Where We Belong (9 page)

“It’s kind of like when a sunny day shows up,” he says. “You don’t question it; you just enjoy it.”

By September 1990, the buyout was complete and Craig began to bring to life his vision of diversifying Juntunen Inc. and making the company more effective for its customers. The business model was unique (at the time) to the headhunting industry and would target emerging technology companies, starving for personnel and productivity during the high-tech heyday of the early nineties. The concept was solid but would take time to flourish. Craig found that his fourteen years in the hard-knocks world of football helped him stay resilient in the face of frequent setbacks. He found, too, that the team-building skills he’d honed as a quarterback translated well into the management of his staff.

“We had a real culture of achievement. We did Outward Bound, rock climbing, white-water rafting, and ropes courses. We were always trying to deploy the very best of the human condition in the benefit of our customer and in the benefit of our company.”

Still, the building process was taxing. The company nearly went broke one year into the restructuring.

“I used to tell people that once you own your own company you start to sleep like a baby. You wake up every hour crying,” he says. “There was never any real relief as we got bigger, because we could have a victory in our Bellevue office but in our North Carolina office there was a crisis. There was always this corner of the attic that was on fire and you had to deal with that fire quickly or the whole house was going to burn down.”

Even with seventeen straight quarters of company growth, Craig found the lows in the corporate climate to be more prominent than the highs.

“In football if you won, you could walk off the field, relax, and enjoy the win for a few hours. But there were only a few Fridays I remember driving home from the office feeling pretty good, feeling like a winner. Those were few and far between. Most of the time,” he admits, “I felt discouraged and incomplete.”

His relationship with Kathi was the bright spot. “She was the positive energy behind a lot of this process.”

The couple’s relationship deepened. They shared a vision of the future with each other and without children. While Kathi loved kids and babysat her nieces and nephews for weeks at a time, she too would never have biological children. Several years earlier, she’d developed an infection in her reproductive organs that resulted in her becoming infertile. Kathi felt fulfilled by her loving family, good friends, stimulating career, and now her close relationship with Craig.

“We fell in love and we had a goal together and we were the ultimate buddies,” Craig says. “We were very happy being consumed with each other. My goal was our goal, which was to sell the company and become ski bums. I think all of us have a real desire to embrace and understand freedom, and that’s what retirement is supposed to give you.”

Kathi adds, “Both of us had similar backgrounds in that we were very focused from college on work; we never took vacations, we never went anywhere, we just worked. So, as we grew together and were becoming successful, we really dreamed about retiring at forty and being able to travel and not have so much stress every single day.”

In October 1995, at forty, Craig sold Juntunen Inc. to Fort Lauderdale–based Interim Services Inc. for an amount that would allow him and Kathi to never work again. The eight months prior to the sale were exhausting; the process involved discerning which of three interested companies Craig would choose. He was clandestinely managing the potential acquisitions while also running the day-to-day operations of Juntunen Inc. He was physically and emotionally drained when the day of the sale, October fifth, finally arrived.

“It happened on a Thursday and we had everybody in the conference room, their lawyers and my guys. You would have thought I was selling IBM, they had so much paperwork,” he recalls. “It was unbelievable how much stuff I had to sign. It took all afternoon. I remember when it was over, we all shook hands, and it was about eight o’clock at night. I took Kath to dinner and I thought it was going to be this huge celebration, but I was numb. I was tired; it was over. It didn’t feel how I thought it was going to feel.”

Plus, although Craig had finally completed a grueling marathon, the terms of the sale required that he run even farther. He had to stay on with the company for three more years to ensure a smooth transition. The new CEO had a more structured management style than Craig, so the company’s cultural environment changed and his former employees struggled to adapt.

“If I was gone it would have been hard for me just to hear about it, but to live it was really hard,” he says. “I was showing up for work without a whole hell of a lot to do. The last year was one of the worst years of my life.”

Kathi stayed on and worked for the new company as well. Within a year of the sale, another transition: Craig asked Kathi to become his wife.

“When he did propose I was like,
Okay, I’m not giving him any time to change his mind
,” she says with a smile. “I said, ‘Can you get ready to get married within two months?’ ”

On October 5, 1996, exactly one year after the sale of the company, Craig and Kathi married. They were committed to each other and to their dual dream of one day doing what they wanted when they wanted. That day turned out to be October 10, 1998. At ages forty-three and forty respectively, Craig and Kathi officially retired. They said good-bye to work and hello to Hawaii for ten days to map out how the rest of their lives would unfold.

In May 1999, the Juntunens moved to Vail, one of their favorite places to ski, snowshoe, and hike. They spent all of their time together and with their beloved golden Labrador retrievers, Buster and Bubba.

“When we first retired,” Craig says, “I woke up every morning pinching myself and giggling in the sense that I didn’t have to deal with anything anymore, and it was such a sense of freedom. My morning ritual was walking our Labs past the golf course, and we’d go down to the creek and I’d wash my face in the water and we’d watch the sun come up over the Rockies. It was very peaceful and I felt really safe. I didn’t understand how calm things could get, how slow things could get. It was very different from this whirlwind we had been on.”

For fun, Craig went through a clinic to become a ski instructor and got hired for $9.00 an hour giving lessons at a local resort. Both young and healthy, Craig and Kathi also spent extended periods of time traveling the world. They voyaged aboard small cruise ships to Italy, Turkey, and Greece, where they biked, hiked, and explored.

