Chapter Two

If anyone could pull it off, she could. That's what friends and colleagues said when Roxanne Coady left New York in 1989 to open a bookstore in a small town.

Of course, they believed in her. She had been one of the top tax accountants in the country. She was whip- smart, driven, and tireless -- "on 82 different boards," as she likes to say, which is only a slight exaggeration. She even grew up in business: As a girl, she kept the books for her father's bakeries. "If you were to pick a dream person to start her own bookstore, it would be Roxanne," says friend and Connecticut Public Radio host Faith Middleton. "She's so smart about business."

Coady nearly proved everybody wrong.

For the first several years, R.J. Julia Independent Booksellers, located on the main drag in Madison, Connecticut, grew by leaps and bounds. The im-pressive growth, however, obscured a dotcomlike inability to turn a profit. Coady says that she ignored budgets and "blew probably $250,000" of the money that she and her husband, a former real-estate developer, had saved up. It was twice what she should have invested, but she couldn't resist going all out on free wine and food at book signings, stylish extra-strength bags, and excessive bonuses. "Instead of solving problems, I threw more money at them," she says. "I didn't run the store like a business."

As an accountant, Coady had always used her head. But as a bookseller and book lover, she let her heart take over. She built the most appealing bookstore she could imagine, while neglecting to build a sustainable business. "Now," she says, "I'm combining head and heart."

Thirteen years after dramatically changing careers, Coady, 54, has proven that she could pull it off after all. In the same time that nearly half of the independent bookstores in the country have closed, R.J. Julia has achieved more than $3 million in annual sales and a modest profit. And Coady, its ever-fashionable, opinionated, and animated owner, has made the transition from successful accountant to successful bookseller.

A Bookseller Waiting to Happen

Coady's passion for reading and her talent for accounting were inspired by her parents, who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to the United States in 1948, settling in New York's Lower East Side. Although her mother had yet to understand English, she read to her children anyway, pronouncing the words phonetically. Once Coady learned to read, she wanted to tackle every children's book in the library in alphabetical order. When she was in middle school, her father, a baker, purchased the first of 10 bakeries, called Em's, and brought her to a meeting with his accountant.

"Who's going to do the bookkeeping?" the accountant asked.

"She is," her father replied.

He wasn't joking. The accountant agreed to teach her, and Coady, the oldest of six, juggled school, family baby-sitting duties and payroll books until she left for college. "Now my father feels I work too hard," she says, laughing. "He says, 'You can't ride two horses with one ass.' I tell him, 'Daddy, this is what you raised me to do.' "

By the 1980s, Coady had become a partner and national tax director at BDO Seidman, the New Yorkffibased international accounting firm. She was the first woman selected for the job. "People tell me now, 'It must have been boring working with taxes,' " Coady says. "But I loved it." She had a 12th-floor corner office overlooking Central Park and was making about $250,000 a year. In 1988, she was featured on the cover of Money magazine, which dubbed her "the accountant's accountant."

Heady stuff, to be sure. But it wasn't enough to keep her there. "As much as I enjoyed the work, it wasn't enriching," Coady says. "It was in terms of dollars, but it wasn't enriching to my heart." At least not in the way that books had always been.

Even as she climbed the corporate ladder, Coady remained an insatiable reader. She would always carry a novel with her, stealing a few moments in a taxi, on the train, anywhere. She was forever recommending favorite titles to friends. "I ran a little library out of my house," she says. "People would say, 'Oh geez, that was the best book you gave me.' "

They were telling her something. It was time to make a change.