Al was my long-time business partner at Universal Tax Systems (UTS), one of the earliest companies to offer electronic filing to tax preparers. I left active management of UTS 20 years ago. By the time I left, I was so burned out that I was a detriment to the company. Because of my burnout, I retreated from any involvement with UTS and all the UTS relationships I established over the years. So I went from seeing Al on a daily basis to hardly seeing him at all. I regret that.
How I met Al is an interesting story. It’s a bit long, but if you like corporate intrigue you might find it entertaining.
I founded UTS in 1986. After two years trying to market and sell tax preparation software to tax preparers, I realized I needed somebody who actually knew how to do it. I had eight customers, not enough to make a living for myself. So I wrote software for other companies in the industry and sold specialized modems designed to communicate directly with the IRS service center mainframe computers. There was no link through the internet or even AOL or CompuServe, so a direct connection to the IRS was the only way for tax preparers to transmit tax returns to the IRS.
My search for a marketer led me to a guy named Bob. He seemed very genuine, sincere, and even modest at times. He was full of ideas, and he had a knack for talking people into things. His wife was one of the kindest people I’d ever met. Getting to know him, I discovered he was also amoral, failed to come through on promises, and spent a lot of money he didn’t have but figured he could earn by the time the bills came due. He would show up hours late to important appointments. I actually believe he had the best of intentions, but he left a trail of failed business relationships and unpaid bills in his wake.
He recruited 8 to 10 individuals from across the country to become exclusive dealers of my software. Al was one of them, and that’s how I first heard about him. He was already a major, successful dealer for one of the most established software companies in our industry, and had a territory in Florida.
It didn’t take long for the dealership network to figure Bob out. They jettisoned Bob and decided to negotiate directly with me and my business partner Randy.
That’s how I found myself in a hotel room negotiating the future of the company. Randy and I were in one room; the dealer network was in another. One of the dealers owned a large auto dealership, and he sent a messenger back-and-forth between the rooms. It was the old technique of the power of limited authority: The messenger was like the sales representative who had to “check with his boss” about the latest terms of the deal. Randy and I were aware of this, and so we were careful.
The negotiations reached an impasse. The dealer network had always assumed that they would split the country up into exclusive territories. But Randy and I didn’t trust most of the dealers to effectively sell the product.
The breakthrough came when the dealers proposed that the territories be non-exclusive. UTS wouldn’t assign another dealer to their exclusive territories, but we could sell in those territories ourselves. In essence, the dealer network felt that we didn’t have the capability to sell enough in their territories to give them much competition. We quickly came to an agreement on the non-exclusive deal.
But Randy and I had an ace up our sleeve. Or at least we thought we could get one. That ace was Al. If we could peel Al off the dealer network and get him to agree to be our V.P. of Marketing, we could cherry-pick the one dealer we were confident could do the job.
We’d have to offer him a large piece of stock in the company. We negotiated a deal based on results: The more software the company sold, the larger his stake in the company. Our pitch was that he would either own a small piece of a small company, or a large piece of a large company. It would be a compelling argument for someone who is confident in their own abilities.
At one point Randy and I were reminded of what we were asking Al to give up. We were musing about how we’d like to draw $100,000 salaries every year. (Note that this was $100,000 in 1989 dollars.) Al’s response was that if $100,000 per year was the goal, he might as well stay where he was. Al opened our eyes to a bigger vision. It turns out he was just the person to lead us there.
Al agreed to join UTS and quickly hired a sales staff. He knew what he was doing. In a few short years, he met all of the goals we set for him and he maximized his stock in the company. The dealer network withered away.
The company grew beyond my wildest expectations. I could quote figures: sales, number of customers, number of employees, several moves and expansion of office space, number of tax returns transmitted, investment by venture capital firms, etc. We made the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies three years running (we peaked at #46 in 1994). It still blows my mind. I can say one thing with absolute certainty: Without Al we wouldn’t have had a fraction of the success we did.
So yes, Al made me and many others wealthy. By the time I left the company, I could decide what I wanted to do next to contribute to society without worrying about how much it paid. But this isn’t why Al was a meaningful part of my life.
Randy, Al, and I met almost daily over lunch to make the executive decisions for the company. It was true team leadership, which is extraordinary. We didn’t need to have a single chief executive because the three of us could almost always agree on a course of action. Our most difficult decisions always seemed to be where we would go to lunch that day!
We were so often seen together that employees started referring to us as “The Three Amigos,” after the film starring Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short. We were all on the Board, and our Board decisions were consistently as smooth as our day-to-day management of the company.
I believe a main reason for this is because of Al’s personality. He is easy-going, even-tempered, and reasonable. He is gregarious and amicable, yet he can make tough decisions when the situation calls for it. He has the vision to see the big picture, and still can take care of the details of managing a sales staff. I’d imagine salespeople are not the easiest people to manage.
He was also a master of managing customers. We accumulated many large customers over the years. (You may know our largest customer: Liberty Tax. They’re the guys who hire spinners to dress up as the Statue of Liberty outside their stores.) Customers of this size demanded access. Al was the person they called. He kept them satisfied even through a few rough years when our software wasn’t working so well and they were losing money by the hour. Al had an amazing ability to soothe. Often a customer would call in angry and by the end of the call he would be thanking Al. It was remarkable.
Al became a close friend over the years. I could relax knowing that he had my back and had things under control. He was understanding when we wrote buggy software that caused him headaches. (I was the lead programmer.)
Al often complimented me as a programmer who could actually communicate with others. He came into my office often with a proposal for a new feature that would help him sell more product. After some thought, I would respond with something like, “that would be hard, but what if we did it this way?” We usually could find a way to get him what he wanted.
By the early 2000s, Randy and I were ready to sell the company. We wanted to diversify our risk. We had too much of our wealth in the stock of one company (UTS), and I had already burned out and left the company (which was for the company’s own good!)
We knew that Al’s dream was to run a “lifestyle” company. He’d explain that he wanted to get to a point where he could draw a fat salary and come in a few days a week just to keep his finger on the pulse. He had seen the owners of another company do this—the company that he was a distributor for down in Florida. So Randy and I knew it would be a sensitive conversation to bring up a sale.
When we brought it up with Al, he quickly assessed the situation and our desires. After verifying that Randy and I didn’t want to run UTS as a lifestyle company, he quickly and calmly agreed to a sale. No muss, no fuss. It was a business decision, and he gave up his own preferences so we could have what we wanted. I’ll always appreciate that.
I run into people from time to time who used to work at UTS. Everybody tells me that it wasn’t the same after we left. Before, it was like family. Afterward it was very corporate and management didn’t seem to care about their employees. At least that’s what they all tell me, usually in the same words.
Al gets much of the credit for this. People really liked him, and he treated them well. He cared about them. Because I was so often holed up in my office programming, Randy and Al were more often the faces of the company to our employees. Al, you are gentle, kind, and wise. I wish I would have made more of an effort to keep in touch, especially while you were still in town. Now that you’re back in Florida, I’ll look for more opportunities when I have occasion to go down there. I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to make new friends when I wasn’t going into work. Now, more than ever, I miss hanging out with you.