Announcer: What do the founder of Wikipedia, the founder of Atari, the inventor of the Weed Eater, and the founder of Chick-Fil-A have in common?
- They are all "make it happen" people
- And they have all been guests on the BusinessMakers Radio Show
Check out their interviews at thebusinessmakers.com. And now back to the BusinessMakers Show with your host, Russ Capper
Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at theBusinessMakers.com. And now it's time for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And for this morning's Flashback we are going to go into our collection and share "defining moments that led to 4 major success stories. And we are going to start off with a big one, a defining moment with the most successful start-up in Business History - most successful in terms of first year revenue - and that would be Compaq Computers - listen as Rod Canion was telling me about the day, in the very early stages of planning the company when he first thought he just might have a winner...
Rod: It's interesting that you asked that, because as long as it's been, 27 years, I still remember vividly the moment when the idea for the Compaq portable gelled in my mind. Now, the background is, along the way quit our jobs, and it happened to be just before Christmas in 1981. About that time some venture capitalists we'd been talking to told us that they were not going to fund that idea, and so we suddenly didn't have an idea that was fundable, and we had no income. So, we immediately dove in, and I, I mean, talk about full time, around the clock, trying to come up with a new idea.That was about the middle of December, okay? So, about three weeks later, after having gone through Christmas and New Year's holidays, on January the 9th, and it was late morning, I was at my house around the breakfast room table going over some various ideas we had.
And that's when the idea for three things that made a product that seemed like it was a stunner. One was it was a portable computer, and the key thing there was that it had to be styled well. In contrast to the Osborn portable, which looked like an army surplus. It had to fit in an office and, and be respected. It had to be rugged. That is, if it was going to be a portable and be carried around, one of the problems you had to solve was really making it rugged. At the time PCs were very fragile because they were just boards plugged into the slots. But number three, it had to run software, and one of the great pieces of experience I gained at TI, was that all 300 of the companies making PCs were trying to get the software companies to adapt their software to their product, because every PC had a different architecture. And so to have that software on your architecture, they had to do something to it. Now, I knew as a startup company, we were not ever going to get VisiCalc or any of the word processors or any of the important software to run on our computers.
Rod: So it became very clear that we had to have somebody else's software. Look around, which is the one company that if you could have their software, you would've wanted it to run. Well, it was obviously IBM, so the, the third and crucial element was that this portable that was styled well, that was rugged, had to also run every piece of software for the IBM PC. Those three things, if you could do them, and at the instant that the idea came, I wasn't sure you could do them. But if you could do them, I thought this would be something that would really do well in the marketplace.
Russ: And from there, Compaq computer produced over 100 Million dollars in revenue in their first full year of operations, and reached a billion dollars in annual sales faster than any other company in history. Up next the defining moment when Tom Fatjo Jr. decided to take his first step to completely change the solid waste industry - that's Tom Fatjo Jr., the founder and former CEO of BFI, and later the founder of three more solid waste companies. We enter the discussion where asked Tom what triggered his interest in the garbage business...
Tom: I was CPA and lived in a southwest Houston subdivision, we had a Home Owners Association that was having difficulties with its garbage collection services. So we had a meeting one night and I was just trying to be diligent and suggest that we get our own garbage collection agency, there were 2,000 homes in the area. And there was, even as I think about it today it's pretty humorous, there was an obnoxious guy there that said, "Why don't you buy a garbage truck and you be our garbage man." Well I would hate to think that I would make an important business decision with an emotional reaction, but never the less I really did take a hard look at the business and in fact decided to do that. Buy a garbage truck and obtain the contract from that subdivision, began to collect garbage. Actually as I recall the subdivision was called WillowBrook, which is in Southwest Houston near Myerland.
Russ: Wow. Do you by chance remember who that obnoxious man was?
Tom: No I do not remember his name, I just know he did me a favor.
Russ: Boy did he ever. And from that point forward, Tom has been incredibly successful. Up next, Garrett Boone, describes the circuitous route that led to the founding of The Container Store. He had been talking about his hand made furniture business that he and has two co-founders had been struggling with, which led to this defining moment...
Garrett: For a year and a half I had worked on the hand made furniture store and it was just not going well. It is just too hard to create every single product for the furniture.
Russ: So hand made furniture, meaning that you actually built the product?
Garrett: Well designed, had it made, maybe built it. You know, a feel good great thing that we could have done and been poor and happy the rest of our lives I guess. But it seemed after awhile that really wasn't working out. And really had begun investigating some products to be sold in a store, and those were all commercial. Turns out that those were all happened to be things that held things and sort of stored things in. So that, along with other things, sorta caused the light bulb to go off one day coming back from a home improvement store. "Wow, what about just forgetting about hand made furniture and just focus on things that store things, hold things, allow people to get organized." And so that was the original idea that myself and Kip with John's support, started out with.
Russ: All right and that lead to the Container Store being a very successful chain all across the country. And our last Defining Moment features, Bennett Greenspan, the founder of FamilyTreeDNA.com. Listen as Bennett tells the story of the exact moment, the defining moment, that triggered the start of his very cool DNA services company...
Benett: And so I was walking and I was kind of down in my beer. I was thinking about the problem. How do I prove that my cousins in California are related to these folks in Argentina? And I remembered that there had been a study done about a year and a half earlier that used the Y chromosome that showed that Thomas Jefferson or the Jefferson family was, in fact, related to someone who was, in theory, the illegitimate male descendant of a Jefferson.
I needed to learn about DNA testing just to confirm that what I thought was correct was correct and then I needed to find a company that could actually do the testing. I couldn't find a company that was doing the testing. I searched and I searched and I searched and so eventually, I decided to look at the scientific studies and find an author or a co-author of one of those scientific studies and call him up and ask him where I could go because all I wanted to do was write a check. I wanted to know where I could send a check and how I could obtain the DNA samples from my cousin in California and from the potential cousin in Argentina. That's all I wanted to do.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone who was offering this service, so I called this fellow up at the University of Arizona who had been a co-author on one of these studies, and I asked him if he would do the DNA tests for my cousin and the fellow in Argentina, and I expected him to say no and he told me no. And I said, "That's fine. Just tell me where I can go to buy a DNA test because that's all I want to do." And he said, "I don't know of anybody that's offering this kind of DNA test anywhere in the world." I had expected the first rejection, but I didn't expect him to tell me that there was no one who was offering the service. And so I had choreographed my call to him like any good salesman would do and I had expected to get an initial rejection, but then he makes what I refer to as his fatal mistake. He said to me, "Bennett, you know, somebody should start a company like this because I get phone calls from crazy genealogists like you all the time." At that point, I couldn't get that man off the phone quick enough. I put down the phone, I went out of the room, I found my wife, and I said, "Honey, I'm going back into business. I'm going into the DNA testing business."
Russ: And what a success FamilyTreeDNA has become. And that concludes this morning's collection of Defining Moments for 4 major success stories, and that wraps up This Morning's Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. Stay tuned in for our Featured Guest discussion with Brian Tippens, Director of HP Global Supplier Diversity, you're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at TheBusinessMakers.com.
