(FORTUNE Magazine) – BY THE TIME they hit their 50s, most chief executives aren't talking about the size of their biceps or how much iron they can pump. The chairman of Greyhound Corp. is different. John Teets has pummeled and punished his body into superb condition, and loves to talk about it. Teets is no gentler on the managers and employees of his $2.2-billion-a-year conglomerate, where he rules with a sidewalk-tough, confrontational style that borders on pure machismo. His manner of fixing up the sleepy hodgepodge of companies he inherited four years ago is so gung-ho that one vice president remarks, ''He'd rather kick a door down than turn the handle.'' ''I'm tough,'' Teets admits, ''tough like leather, with just enough give to take a beating all day long and not shatter.'' Finesse, tact, and Madison Avenue polish he hasn't got. His speech retains the harsh accent of Elgin, Illinois, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago where he grew up. At home he'll show off the weight machine, not the art on his walls. And Teets's two-fisted manner has shaken things up at company heaquarters in Phoenix. Since he took over, Teets (age 52, bicep 17, record bench press 385) has sold off 14 companies -- cutting the company's revenues nearly in half -- tangled / with Greyhound's biggest unions, and threatened to unload any other subsidiary that doesn't live up to his rigid standards. What's left is beginning to improve under his rough tutelage. Last year's $125 million in earnings was the second best in history, and profits for the first half of this year are up 25%. The stock price has doubled in three years. Return on equity, which dropped for several years, has bounced back to a recent 12%. ''There's a real turnaround under way,'' says Katherine Stults, a Dean Witter analyst. Teets predicts record earnings for 1985. Some of what's left is famous, such as Greyhound Bus Lines, which makes up about 25% of revenues, or Armour-Dial, purveyor of soap and canned hash, which contributes another 17%. Most of Greyhound's other operations are obscure, picked up during the 15-year reign of Teets's predecessor, Gerald Trautman. Among other things, the company provides check clearing, cleans airplanes, leases locomotives, builds buses, runs cruise ships and cafeterias, sells money orders, and insures home mortgages. Unconsolidated revenues from some of these boosted sales by another $538 million last year. Teets, who rose through the food and restaurant operations, finds his biggest headache now is the bus business, which has been broadsided by low- cost bus lines and airlines. In a company loaded with bus nostalgia, Teets is attacking the line's problems with a restaurant manager's eye for cost and a leatherhearted lack of sentiment. ''There's no romance to the bus business,'' he says. ''It's just so much luggage from the past.'' When a longtime bus executive protested a cost-cutting move, Teets displayed his own lack of romance by deriding even the buses' famous logo. ''When I'm cut,'' he said, ''I don't bleed little blue dogs.'' Teets touched off a violent seven-week strike in 1983 when he proposed a 17% wage and benefit cut to the Amalgamated Transit Union. He won a 15% giveback, but last year the lines had an operating loss of a million dollars anyway. Teets has begun shutting down marginal terminals, and franchising routes to other operators. In August he permanently laid off 1,500 of the bus lines' 11,000 employees, including 400 supervisors. The worst may not be over. Teets needs lower labor costs, and if he doesn't get them he says he will shed more routes and terminals. There is little reason to believe he's bluffing. When Teets became chief executive in 1981, Armour Food's $2-billion-a-year meatpacking operation was ! earning only $10 million a year. Teets concluded that overpriced union labor was the culprit. Two years ago, when the United Food and Commercial Workers union refused to cut wages, he shut down all 29 plants one Friday. He sold the slaughterhouses to ConAgra, which reopened them with 4,000 non-union workers the following Monday. That's hardly what you'd expect from the son of a crane operator whose job was to enforce construction union work rules around Chicago. But when Teets was 13, his father bought some earthmoving equipment and started a small construction company. The business was barely up and running, Teets recalls, when two union enforcers showed up at an excavation site and announced that his father was violating work rules. ''They said we had to have an oiler standing by the compressor all day long, and another guy here, and another guy there. My father said it would ruin him, and threw them off the site.'' When they left, Teets says, his father was stunned by the impracticality of the union work rules. ''He sat down shaking his head, and said to me, 'We've gone too far.' '' The enforcers