Are You on the Right Track? Part 2

Can You Slay the Demons of Overwork?

Mike Baker always wanted to run his own business. Growing up in northwest Arkansas, in the shadow of Wal-Mart and of Tyson Foods, he adopted a pretty bleak view of living his life as somebody else's employee. "I just knew that they would never pay you enough to get ahead," he recalls. "It wouldn't be in their interests."

Even so, Baker hadn't yet made his breakaway when he was already in his midthirties. His first career had already run its course: a 13-year tour of duty in the U.S. Army, including a successful run as an Oklahoma-based recruiter. That career ended when he quit in the early 1990s, rather than accept a transfer to Korea. Afterward, with only a high-school education, he bounced around in various jobs and ended up working on the loading dock at a Levi Strauss denim plant in Fayetteville, Arkansas. It was sweaty, repetitive work that paid $9.75 an hour, without even the pretense of a career track.

Eager to try something else, Baker began listing oddities for sale on eBay, the online auction service. He fiddled with eBay for a couple of hours before work each day; he checked his listings the moment he got home. Before long, he realized that this might be his big chance. A box of 1,000 miscellaneous mass-produced photos and posters, which he had acquired for less than $100, turned out to be a gold mine when the pictures were listed one at a time on eBay. People across the United States bid as much as $65 apiece for individual prints. When Levi Strauss closed its denim plant in late 1997, Baker instantly started a new career as a full-time seller on eBay.

For the first few months, everything clicked perfectly. Baker quickly became a clearinghouse, finding dealers who were eager to sell him boxes of Michael Jordan posters, Stevie Ray Vaughan pictures or, best of all, art prints. Then he resold them, one at a time, on eBay. Buyers paid double or triple -- or even more -- than what the items had cost Baker. Yet they felt that they were getting a good deal.

As Baker's sales volume soared, something jarring happened. What had started as a pleasant hobby became an exhausting collection of four or five jobs all rolled into one. Each day began with marketing and sales at 6 AM, as Baker started typing his latest "for sale" listings and then posting 100 or more of them on the Internet. At 10:30 AM, he collected the daily mail and turned into the finance department, sorting through dozens of small checks and making sure that he knew what each customer expected to get. There was no time for lunch: By the time the checks were processed, he needed to head into a large, insulated shed behind his house in Springdale, Arkansas and become the shipping department. There, he darted back and forth among vast rows of shelves, looking for everything from Monet or Van Gogh prints to sassy pictures of dogs playing poker and cats dressed up as sushi chefs. Each time that he found the right print, he rolled it up, slipped it into a narrow packing tube, and pasted on an address label. Just before 5 PM, he would head to the post office to mail the day's output.

Dinner was a blur, hastily gulped down with his wife and four children, before Baker headed back to his computer to become the customer-service department. Each evening, he dashed off dozens of emails, trying to straighten out lost shipments or to answer detailed queries about his wares. He unfailingly answered every stranger's email, partly out of politeness -- and partly out of a desire to offer the best customer service, and as a result, have one of the best feedback ratings on eBay.

By early 1999, more than 5,000 customers had posted positive comments about Baker on eBay's site. It earned him a coveted red star on his eBay biography page, plus the intoxicating feeling that every day, more people across the United States publicly said that Mike Baker was a good merchant. Still, in his own household, he wasn't a hero anymore.

"I was up until 1 AM every night, seven nights a week," Baker recalls. "I was getting really stressed out. My kids were telling me to slow down. They kept saying, 'Dad, we never see you. You're at that computer all the time.'" His 13-year-old daughter, Amanda, wanted a horse. His 16-year-old son, Mitchell, wanted to see his dad at high-school football games. His wife, Sharon, wanted a family vacation, even if it just meant driving to Oklahoma City for a few days. Everything else in his life was being put on hold so that he could keep growing his eBay business.

Finally, Baker realized he was at the breaking point. In the summer of 1999, he hired his mother and father, both retired, to help each weekday from 10 AM to 2 PM. His mother, Earlene, took charge of processing incoming checks. His father, Delbert, a one-time chicken-farm owner, helped operate the shipping room. Soon they were joined by Baker's oldest son, 21-year-old Michael, and by Michael's friend, Jason Norton. By year's end, Baker had five relatives or family friends on the payroll, all at $12 an hour. He was nervous at first about the extra expenses, but soon realized that his earnings could support the costs -- while the added peace of mind would be invaluable.