Part 1 of 3: That time I asked for & received a million bucks to build a tech team out of thin air. I was 32.

Dateline: 2000-2003. My lengthiest employment: 7 years. In a row. One of the 'big 3' consulting firms in the B2B incentives space. These agencies manage behind the scenes programs that dangle carrots to high performing employees in other companies. Think car dealers, drug reps, hotels, various execs, whatnot. Incentive agencies are not consumer facing ergo hidden. Anyhoots, one of the 10 or so departments in this agency was a poorly managed & dysfunctional market research team. That was my home for 7 years. Starting salary: $36k. Ending salary w/bonuses around $100k. Now you know why I stayed. 

And when I say dysfunctional, that's being kind. It was embarrassing watching the team leader interacting with other departments. The worst team lead we had was an imbecile named Gregg. I could give many examples, but here's one. Every single morning, he recorded his voice mail greeting. Same message, just changing the day. Nobody ever called him btw. But this occurred, every single morning, for the 2 or so years he was at the helm before being demoted: he never got his recording right. He would delete and re-record it, over & over. Loudly. All 10 of us heard this, every morning. Our boss was unable to say the same sentence without screwing it up. It was our morning ritual. Counting how many attempts it took for him to say 'Hi this is Gregg, today is Tuesday April 12th, please leave your number with your message and I'll call you back. 

The daily median was 3 attempts. 

I became keen on computers & 'the web' in the mid-late 90s. Didn't seem like this company was. They had old PCs, running on Win 3.1 (!) when I started. Puke. My buddy taught me how to build my own PCs in '95ish (technically: assemble, not 'build') & was fascinated with 'the web' early on. Even had an AOL account in '95-6 double puke. But AOL had that gateway to 'the web' which ppl 'surfed' on our slow arse dialup modems. That was a hoot. In '98 I was one of the 1st residential customers in MN to have a DSL line enabled at my house. Via 'Qwest' internet if you recall that name. Ergo, 10x faster than a dialup. Those were heady times. Let's focus.

Anyhoots. The point here, my web interest grew & grew. Por ejemplo, in 1996 (!) I launched a website for a Minneapolis musician to sell his CDs. His latest was well reviewed in Rolling Stone (3.5 stars!) but nobody could find them anywhere. He had boxes of them in his apartment. I met him hanging out at the legendary Nye's Bar in Mpls where he had a weekly gig, him & his guitar, singing fantastic originals. 10 years earlier I initially heard him in local bars with a full rocking band, tearing the roof off. He had downsized since then. Anyhoots, I made a simple website using Coffee Cup html software, with a separate plugin for credit card transactions. Found a local hosting provider and registered the domain. And it all actually worked! Orders came in! This was pre google et al., Yahoo was prolly the dominant searcher. I got 2-3 orders per week, meaning I inserted into the wee boxes & mailed them out. Naturally I paid the musician whatever his share was, can't recall. It wasn't big bucks, that I do recall. But hey, in 1996 I was running a functional website that took credit card orders. How many ppl can claim that? Probably a lot but seemed heady at the time. Still does, for that matter. Let's focus. 

Ergo, I was web savvy working on a team filled with suburban luddites, in a company filled with same. People who don't think in meta find me odd my whole life, still do, but this was an outlier even for me. I was talking about networked computers, 'the web,' the future of market research being online. The market research space was paper or telephone call center based. Sometimes focus groups. Paper surveys, postal mailed, followed by thick paper reports nobody read. Don't get me started. 

But I saw the future. And it wasn't on paper. 

HQ sprawled across 5 buildings, a few hundred suburban luddite employees wearing pleated dockers. I was in a breakroom at a vending machine when the company president, the numero uno, walked in to use the vending machine also. I said without thinking, and I quote 'hey Larry, have you heard about what I've been doing with online surveys in our department?' He had no idea who I was. But, turns out, he also saw the writing on the wall re 'the internets' and was open minded about getting his company in the game. He replied something like 'no but come by my office and tell me about it.' I said yes thanks will do. I called his aa later, set a meet, don't recall if I went alone or what but we chatted. I worked in a sea of cubes, he did not. He had the plush crib, real wood, real wood desk, all of that. But I was brash as hell back then, not like now haha. I had a vision of the future and it looked like the internets. So the gist of the meeting was the end when he said 'why don't you return with a business plan and we can go over that.' 

I left, wondering 'what's a business plan?' 

But I asked around, found out. In doing so, guess what! turns out leapfrogging several layers of management to talk about the future of the world with the company president doesn't go over well with the pleated docker suburban luddite cube jockeys. But we'll circle back on that. The company president gave me the go ahead, to present a plan at least. I had no shortage of gusto, no? Let's focus.

I got a call from the head of IT, who said he heard I was talking with the brass about a new tech team. Gary told me there was a local firm, a VAR (value add reseller) doing corp hardware & software installations. Gave me the name of the sales bloke who had been calling Gary. His name is Dan. I worked with Dan for the next several months. Dan & I hit it off. He is one smooth sales fella. Over many nice lunches on his dime, he talked about the complexities of getting an installation up & running. Sounds easyish, but the ongoing care & feeding of a couple networked servers doing alot of data crunching & reporting isn't exactly plug and play. Might be nowadays but back in the late 90s, nay bobby. 

So, why 2 servers? Because Dan kept telling me I needed Informatica PowerMart for my ETL (extract transform load) data pump on the front end. Did I? Who the fuck knows. Probably yes. That was server 1. Server 2 was to run Business Objects for the back end. That software grabbed the prepped data from server 1 & allowed my future teammates who didn't exist yet to create whiz bang reports. 

In hindsight all seems like overkill. But back in the day, cloud computing didn't exist, not like it has the last 10 yrs or whatnot. Nowadays it's all way easier. Buy a server today? Yuk. Here's how Informatica charged for licensing their sw: by number of CPUs in the server. What? Idiotic. 

Speaking of pricing, I needed key ingredients in my business plan, namely pricing. Also, um, a plan. I worked with Dan on the pricing, based on my plan for the team, which resided in my head. Pricing hardware & software is easier.  Those cost X. Installation costs X. Ongoing support & whatnot costs X. Dan figured that stuff out, hell that's his job. So the price that came back to me was so ridiculous, like $600k. I had to add in more for the employees I would hire somehow. Final total wasn't a million, but rather $850k. Still a stack, no? 

I had created 10 or so slides I presented to the President. Just him, me, and the CFO in the fancy conference room. At the time, late 90s, this was a half billion-dollar company. And he ran it. Privately held. The fact it was privately held was how this occurred at all. Decisions can get made like this, if they come from the top. He's the captain. Let's focus. So I went through my slides, talking about the future of data collection & reporting in market research going totally online. I knew he dug that pitch already; it's why I was in the room. He also knew the rest of the company was ridiculously old school. I took the initiative to make this meeting happen. He prolly found me a strange oddity like everyone else does, but I was there, I was prepared, I had done the homework. 

I do remember exactly my final line of my pitch was 'and I think I can pull it off.' He nodded. He said 'ok.' 

I don't recall the specifics of the days that followed, other than word got out, prolly by me. I was now well outside my lane as far as the market research team of 10 goes. Or the entire company of 1,300 employees for that matter.

But it was giddyup time. This was on me, and the spotlight burns brightly I was to realize.