Snowshoeing in Vail, 1999
(Courtesy of Kathi Juntunen)

“I had traveled the country for work,” Kathi says, “but I had never traveled internationally, so those were just great days.”

In 2000, it made sense for the active couple to buy another house, this time in Arizona, which allowed them to play golf when Colorado was less inviting.

“In the early days of retirement, we basically lived like a dog,” Craig says. “There were the ritual undertakings—you slept, you ate, and you got a little exercise every day. The biggest decisions we made were, ‘Are we going to use a three wood or a driver off the tee?’ and ‘Are we drinking red or white wine for dinner?’ Life couldn’t have been any easier for the first year.”

There was abundance: recreation, travel, fabulous restaurants, and cocktail parties on the country club circuit. More of a homebody than Kathi, Craig tolerated the high-end gatherings and immersed himself in countless rounds of golf with friends. As a couple, they were very happy and rarely had any source of conflict. However, there were some adjustments. Craig was used to relying on support staff as CEO of a company.

“We had to work through that,” Kathi says, chuckling. “He would scream my name out to come help him do something. I was like, ‘Okay, time out.’ That was a bit challenging.”

But, in hindsight, Craig calls the allure of retirement one of life’s greatest tricks.

“I think life does have to have purpose, and I think we do benefit from some sort of tension in our lives, to a healthy degree—some problem you’re trying to solve, some piece of the puzzle you’re trying to fit. I think the human condition likes to be challenged and intrigued. The problem with retirement is that most of what’s in our forefront are memories of how it was. You’re not looking forward to anything other than another round of golf or another party. There isn’t anything that’s pressing in front of you, so all the really good parts of your life are in the rearview mirror. We’d go to these cocktail parties and everybody was talking about what
used
to happen. We were very seldom talking about what we were doing tomorrow, because we knew what we were doing tomorrow—we were going to go to the golf course, play golf, have a few cocktails, and go to somebody’s house for dinner . . . where we’d again talk about what we
used
to do,” Craig says with a laugh.

In 2000, Kathi took a job at a family learning center teaching elementary school students. She also spent a month in Mexico volunteering at an orphanage. Opting out of the tight-knit country club lifestyle was delicate, but Kathi was feeling more connected with her Catholic upbringing and less with what had become a rather unrewarding routine.

“It just began to feel a little narcissistic, a little too,
Is this all we’re going to do for the next forty years of our lives?
Something didn’t feel right.”

Craig describes himself in the second year of retirement as chronically empty rather than bored; conflicted, too.

“There was a period of personal mutiny going on because after all, this was the plan and we got there and it was such a luxurious, and in many respects, such a good life,” he says, “so how could I question that?”

In August 2001, Craig was offered an intriguing opportunity that would take him back to a place where his most gratifying memories were made—the football field. His college roommate, who had become the head football coach at the University of Nevada, invited Craig to spend a week observing players participating in the Wolf Pack training camp. Craig agreed, and ultimately, his old friend valued his insightful input. The coach then suggested to a colleague, the head football coach at Arizona State University, that Craig could offer fresh eyes on his football program, too. By 2004, Craig had accepted a full-time job with the team as director of player development and assistant to the head coach. Staff members lightheartedly dubbed him the Architect of Attitude for his impactful relationships with players.

“I was a cross between a sports psychologist and a success coach. I usually had about seven or eight one-on-ones a day, and I’d have confidential conversations with the players. We’d talk about life—and football—and then I’d tell the coach patterns I was hearing from the team,” Craig explains. “Then we did a whole bunch of character-development stuff in the off-season, things I learned in my business that I just contoured to football. I really loved it.”

Kathi watched Craig flourish and rediscover a meaningful direction in life. She told him at dinner one night that she hadn’t seen him as happy in years. Her own search was still under way.

“I was actually jealous.
My God, he got it! He found it!
It was a perfect blend of his skill sets—nurturing young men, football; he loves the whole team sports thing,” she says. “I love sports, too, so it was a good thing for us as a couple. I really thought,
This is it
.”

But was it? On a beautiful autumn morning in Arizona, a routine round of golf answered that question.

Craig knew of Rick Federico because they belonged to the same country club in Scottsdale. They’d shaken hands on the golf course but never shared a conversation. Rick was known as a community leader, a quality guy, and a very skilled businessman. He was also a successful fund-raiser for his alma mater, the University of Tennessee. In fall 2005, Craig received an e-mail from Rick asking if he’d like to be included in a threesome for Saturday golf. ASU had a bye week, so Craig agreed; it would be nice to pick Rick’s brain about improving fund-raising efforts at ASU. That morning, the men decided to tee off on the back nine and soon began exchanging details about their personal lives. Craig beamed about Kathi. Then it was Rick’s turn.

“I was intrigued by the way Rick spoke,” Craig recalls. “He spoke from the heart.”

Rick and his wife had raised three boys and took great pride in their kids’ accomplishments and character. As Rick grabbed a six iron, he added that several years earlier, he and his wife had adopted two little girls from Haiti. Ting! He launched the ball into the middle of the green.

From that swing forward, the golf game for Craig took a backseat to his curiosity about Rick’s “second” family. He’d never talked to someone about adopting, let alone from another country. He wasn’t even sure where Haiti was on the world map. He asked Rick, “Do they call you Dad?”

Rick said yes.

“When he talked about his daughters he would tear up,” Craig says. “This was not just something that he agreed to with his wife and he was a passenger on the ride. It was important to him. It mattered.”