It’s a late-winter weeknight in Lake Forest, and family burdens being what they are, people are late for the seven o’clock get-together. The guests, all of them women, trickle in gradually and take their seats in the living room of Bill and Judy Wingader. The room is tastefully decorated with a chintz sofa, wing chairs, a yellow rug, ersatz flowers in baskets, and a ceramic cat lounging on the hearth.
“This must be some new form of group therapy,” cracks a woman in a blazer.
Steve has a full head of hair, and so do the women, but he still touts Nu Skin’s “hair fitness preparation.” He never says the liquid actually grows hair, as the Upjohn Company’s Rogaine does–Rogaine is the only FDA-approved battler against male pattern baldness. Instead, says Steve, the Nu Skin substance “increases the circulation in your hair” and so “encourages new hair growth.” Rogaine, on the other hand, contains drugs, and Steve notes, “We don’t know what effects those drugs could have.”
“When you’ve done basically the same thing for close to 30 years, as Bill has, you go through a burnout stage,” says Judy. “Besides, if you’re entrepreneurial at all–and we all are–you want to be on the threshold of what’s going on in business. And Nu Skin is. It’s a recession-proof business, because people always want to look good.”
One day in late October, Bill Wingader got off the train at the Milwaukee Road station in Lake Forest to find a card stuck on his windshield. “The Ultimate Opportunity,” read the headline. “For the first time in your life you have the chance to position yourself on the ground floor of the most innovative, creative new company in America. Right now you are only 24 months away from financial independence.” Bill was advised to call the number at the bottom.
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Still, Bill says, he was curious enough about the financial rewards promised–and bored enough with his long commute and the predictability of bond underwriting–to make a phone call. He got a recording, in a man’s voice, that purported to be on behalf of “a group of business executives who have chosen to give up the corporate rat race.” The man said that “within a few short years” you could triple your present income. “One last thought,” the man concluded. “If you had been listening to this very recording in 1954 and heard about flipping hamburgers and golden arches and a clown, would you have left your name and number?”
The Wingaders’ two grown sons live at home, and Mike quickly joined his parents in their enthusiasm. But Steve, the elder, resisted. “My dad really got into this, and he’d mention it around the house all the time,” says Steve. “I’d say, ‘Look, this is a pyramid scheme.’ I thought to myself, what is he thinking?” One Saturday afternoon in December, when father and son were watching TV, Bill besought Steve to give him a good listen. “In what my dad told me, I saw the opportunity,” says Steve.
