Everybody has secrets.

J. Edgar Hoover used to keep his enemies' secrets in his FBI files by day and then sometimes secretly wear women's clothing at night. We found out about that soon enough. Mel Gibson used to keep his alcoholism and anti-Semitism a secret, but no more. Our president has been known to secretly smoke cigarettes. I've always had a secret crush on Katie Couric.

Well, now you know.

Kurt Marone's got some secrets too. No, he doesn't wear women's clothing at night ("makes my legs itch"), drink too much alcohol, practice anti-Semitism or lust after Katie Couric ("too annoying").

Kurt's secrets lie in his financial statements. No, he's not hiding anything illegal. He just doesn't want people to see how much or little he's making.

"This is nobody's business," he told me a few years ago. And he was right. One of the benefits of being a penny pincher and owning your own company is that you can fly it under the radar and not have many others know all about your business. Our secrets are our secrets.

But times change.

J. Edgar Hoover died and his enemies eventually disclosed his secrets. A drunken night in Malibu brought out Mel Gibson's. And when Katie Couric winks at me from behind that anchor desk, I just want to shout out my secret feelings for her to the whole wide world!

But enough about Katie.

This is about Kurt. And for Kurt, what changed was the recession. It's caused him to reveal his secrets. And share his financial statements. Particularly with his employees. Why? "To keep them employed," he said. Kurt needed to come up with better ways to pay his people. So this penny pincher sacrificed secrecy for a bonus plan. And it turned out to be a great decision.

As the recession hit, Kurt found it tougher and tougher to pay his employees. He was able to lay off a few nonessential people. But he didn't want to part ways with so many of the valuable people who helped him grow his business. People that he trained and who knew the company's operations as well as he did. People who would be busy once the economy began picking up. So he decided the fair thing to do was to tie their compensation in with his company's profits. If they all worked hard and succeeded, they'd get more money. If the company didn't do as well, then nobody (including him) did as well.

At the beginning of the year, Kurt determined he would allocate 30 percent of his profits to his employees for the next year. Not sales - profits. He did the same thing in the following year, too. Share the profits like this? What is he, some kind of a milquetoast socialist? No way. Like me, Kurt's a capitalist and a red-blooded male through and through. Sure, he's not a big fan of Katie Couric. But he's mentioned Barbara Walters' legs to me more than a few times.

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