly knotted ties aren't proof of success, however. In fact, they are sometimes the way you fake success. If you graduate from a good school, use your connections to ease into middle management and learn a few phrases from whatever business text happens to be the philosophy du jour, it can be years before anyone figures out you're incompetent or clueless. Or both.
Somebody forgot to tell Whitaker. He did it all the wrong way. He started in the back of the pack and earned what he got.
"He just came up to me one Sunday afternoon and said, 'I'd like you to consider me for a job one day'," said Mark Mitchell, owner of Mark Anthony Inc. "In my mind, I'm thinking, what in the world am I going to get him to do?"
It was not an unreasonable doubt. Mitchell, the owner of a chain of hair salons, is a man who plays golf with Dean Smith, serves as chairman of a state licensing body and parks in a reserved space only a few steps from the door of the office building he owns. He has what in rocketry is called throw weight. Whitaker, on the other hand, was an eighth-grade dropout asking a fellow church member for a job. And being none too subtle about it, either.
"I kept hearing [Mitchell] talk about how good his business was," Whitaker said. "And I was starting to wonder how long I wanted to kick carpet."
That's what Whitaker did then: kick carpet out of his truck and tack it down in other people's homes. Today, he's vice president of Mark Anthony, effectively overseeing the daily operation of a $10 million business. And while it's easy to n ote that he's a long way from his roots in the rural edge of Garner -- where he grew up unhappily, quit school and almost made a hash of his life -- it would be wrong. He's not a long way from there at all. He still lives in his childhood home.
His story -- a hardscrabble life, eventual success and salvation in the Lord -- is one that could come straight from one of Maxwell's motivational sermons.
Whitaker's home was a place where drunkenness was common, and where four stepfathers moved through over the years. Whitaker credits the men with trying to bring order and calm to the home, but they never could. Still, two died trying: one killed by his own hand, the other brought down by natural causes as he mowed the lawn.
As a result, Whitaker, 47, was a troubled youth, albeit in a time when that was a euphemism for truancy and mouthiness rather than assault and rape. He describes himself this way: "Troublemaker and total failure ... bully, had a bad attitu de, just resented authority." Not surprisingly, the principal at his Garner school told Whitaker he was headed for real trouble. Not surprisingly, Whitaker's response was to quit school rather than reform.
A 15-year-old dropout isn't a valued commodity in the job market, however. Whitaker worked for a time at the farm across Fayetteville Road, shoveling silage for the livestock. Then he became an egg gatherer at Kildaire Farms in Cary, when i t actually was a farm and not just a nostalgic subdivision name. Eventually, he joined his brother's carpet-laying operation.
This is when, finally, the value of hard work and dependability set in, Whitaker said. "No one taught me that. I had to learn it, to get the things I wanted."
This also is when he became a committed Christian. Whitaker, his wife and their three sons joined Midway Baptist Church in the mid-1970s. The congregants of Midway Baptist, whose sense of order is so profound that the church not only mainta ins its own grounds but also landscapes the median of U.S. 401 where it passes in front of the church, have no desire to divide their spiritual and everyday lives. The same instinct that compels them to host a visit from Jerry Falwell just before the 1996 election -- an event that was a thinly disguised anti-Clinton pep rally -- also compels them to make charity and good deeds a daily practice.
It also has prompted Whitaker to focus the same laser-beam intensity on both his job and his desire to help.
He spent five years working with his brother before buying his own tools and becoming an independent contractor, putting down flooring for retailers. That's how he passed the next 15 years -- until Mark Mitchell, against his own instinct and contrary to a lot of good advice, decided to give Whitaker the job he'd asked for.
Mitchell's hesitancy was understandable. Mark Anthony Inc. operates 13 hair salons in malls across the Triangle. It has 180 employees, and almost all of them are women and almost all of them are trained in the cosmetic arts. Whitaker was ne ither of those things.
Instead, he was a guy who couldn't even claim to have as much education as a high-school dropout; a guy who had no apparent skill of use to a hair-salon owner; and a guy who sometimes didn't quite get his verbs and nouns in agreement.
"But he said, 'Anything breaks, I can fix it for you'," Mitchell recalled. "Cleaning and delivering, too. Finally one day, I felt like it was the thing do."
When Whitaker showed up the first morning, Mitchell gave him a list of things to have done by the end of the week. Every chore was finished by that afternoon.
On his second day of employment, Whitaker realized the job was his to create.
He broke it down into three parts. First, he simply did what had to be done: unstopping toilets, changing light bulbs, building shelves for storage rooms and figuring out how the company computer operates. Second, he began shadowing Mitchell, trying to l earn what the owner knew and how he worked. Third, he began a relentless campaign to ... well, woo the company's female ranks.
He oiled their scissors. He repaired their hair dryers. He adjusted their chairs. He kept his pager charged and made himself available for any crisis, even those unrelated to work. Need a flat tire changed? Call Carlton. Locked your keys in your car? Cal l Carlton. Broken down on the side of the road? Call Carlton.
In fact, it's best that you don't get caught between Whitaker and a good deed. You surely would be crushed.
His commitment to helping his fellow employees is legendary within the company. When hired, everyone is given his home telephone number and pager number and told to call in an emergency. He has pulled himself out of bed at odd hours often enough to make his willingness to help acknowledged fact.
"Everybody here loves him," said the receptionist at one of the Mitchell salons, reached at random by telephone. He'll really change a tire? Drive a stylist home in bad weather? Fix a broken radiator hose? "Oh, yeah. That's him."
This is, of course, textbook procedure for making yourself invaluable: You take care of business, tackle jobs before someone tells you to, pay attention to how the boss operates, read trade publications to learn about the industry and build loyalty and a ffection among your fellow employees.
Then, when four years have passed, you find yourself being named general manager. Barely a year after that, you're named vice president.
At Mark Anthony, that title means something. Unlike some companies, where there are so many vice presidents underfoot you're tempted to call critter control, there is only one vice president at Mark Anthony. Mitchell is in charge, and Whitaker, as he puts it, is "the man under the man."
Increasingly, however, Whitaker is the man while Mitchell tends to other things. Mitchell is past president of the International Chain Salon Association and chairman of the state Board of Cosmetic Arts. But he doesn't fret when he's away fr om the office. For instance, Mitchell is so comfortable with Whitaker's stewardship that he was uninvolved with the construction and opening of the latest salon. "I never even went over there 'til it was open," Mitchell said.
But then, he didn't have to. As long as Whitaker has his repair tools in the Mercedes' trunk and the pager on his belt, all is well in Mark Anthony's little corner of the hair world.
Just don't get in the way of a good deed.
G.D. Gearino can be reached at dang@nando.com or 919-829-4802
Copyright © 1998 The News and Observer Publishing Company
Raleigh, North Carolina