never came back, and that seems to have impressed Teets. ''They knew my father would be tough,'' he says. A boyhood friend agrees. ''John's father was the kind who might look for a fight,'' says Greg Besinger, now a developer near Chicago. And the elder Teets demanded physical toughness from his four sons. ''We were always doing push-ups and pumping iron when I was growing up. If we got pushed around in school and didn't fight back, my father would spank us.'' Other activities in school proved more difficult; Teets was no scholar. The father's construction contracts kept the family moving around the state, and Teets remembers being in two and three different high schools a year. ''I was a long way from an A student,'' he admits. His father wanted him to be a civil engineer, but he took just one course at Elgin Community College, trigonometry, and quit. ''I was bored with slide rules,'' he says. What he really enjoyed was his part-time job at a nearby restaurant. At 24, with a stake from Besinger's father, he got a 49% interest in a local restaurant, shopping center, and ice rink complex called the Winter Garden. It was a great success -- the restaurant alone pulled in $4,000 a day -- until a series of personal disasters hit Teets in 1963 and changed his life. His wife, Betty, died of unknown causes in her sleep that spring, leaving Teets, then 29, with two daughters, 4 and 2. In July his brother Carl was fatally poisoned by gas while working on an excavation. In November the Winter Garden burned to the ground in a spectacular fire. Teets was devastated. His friend Greg Besinger recalls that shortly after the fire he spent a day with Teets -- and Teets didn't talk the entire day. To shake Teets out of his despair, a friend urged him to apply for a food management job being advertised by Greyhound, then headquartered in Chicago. When Teets refused, the friend said he wouldn't leave Teets's house unless they were going to Greyhound. He got the job, running Greyhound's restaurants at the 1964 New York World's Fair. His restaurants were well run, with good, cheap food, and lines of customers snaked around the building. Old-timers remember him pitching in everywhere, washing dishes, cooking, and catching crates of vegetables thrown off a delivery truck. ''He worked 12- and 14-hour days,'' remembers Frank Nageotte, now president of Greyhound. ''I remarked on it to someone and they told me about what he'd been through the year before. He was agonized.'' GREYHOUND EXECUTIVES were so pleased with his performance that they made him president of Post Houses, a $32-million-a-year subsidiary that runs restaurants in its bus terminals; Teets gets credit for vastly improving operations. In 1968 he was lured away to another restaurant chain in Chicago, and worked at two more restaurant operations before he returned to Greyhound eight years later. One of those jobs outside Greyhound was at Canteen Corp., owned by ITT, and as Teets puts it, his encounters with master conglomerateur Harold Geneen proved ''a great learning experience.'' Teets seems to have learned the most from Geneen's practice of calling scores of top managers into a room and quizzing a few on their operations. At one meeting, Geneen called on Teets and grilled him on Canteen Corp., eventually boring in on a minor meat- delivery operation. Teets was flabbergasted at the detailed nature of Geneen's questions. ''He asked me how many trucks we had at the meat operation, and when I said it was a dozen or so, he asked me if we needed that many.'' Teets was forced to admit before 90 of his peers that he'd never thought about it. ''I went back and studied it, and concluded we only needed five or six trucks.'' By the time Chairman Trautman wooed him back to Greyhound in 1976 to run its barely profitable $139-million-a-year Food Service Group subsidiary, - Teets had developed his own demanding Geneenish style of dealing with managers. That's the style Teets uses to this day -- and he has needed it. ''Greyhound was run with benign neglect,'' observes Dean Witter's Stults. ''Trautman wasn't much of a tire kicker.'' Teets has kicked more than tires. One of his first acts as chief executive was to declare that every Greyhound subsidiary had to aim for at least a 15% return on equity. Operations like meatpacking and the bus lines, which were earning less than half that, soon got special scrutiny; managers were told to draw up plans detailing how they intended to meet the goal. For many, it was a new experience. Edward Merhige, president of a subsidiary that ran duty-free shops on cruise ships and in airports, turned in the same strategic plan in 1981 that he'd drawn up a year earlier. When Teets confronted him, Merhige was astonished. ''I never thought you'd read it,'' he exclaimed. Teets ordered the heads of each major division to develop a half-dozen yardsticks he could use to