cc: file, Diane Cluff, Darrell and Nancy Krueger, Sara and Des Penny, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, Claude and Katherine Warner, and Lloyd and Luana Warner.
"I put together my first business plan when I was in High School. I didn't know it was a business plan then. I was already an entrepreneur, didn't know it, and some 34 years later I still have to look up how to spell the word. My first business plan covered earning enough money to buy a bigger and louder amplitude with built-in fuzz control. It all started the day the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. I would have been about 14 years old, just discovering girls, and all my friends came to Junior High School the next day talking about all girls screaming and clawing at The Beatles. So the next Saturday there were about 20 of us in Randy Shirts' garage. We probably had the whole Cedar High School band, with every horn and other instrument you can imagine. Within a few weeks it settled out to the five of us:
We all wanted to get in the Kwainis Club sponsored Key Club the next year when we got to High School, and so we called ourselves `The KeyNotes.' We were terrible and we didn't realize it. I had been playing guitar since fifth grade. I didn't know much more than a few chords and how to read a single note at a time on the treble cleff. I remember at one practice having my new guitar teacher, who played in a real band, come over to Ray's house for a practice and tell us how bad we sounded. I remember one of the hardest things I had to do was to ask Dale Hatch to leave the band. He was too busy with sports (first string quarterback, first string basketball, and first string baseball) and seminary president and school offices. We were about Juniors when that happened. We democratically changed the name of our group to `The MydKnight Hour' at that time. We played from ninth grade through the end of our senior year in High School.
We had a lot of fun. We played a lot of places over the next few years. We played on several school assemblies, we played for CHS Dances, for CSU (College of Southern Utah) dances, for church dances, in Parowan, Milford, St. George, Springdale, Enoch, and Roice Krueger got his High School to pay us $20 to play for a High School dance in Bicknell. We put a kind of `business plan' together to get the money to build a trailer to put all of our equipment in. Dad helped us build the trailor. We used springs from an old truck, and used the coiled circular tension, rather than the vertical tension to provide a spring. When we went to Bicknel my sleeping bag flew out of the trailer before we had passed the north end of the farm going down the Minersville Road. I cut in front of some kids after the dance and forced them off of the road because I forgot the trailer was behind me. We made enough money playing for dances to design and have an electrician build a spotlight control, which turned different colored spotlights on and off as we played. We also designed and built a strobe light using the motor from my Erector Set to turn a wooden disc in front of a spotlight. We were high tech. We did earn enough money to buy some fairly large Gibson amplifers. We were kids pushing technology limits.
My second serious business plan, and the first one in the form of a real business plan was put together as a class assignment for Entrepreneurship I, a class for my MBA (Masters of Business Administration) at SMU (Southern Methodist University) in Dallas, started on 18 December 1977 and completed on 11 October 1979. I distinctly remember the lecture where I started the business plan. The professor said `You folks arn't real entrepreneurs, for if you were you would be out there starting a company and not in here listening to how others have been successful.' So I walked out of the class and started Computer Genealogical Services (CGS) that night. It was a lot of fun. I got my professor to give me an account on the CDC-6600 (Control Data Corporation) at SMU, to prototype the business. We rented a keypunch machine and put it in Linda Fletcher's home. I was very excited about coming up with a way women could stay at home and work and still be there to raise their children. We eventually rented time on a time-share computer in Kansas City, and used a remote office off of I-35, not too far from the Mobil office on Mockingbird, where I was bored to death (I mean working). We did my genealogy and the Malouf genealogy. It was a great idea, about 10 years ahead of when the technology made it cost effective to do this on a personal computer. My partners were Richard Holtry and Ed Gray. We had a lot of fun and yet we ended up not being friends because of all of the emotions tied with who was doing their fair share, who was not, and what the real objectives of the company were. To be fair, Ed and I are still friends.
As I got into the 3-D visualization computer graphics, specifically with Evans & Sutherland, there were a lot of discussion around business plans. However nothing formal was written up. Then I left Mobil and went to the University of Houston. We had to do a plan each year for the Seismic Accoustics Laboratory (SAL) to meet Consortium Sponsor expectations. As we expanded SAL, building the overlying Allied Geophysical Laboratories (AGL), as well as the Well Logging Laboratory (WLL), the Field Research Laboratory (FRL), the Research Computation Laboratory (RCL), and the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL), there were `sort-of' business plans prepared for each operation. These were busy and fun times. As I look back it is easy to see I was too involved in my work and not involved enough at home. We were making a difference, and it was fun.
