PhillyDeals: A longtime company man strikes out on his own

Larry McCarthy used to work for credit-card lender MBNA Corp., one of the big Philadelphia-area service companies that thrived in the years of Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, the debt-fueled, seemingly endless Indian summer of the long, now-lamented U.S. economic boom.

MBNA's bosses saw the writing on the wall. In 2005 they sold the company to bigger, dumber Bank of America, which thought it could still make money if it cut costs. McCarthy took on a new job - "managing the transition process" - reassigning, retraining, and dismissing staff.

"That became my role for the next five years," said McCarthy, as B of A went on to absorb U.S. Trust, Merrill Lynch, and, disastrously, Countrywide Mortgage.

In 2008, as bad loans finally froze the financial markets, Bank of America went on government assistance and had to stop buying new firms. It offered McCarthy what amounted to a demotion. The transition man, downsized.

McCarthy turned it down. "Some soul-searching," he recalled. "I was never the person who hated having a boss. I was loyal. I did what they asked." But he came to believe, at 50, it was time to leave corporate America. "Nobody's happy," he said. "Companies will continue to struggle, at least for the next few years. I thought it was time to go out on my own."

McCarthy and his wife invested part of his severance package in a regional franchise of Doc Popcorn's PopKiosks, owned by Rob and Renee Israel of Boulder, Colo. McCarthy has hired 15 people - from teenagers to his kid sister - at his flagship Christiana Mall site. He plans another at Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, and more to come.

McCarthy doesn't expect to recoup his corporate salary soon. It's enough for him to work hard, in tune with the times.

People in his parents' generation hoped to work for big manufacturers like DuPont "all their lives," McCarthy said. People in his own generation job-hopped, often among the big financial companies that came to dominate the economy in the late 1900s and early 2000s.

"It's changing again, dramatically," he said. "You see a lot more self-employed people. Kids don't expect to go to a company anymore. We need to be flexible in how we work."

No magic

While the McCarthys are coming to grips with reality, the government in Washington is still fighting about how to get back to the way things were in 1990 - or maybe 1890.