keep track of their performance throughout the year. Some were universal, like return on equity. Others were extremely specific. Half of Armour-Dial's sales come from bar soaps, so Teets and his managers determined that he should get frequent reports on the prices of tallow and coconut oil, soap's two main ingredients. He was furious to discover that the $800-million-a-year bus lines, after years of federal regulation, had almost no idea where they were making or losing money. ''I saw we had ten buses a day from Miami to Key West, and asked which ones made money,'' he says. ''I found out we only knew which states were making money.'' When Teets suggested the division improve its accounting, the head of the bus company protested it would cost $4 million. Teets shakes his head incredulously as he recalls that reply. ''I told them it was going to be the best $4 million they ever spent.'' He reviews performance every three months, when a dozen top managers meet around a U-shaped table on the fourth floor of the Greyhound Tower in Phoenix for the ''operational review meeting.'' It's an exercise in agony for the unlucky or the unprepared. When one subsidiary made only $8 million last year instead of the $35 million anticipated, Teets thundered that a monkey could make better predictions. Few executives show up late for meetings. Teets has devised what he calls ''Teets Time'' -- everyone is supposed to show up 15 minutes early. Often the doors are locked exactly on the hour, leaving a latecomer outside for half an hour or more. When the doors are opened, the delinquent must walk to the front row, which Teets keeps vacant for such malefactors. Teets may order the rest of the audience to applaud while he sarcastically thanks the tardy executive for showing up. ''My meetings start on time,'' he says with a chuckle. HE FIRES questions at top executives out of the blue, to see how well they know the details of their operations. One manager couldn't remember the exact cost of condiments used in Greyhound's Belgian food service business. Teets announced that everyone would wait, so the hapless fellow sprinted off to his office in an adjoining building to retrieve the numbers. Some meetings turn into roaring, angry diatribes. Teets himself tells of a session with the heads of a group that makes museum and convention displays. ''I was shouting, and pacing back and forth and ripping pages out of their financial report and throwing them on the ground,'' he recalls. ''It was a good way to get their attention.'' Often he delivers fiery, preacherlike orations to his flock, and returns to his office still out of breath. The theme of these harangues is often simple -- exhorting managers to strive for the 15% return, to track their overhead better, or simply to work harder. At the same time, Teets turns much of his ferocity inward. He figures he was chosen to replace Trautman as chief executive over two other top executives in part because he was younger, and tough enough to take on the nasty chores of turning Greyhound around. ''Wars are fought by the young,'' he observes. As though everything could be accomplished if he had surplus willpower to instill in others, he's in a constant and longrunning struggle to toughen and improve himself. When he was 32, he took a Dale Carnegie positive-thinking course in Detroit. ''He was incredible,'' recalls his instructor, Ralph Nichols. ''At the first session I asked everybody what they wanted from the course, and this muscular, gruff guy stands up and says, 'I want more confidence.' He already was the most confident guy I'd ever seen.'' Teets told Nichols he worked out with weights to build his self-confidence, but wanted more because sometimes he wasn't sure-footed enough. ''Confidence is like money,'' laughs Nichols, now a close friend of Teets's. ''Some people never get enough.'' Every morning he climbs 19 flights of stairs to his office -- and to win converts to his spartan ways, offers prizes to other stair climbers. When he returns home, he runs three miles. He fell through the ceiling of his home three years ago while moving furniture in the attic, seriously injuring his arms, back, and pelvis. The damage is not apparent, but doctors won't let him do arm curls with 160-pound barbells anymore. Teets forced himself to sell the weights he'd had since he was 20 so he wouldn't be tempted to use them again. ''I literally cried when I sold the weights,'' he admits. He works out with the weight machine for an hour every day, toughening his muscles and his resolve: the mirrors in his exercise room are plastered with posters carrying exhortations such as ''The race is not always to the swift but to those who keep running.'' Teets arrives at work before seven most days but believes in getting home early, and usually leaves at 3:30. He expects others to do the same. ''Your family is more important than