Kevin Kinsella was the motivation to put together the first real business plan which was implemented. Kevin called me up out of the blue just before Christmas in 1981. He said he had read the article I had published and put Fred Hilterman's and Gerry Gardner's names on, called `Interactive 3-D Interpretation,' and wanted to talk to me about starting a business. Kevin had started a company called SpectraGraphix, which built an IBM monitor clone, and wanted to find a new market for this monitor. He saw interactive display of seismic data as a good practical application with a significant economic upside. He had asked friends in Denver who the authors of the article were and they pointed him to Fred. He had been talking to Fred for several weeks, when he put an ad in the Houston Post for a 35-40 year old MBA with good experience in oil and gas exploration and production. When he showed Fred the article Fred said, `Have you been talking to Roice Nelson?' He got similar responses from both of Fred's partners, each of whom had approached me about forming a business with them prior to Fred leaving the University of Houston and joining with them to form Geophysical Development Corporation. So he decided to call me.
We agreed to meet and talk about it at The Inn on The Park, now the Omni, off of Woodway, between Christmas and New Years. I took your Mom with me to check him out. He did not like her there and asked her to sit in the lobby. We talked at some length and I agreed to work with him to put a plan together. We worked on it for the next several months. We tried to talk several people to be founders with me. There was a hardware guy who was hung-up on Harris computers. Terry Smith turned us down because he didn't thing the hardware guy cut the mustard. A guy from Gulf, whose job was too stable to take the risk (he later was moved to Chevron after the merger) and a couple of guys from Chevron turned me down. We have had funny discussions about the way things turned out over the years.
Kevin had put together a pretty good skeleton for a business plan, and we were kind of stuck when we had lunch in the spring of 1982. Kevin had registered the initial name of what became Landmark Graphics Corporation as GeoGraphix (a company name later used in Denver and bought by Landmark a few years ago). He said to me `You do not have enough gray hair to sell as a President to Wall Street, and you are better suited to work in the technical area. Can you think of anyone?' I said, `Yes, the marketing guy I have been telling you about. And based on my experience at CGS it would be great to have the best marketing guy in the world as President of the company.' So I went to Bob Limbaugh's office a short time later and asked him for some supporting material for what became Chapter 10 of `New Technologies in Exploration Geophysics,' and I asked him: `Bob, how would you like to quit your job, take a cut in pay, and be my boss?' He answered `Yes!' I told him we needed the best hardware and software guys in the business to work with us. He said he knew just the two guys, went over to their office that weekend and John Mouton and Andy Hildebrand agreed to join us. Because Andy left for Australia, I didn't even meet him until after Bob and I had gone to Cain, France for the EAEG (European Association of Exploration Geophysicists) annual meeting and had stopped in London and made our first sales call at ICI Petroleum. Andy took over keyboard on the business plan from Kevin and the results were sold to Haliburton in October of 1996 for $560 million.
We put together business plans of varying complexity for Walden 3-D, Inc., Dynamic Oil & Gas Corporation, HyperMedia Corporation, Advanced Structures Incorporated, and China Cattle Corporation. The reason I have taken the time to write out all of this background is because this week has been spent working on improving and polishing and condensing from 76 pages to 26 pages the business plan for WVS Corporation (Walden Visualization Systems). The `we' includes my assistant Rhonda Hartmann (chief editor), John Amason (working the keyboard), Ron Burgerner (finances), Jeff Hume (President of The Energy Innovations Group), and myself. In trying to think about what to write about this week, I got thinking about some of the headers (as edited below) on some of the e-mails passed to me this week. Note the times and topics on the e-mails. Seemed we mostly worked between 9:00 PM and 3:00 AM:
There has been a tremendous effort put into coming up with a business
plan which accurately represents our intentions at WVS. It has been a lot
of fun, and the potential difference this project will make on society and
on the world is very exciting. It also won't hurt to not be broke again, if
we are successful in raising the $10-15 million necessary to buy the large
computers and software agreements we have defined in the business plan.
If any of you are interested in a copy of this plan, drop me a note and I
will send back instructions on how you can download it to your own computer.
Yesterday I took a break for about an hour and wrote another song, which I named: `Business.' The words are:
I hope you will each take the time to put together your own personal business plan. I promise you will find tremendous benefit in having a quantifiable measurement of where you want to go in your life. It is important this be a dynamic, living document, which is reviewed regularly, and then updated to meet new realities, so you will know whether you made your objectives or not. Sometimes these are called a personal mission statement, which is a topic for another Thoughtlet."