Leaving Halliburton
I enjoyed the work we did and the dream team working around me but I did not see any evidence that my career at Haliburton was advancing in any way. I began to consider leaving Haliburton to start my own business. The DST System was important enough to Haliburton that we pretty much had a blank check for anything we needed or wanted to do. I had worked for Haliburton in Research and Development for nearly 13 years without a real promotion or salary increase. Looking back on it now, I can see that I should have done a better job of looking out for myself.
One really great thing about working for Halliburton was their profit sharing plan. Everyone in the company participated in it. The amount of profit sharing each person got was a percentage of their salary. There were some years when profit sharing amounted to as much as 35% of a year’s pay.
Towards the end of 1981, I watched as the IBM PC was introduced and the market for personal computers began to become more popular. Up to this point, I had resisted because I had enough involvement with computers at work and I could not see having one at home. I bought an IBM PC with a green screen, two floppy disk drives, 64 Kb memory and VISICALC at a cost of around $3,500. Watch Dan Bricklin explain how he invented VISICALC.
My first VISICALC project was to make a matrix of opportunities I could pursue when I left Halliburton. This table was vertical columns of each career I might pursue and horizontal rows for weighting factors that should be pros and cons of each alternative. After several weeks of studying this matrix, I realized that I did not have a row showing my level of interest. As soon as I filled in this row, I realized that a computer store was the best choice for me.
The next spreadsheet I made was a similar study regarding opportunities to work with the franchise operations to consider. I made trips to Computerland, MicroAge and one or two other computer store franchisors.
MicroAge had headquarters in Tempe, AZ. They were in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and charged a $30,000 francise fee for each store. MicroAge sold me on “the solution store” concept. They introduced me to a few people who would be giving marketing and technical advice as well as providing solutions we could sell. I sent the franchise fee to MicroAge and signed all the franchise documents in spite of MicroAge being in bankruptcy.
As I began to plan for opening the store, I realized that the job was too big for me to do alone. I looked around to see if I could identify a partner. My obvious choice was George. I had recruited him after he graduated with a Masters Degree in Computer Science. He was a valued member of our DST project team and I knew he was trustworthy and technically qualified. VISICALC would also prove to be invaluable as we needed to produce pro-formas that would be used in planning, forecasting and budgeting.