your job,'' he preaches, and takes a dim view of employees who grind away after hours. In 1966 he married a second time, to Nancy Kerchenfaut, a hostess at the Winter Garden before it burned. They hold hands un-self-consciously, he calls her ''Peanut,'' and tolerates her tiny, beribboned dogs with good grace. They have two daughters of their own, but can dote regularly only on the youngest, Suzanne, 11. The other three have gone off to college or careers. He genuinely prefers his wife's company to most other people's, and aside from a 16-handicap game of golf every Saturday, spends most spare time with her. Despite his $992,000 salary, their tastes are simple. A popular diversion is to drive around Phoenix, looking at houses for sale or under construction. Occasionally the exuberant Nancy will spot an open window at an empty house and climb through, successfully exhorting her husband to follow. Mostly, Teets is a loner. He builds friendships slowly, he admits, and has few close friends in Phoenix. Senior Greyhound executives never get invited to his home, and though he plays golf with a few, one participant says it's more like a long golf lesson by Teets than a relaxing game. ''I've made a conscious decision not to get involved in employees' personal lives,'' he says. ''I've got a senior executive whose wife has two lumps in her breasts. I tell him I don't want to know about it. I do it so when I weigh a business decision I don't have all that luggage that a guy's wife isn't well.'' So far, Teets's aloof and aggressive management style has been good for Greyhound. Over opposition from other executives and at the price of great animosity from workers, he has grappled with long-ignored problems at the bus lines and the slaughterhouses. ''Could it have been done more gently?'' wonders Carol Neves, a Merrill Lynch analyst. ''I don't think so.'' After all the cutting back, Teets is now ready to expand. He sees Greyhound as a specialist in the sort of consumer services he's comfortable with -- ''penny businesses,'' like restaurants, where success often comes from vigorous cost squeezing. Greyhound's food operations are too small a proportion of the company now, he says, and he wants to make hotel or restaurant acquisitions. Bargains are hard to find, he complains, but last month he bought a cruise ship called the Oceanic, at 40,000 tons one of the largest in the world, that will ply the Caribbean. EVEN THOUGH it doesn't count as a ''consumer service,'' he likes Greyhound's soap and food operations. In April Greyhound bought Purex Corp., a maker of bleach, soap, and other household products, for $264 million and merged it with Armour-Dial. One analyst describes the acquisition as ''boring,'' but says it fills many gaps in Armour's product line without a lot of new overhead. Despite costs associated with the merger, Purex should contribute to this year's earnings. Teets, who wants more ''balance'' at Greyhound, says he won't buy any new financial service companies. One analyst speculates he may sell some off, such as the complex equipment-leasing subsidiary and perhaps even Verex, a profitable and well- run mortgage insurer. ''If Greyhound were only financial, I'm not sure he would be the right C.E.O.,'' says Neves. ''He's an operations man; he's good with tangibles, such as buses, but not with intangibles.'' Despite his fierce style -- or perhaps because of it -- few Greyhound executives complain about his management. Former executives have more to say on the subject: some call him more of a tinkerer than a builder, excessively close to details and lacking the broader vision necessary to keep Greyhound growing. ''He's more like a chief operating officer than a chief executive,'' says one. Teets's rejoinder: ''I had a big picture of the future of meatpacking and busing. All the steps I've taken there reflect that.'' Clearly, though, he'd rather be whipping his people into shape than dreaming ^ up lofty notions of what Greyhound might be. ''Moses went up on the mountain,'' he says. ''He came back a few days later and announced he'd been talking to God. And what did he find out? While he was gone, everybody forgot what he was preaching and were worshiping a golden idol.'' There will be no mountaintops for John Teets anytime soon. He keeps a quote from Teddy Roosevelt on his office wall, about a man ''actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood . . .'' Clearly, that's where Teets likes to be, and God help everyone else. BOX: INVESTOR'S SNAPSHOT GREYHOUND SALES (LATEST FOUR QUARTERS) $2.3 BILLION CHANGE FROM YEAR EARLIER UP 12% NET PROFIT $136.7 MILLION CHANGE UP 58% RETURN ON COMMON STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY 12% FIVE-YEAR AVERAGE 12% RECENT SHARE PRICE $27.75 PRICE/EARNINGS MULTIPLE 10 TOTAL RETURN TO INVESTORS (12 MONTHS TO 9/30) 28% PRINCIPAL MARKET NYSE Explanatory notes: page 124