My Dad the entrepreneur.
My wife and I started our own business this year. I will be 40 years old soon and I have always throughout my adult life wanted to start something and be my own boss. Where did this desire come from? Why on earth would I leave a stable, professional corporate job for the uncertainty of starting a small business? The answer is quite simple. I watched my father leave a corporate job and start a small business. I learned from him that starting a small business can be more rewarding and honestly lucrative than the guarantee of a corporate job.
If I could describe my dad in a few words it would be “opportunistically creative”. Through much of my childhood, my dad was constantly starting new things and starting new businesses. He always held down a steady “corporate” job at Southwestern Bell (SWB)but always was trying to think of the next big thing. I grew up in the 80’s. This was a time when computers were as big as a desk and the internet was something that the government was still toying with. Working with SWB he saw the power of the computer and the telephone. His first business (that I was around for that he started) was trying to sell modems to the big corporations that needed them. Talking to him now it was a pretty sweet concept. He found modems from Taiwan that sold for “pennies on the dollar” compared to the US version. However they had the same components as their US counterparts. So his idea was simple. Buy the cheap modems, bring them to the US, mark them up but still be cheaper than the competition. From conversation with my dad, this could have been highly successful. However because he worked for SWB, he was afraid to lose his corporate job and benefits and do this full time. Because he was being pulled in two different directions, he closed his business.
A couple years later, he got the urge to try again. This time his brother Jim convinced him to go in a completely different direction. My uncle, similar to my dad, owned his own business in dry cleaning. He came up with the idea to start a commercial auto detailing business. They would partner with the local car dealerships and detail their used car lots. They set up one of the largest used car dealers in the St. Louis area and started going for it. This is where I come in. When I was 13 years old I began working for the family business washing cars in the summer. It was pretty fun as I was outside and I got to see and be in some cool cars. Also my dad hired my grandfather to run the office so I got to see him a bunch, which prior to that I hadn’t really known him that well. I am thankful for the opportunity to get to know him better. Ultimately they had to close the doors. Again it came down to my dad and uncle each had their “main business”. My dad with his corporate, SWB job and my uncle with his dry cleaning. They couldn’t put the time and resources necessary to make it work as a full time job.
I just gave you two businesses my dad started that ultimately failed. The reason they failed was not because they were bad ideas, but because fear held them back from leaving the corporate job with benefits and making a full effort in it. I can completely respect that. How hard it must have been to decide that the safety of a big business was better than the fear of the unknown. Even if what you started could make you more happy and successful than what you are doing.
So how did he get over his fear and go all in? It’s easy to make that decision when you are forced to. The safety of the corporate job was no longer an option as SWB decided to move their corporate headquarters from St. Louis, MO to, at the time, San Antonio, TX. His division was going to move to Austin, TX. My family, God bless them, were not going to move to Texas. My dad is one of 5 brothers. I think at the time I had 23 cousins between my mom and dad’s side. (It has grown since then…I think we’re in the 40’s with all the grandkids.) The point is we weren’t going to leave all of the family for my dad to pursue this career. Luckily for him he was allowed to take early retirement and when I was a freshman in high school, he left SWB for good.
Before my dad left SWB, his division was essentially the SWB version of Bell Labs. He got to see all of the new technology being developed. One of the things I got to see (before it was mainstream) was video conferencing. Imagine helping to develop the precursor to facetime or any other video calling. Keep in mind this was at a time (the 90s) when the internet was in its infancy and phones were still hooked to walls. When there was a rainout for a baseball game, parents didn’t get a text or email saying it’s been cancelled but rather each parent had to call a set list of other parents. This was called a phone tree. The point I’m trying to make is that the things we take for granted today weren’t readily available even 20 years ago.
That being said, while my dad was trying to figure out what to do he was approached by an old family friend. He had an idea about something involving phones and since my dad was recently retired and worked in that field, that he would be a great candidate to run this idea by. The idea was simple by today’s standards but was groundbreaking at the time. His idea was could if you could record a message and that message will be simultaneously sent to every phone in a database. The answer was yes and National Notification Center was born.
I won’t get into all the details but if you want to blame somebody for getting a “robocall” my dad is the prime suspect. I’m sure you have gotten one of these. “Hi this is candidate X, please vote for me on November 2nd.” Or “Hi this is Principal John. School is cancelled today because of snow.” My dad was a pioneer in this. The company actually started for drug recalls. In order for a major drug company to be able to call every pharmacy in the country to pull a defective drug off the shelf.
Fear had held my dad back from going into any of those previous businesses mentioned because of the safety net of that corporate job. Now the safety net was gone. He had to go all in. In talking to him now he said this, “There was always a constant fear of failure but there was nothing to do but succeed. Failure was not an option. So rather than worry about it, it motivated us.” What a great way to look at it. Fear was a motivator. That motivation took them to run a successful company. About 10 years ago he sold the company to a major company and retired a much happier man.
My dad is just one of many stories of building a successful small business. Through a few false starts, he finally found success. I am trying to model myself and our business after him. He is a great resource when I run into any issues in life or in work. I am grateful to be his son.
-The CRG