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Anything Is Possible
A wiindow coverings exec learns what it means to find your limits and push beyond them.

by Howard Shingle

We all know the window coverings industry is a people-oriented business. The relationships we form and nurture today can start a chain reaction leading to more and better business tomorrow. Some realize this is a pretty good way to live our personal lives as well. Bob Lee, Enhance Your Vision, Barrington, IL, is one of those people.

The last time we saw Lee he had just completed a 3,200-mile bicycle trip across the United States as part of an awareness and fundraising effort for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) (see D&WC, August 2001, page 24). Since then Lee has returned to the industry with his own, one-person custom window coverings business and has helped his son, Scott, start Spectrum Window Design, Denver, CO, but he hasn’t forsaken what he had learned earlier: There is more to living than working.

Typical of Lee, that’s likely to mean getting involved with a charity and do something different from his day-to-day activities. In September 2003, Bob and Scott Lee took a break from work to get involved in Face of America, a bicycle ride that began at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City on the second anniversary of September 11 and ended in Washington, DC. The event was sponsored by World T.E.A.M. Sports, “a phenomenal organization,” Lee says. “Their whole philosophy is bringing the abled and disabled together, to have no exclusion of anybody—anyone can be a member of the organization—and bring people from around the world together in unity and peace.”

To illustrate that point, Lee says last year’s 280-mile ride included cyclists from Kosovo, groups from Israel and Palestine riding together, Vietnamese representatives, one of the largest groups of blind cyclists ever riding together and amputees.

The event’s opening moments were particularly poignant. “To start out getting into New York on 9/11 and seeing all the memorial wreaths and seeing people still mourning their losses, to see the towers of light go up that evening really was an appropriate time to start the ride. It gave you time to reflect and to see what hatred can do in this world,” Lee says.

TEAMWORK
The ride had special meaning for Lee personally. Two months prior he had undergone colon cancer surgery and wasn’t sure of his ability to complete the trip. It was enabling to have his son with him. “I’ve helped him in the window coverings business, getting him started in Denver, and he was able to help pull his dad along, taking lead and making my ride a little bit easier,” Lee says.

After doing more than 60 miles on a tough morning, the two caught up with a group of eight other cyclists and together helped each other through the afternoon—and the miles ahead. “I knew I had 60 miles in the afternoon to go. We caught up with a group of guys and we clipped along at 19 miles an hour for the 60 miles. We had breaks, but it was that momentum, that team effort and working together that makes life easier.” Lee says.

“It gives you a new perspective when you go back to work. When you see so often how we paralyze ourselves and set limits for ourselves, you realize you’ve got to push through those. Going into the ride I didn’t know how I was going to do, but when you push through something you feel very good that you were able to do it.”

ENHANCE YOUR LIFE
Work and life do have at least one thing in common as far as Lee is concerned: the need to set goals and take on challenges. “Doing something like a World T.E.A.M. Sports is a good diversion and a good healthy challenge. Sometimes in business and life we don’t challenge ourselves enough,” he says

Getting back into the window coverings business after leaving Eastern Standard Corp., Baltimore, MD, in 1999, was a challenge Lee set for himself, but this time it’s a little different. “This is fun. I get to see a lot of homes and deal with a lot of lovely people. The negative of it is that many of them are short-term relationships. The positive is seeing the transition of bare, hard glass to beautiful window coverings that are soft and energy-efficient and offer ultraviolet protection. It’s fun.”

With a new focus on life and work, Lee finds he is both happy and successful. “I’ll do someplace between a half and three-quarters of a million [dollars in sales], but I can do that and not be reliant on other people except manufacturing people. I can do my own paperwork, I can do my own installing and I can do my own selling. I’d rather cap things here and be in charge of my life at this stage in life. I’ve climbed the [corporate] ladders and I don’t need the ladders—except for my stepstool.”