Tuesday February 2, 2005 – Life’s Work

Tuesday February 2, 2005 – Life’s Work

My daughter “M” returns an earlier call I made to her today and we get into a discussion about my life. M likes to organize my life for me and for the most part her organization is a hell of a lot better than mine, which is largely non-existent. I should clarify that by saying that my life is not “planned”. My life kind of happens. But there are degrees to everything and to give you a comparison, my father is the sort of person who drove his Ford Van 70s vintage with a Lincoln V8 engine he had installed pulling a Airstream trailer from El Paso, Texas to Fairbanks, Alaska sometime in the late 1980s. He would stop at whatever trailer park he could find along the way, never once making a reservation. That’s the extreme. When I travel I have reservations. But, I don’t have financial planners running the numbers on my earning power, what my exit strategy is, and what financial goal I expect to have when I’m force to exit.

M was proposing that I establish some sort of consultancy and build a business that I could eventually sell and that would be my exit strategy—she’s kind of like that financial planner in that regard, but much more lovable and endearing. I think of running a business and that whole thing about planning comes rushing back at me. A business, a small business especially, is like a small enfant. It requires and incredible amount of nurturing unless you stumble onto something that takes off like crazy, the early PCs for example. The early small business owners that ran those no-longer-existent companies—like Northstar, Altair, Ohio Scientific, Vector Graphics, the list goes on and on—were mostly small business owners who started their company, hired a large number of people and found themselves toiling away trying to feed an insatiable appetite—a kid with a voracious appetite that continually threatens to eat you out of house and home. Each of them found something they were good at and a market interested in what they were selling but none of them were able to find the follow-on product that would keep people coming back to buy the next thing they were producing.

The attributes of a good businessperson include the ability to foresee the future or more accurately to formulate a view that a large majority of the buying public buys into. When I was a kid we made skateboards by breaking apart a skate and screwing the front part to one end of a three-foot 1-by-6 board and screwing the back part to the other end. Nothing fancy but it did allow us to skate down Pierce Avenue in El Paso, Texas at a good clip—the sound of metal skate and concrete sidewalk creating a noise nuisance for the neighbors. The first owner of a skateboard business must have seen kids like us doing our thing and built the first skateboard—he was probably one of us. Over time, being a skateboarder himself—likely one that pushed the envelope, he modified the design continuously over time adding just enough new capability to keep up with the leading edge of his customer base who would drag the rest of the community along over time.

I saw the business, but unlike the businessman I lacked the focus to concentrate on that one thing. That guy is still building skateboards and probably loving every minute of it. But that’s not me. With that epiphany, I had to explain myself to M. “Look,” I said, “what I do best is flit from one intriguing thing to the next—skateboards, motor scooters—I had a Vespa like Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette in Rome Adventure (1962), and finally cars.” My interests were constantly changing. I read books by Victor Hugo, Francois Sagan, Earnest Hemingway, Nero Wolfe, a book on Francisco Goya and the Naked Maya, Robert Payne’s biography of Heinrich Schliemann, and I bored easily of detective novels, biography, and etc. moving from one to the other and eventually back. I had a difficult time with mathematics. I rebelled against their puritanical order, their absolute requirement of a correct answer, their absolute predictability. If you have $100 and you spend $10 a day, at the end of ten days, you’re left with nothing unless you can figure a way to make another $100 or some other amount.

In later life, I did become part of a small company confronting a finite life and had been a death’s door on many occasions. The company, a monthly newspaper, began in the early 1990s with a million-dollar investment from a group of venture capitalist. They had invested at the urging on one of the group’s members. The business plan was simple. Get a number of companies in an industry—this case high tech—all making the same kind of product. They needed a publication to communicate their messages to potential customers. Each company committed to purchase some number of ads from the publication. The companies would each contribute a list of their prospects and customers with names and addresses—this would be the circulation list and voila a newspaper was formed.

A few months after the first edition came off the press, the area went into recession. The promises to purchase ad space went away and the newspaper had to live off the investment capital they had taken in hoping the recession would end and the business would resume. As cash burned with modest sales of ad space, everyone agreed desperate times call for desperate measures. The VCs took a larger share of the company in exchange for another Million-dollar infusion, the funds to be spent of a conference and trade show. Same premise: get a large group of high tech companies to provide presentations on their products, charge the same companies to exhibit their wares in a large exhibition hall—the San Jose Convention Center, and charge attendees to come listen to the presentations. This was an instance where the publication created a high-ticket event and no one showed up, even the luncheon speaker—a well known politician who had promised to speak but cancelled at the last minute to a scheduling conflict (better known as bait-and-switch).

I joined five years into the ten-year run and after four million in cash burn. It is not fair to say we resurrected the company from the dead. Rather we convinced enough advertisers to spend money with us at a time when the economy of Northern California was booming—dot com was rising. Then as the new millennium was upon us the president decided to sell to an overseas buyer willing to offer ten million for the property. The sale went down. The VCs got their money back with bank interest for the time their money was tied up and we all got new bosses. A year or so later, the economy tanked. The remnants of the publication inside the larger conglomerate evaporated with nearly all of the employees gone. The going concern we had infused with enough life to last ten years, died from lack of concern, in a tenth the time.

What I learned I do well is survive, but what I did for the publication was continually find new things to do. The last thing I did was produced a conference, something everyone at the company feared but this time, we threw an event, and everyone showed up. It didn’t make us any money, but it got us noticed by the giant that eventually acquired us and in that sense it more than paid for itself.