Former Executive Avoids Falling Into ‘Lost Generation’

Back in the early 1990s, Bill Sanders was a symbol of the economic times: a high-paid executive thrown out of work by a corporate downsizing.

After being stripped of his $140,000-a-year pay package and the perks of executive life, he struggled through more than a year of unsuccessful job-hunting, an ill-fated investment in the restaurant business and nagging self-doubt.

Today, the 57-year-old Sanders is earning a six-figure income again. And while he now has a single assistant rather than a division of 200 people under his authority, Sanders is thriving in his new career as a stockbroker in West Los Angeles.

In the broadest sense, Sanders’ fall and subsequent comeback dovetail with broad swings in the national economy. Ever-changing business conditions have triggered widespread layoffs in long-established businesses even as new jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities emerge in other industries, providing a fresh start in a new economy for many victims of downsizing.

Sanders’ personal journey, in fact, is an illustration of how someone--largely through talent, persistence and a willingness to adapt--rebounded professionally in middle age and avoided joining the “lost generation” of workers whose careers never fully recover after a layoff.

“I wish I had done it years ago,” said Sanders, a slim, earnest man with a calm, flat voice. “I am just focused on what I do, and there’s no interference. It’s as pure a form of entrepreneurship as there can be.”

Still, getting there was hardly easy. Sanders struggled with bouts of disillusionment after losing his last job in mid-1990 as director of information services for Candle Corp. By late 1991, his will to keep pursuing such jobs flagged.

He became convinced that the job market for chief information officers, the executives at big companies who oversee data-processing operations, was glutted.

“There are people as qualified as or more qualified than me who are out of work as well,” Sanders said in December 1991 when he was profiled in a Times story on workers then caught up in a rising tide of joblessness and economic distress in Southern California.

Sharp cutbacks in the executive and managerial ranks at the time “cast legions of people into the street,” said Gary Kaplan, an executive recruiter in Pasadena who advised Sanders. “He [Sanders] was a classic example of the type of individual that was impacted.”

Experts still are trying to clarify the extent to which white collar workers have been hit by downsizing. But a survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 1.9 million managerial and professional specialty workers--a group including everyone from executives to engineers to doctors--lost at least one job between 1991 and 1993. That reflected 6.1% of all the workers in that job category.

And, overall, the managers and professionals who managed to land new full-time jobs by February 1994 earned 2.3% less than in their previous positions.

Sanders, instead of sinking into despair after his layoff, kept job-hunting and also got into the restaurant business. He poured $225,000 into a Mexican fast-food franchise in Culver City called Mrs. Garcia’s. The plan was to use the restaurant as the starting point for a management company that would run a network of fast-food outlets.

The reality was far less glamorous, especially compared to the days when Sanders had a big staff that included a personal secretary to take care of such things as arranging his doctor appointments. In his new life as a restaurant owner, on days when the delivery boy would call in sick, Sanders would deliver the burritos.

Worst of all, the restaurant never took off and eventually turned into a financial and emotional drain. Sanders blamed the failure partly on the over-saturated market for fast food and partly on his shortcomings as a restaurateur. Locked into a long-term lease, he wasn’t able to pull out of the investment until earlier this year, after suffering an overall loss of about $100,000.

As Sanders cast about for ideas and looked without any luck into other ventures, the notion of becoming a stockbroker began to take hold. Sanders had long been an enthusiastic stock trader. Largely through his investment profits, Sanders managed even during his days of unemployment to maintain the family’s upper-middle-class lifestyle and to stay in the home they have lived in for 30 years in an away-from-the-beach section of Malibu.

The big obstacle to becoming a broker was Sanders’ image both of himself and of what is involved in sales work. He rejected the idea of getting involved in a “hard-selling, pressure type of thing, where people would be prone to brush you off rather than hear what you want to talk about.”

Soon after entering the field, however, he found being a stockbroker more gratifying than anything he had done. He liked both advising sophisticated investors and helping people with substantial assets but little financial expertise, including retirees and widows.

His comforting, understated manner also has been a plus. Sanders’ wife of 37 years, Bonnie, said: “Bill is the kind of broker who people like to refer their mothers to.”

Another advantage that Sanders had was that, while in corporate life, he traveled within a circle of executives with high incomes and substantial assets--prime prospects for a stockbroker. Today, those old contacts account for many of his more than 150 clients as a broker at the Westwood office of Oppenheimer & Co.

Still, Sanders had to make adjustments. Mark Towbin, who is Sanders’ immediate boss at Oppenheimer, said Sanders’ meticulous style and close attention to detail clashed with the often-frenetic pace of the brokerage business.

At first, Towbin said, “He was coming into my office every 30 seconds about every little thing. But now, I’d take an office full of Bills.”

Bonnie Sanders, a part-time elementary school teaching assistant, said her husband’s job satisfaction has made him more relaxed and more of a “people person.”

“Everyone notices he’s more mellow. And mellow has never been his trademark,” she added.

Kaplan, the executive recruiter, added that “if I called Bill Sanders today about a CIO [chief information officer] job, he’d be polite, but he’d tell me to get lost.”

Sanders put it more gently.

“In the last 25 years of my career [in corporate life], I achieved most of what I achieved through others. . . . I have come to realize that my real talent is in doing things myself. I didn’t like the dependence” on subordinates, Sanders said. “It took me many years, but I think I finally wound up as the right peg in the right hole.”