Start & Run a Rural Computer Consultant Business. John D. Deans

weekday surfing is what got me caught. Noticing the tan skin and sun-bleached blond hair, my boss checked up on my processing logs and found that I had optimized my job-processing time down to less than part-time hours. He called me in to meet with him and two other managers in his office, and I thought I was fired. I confessed my prime-time surfing escapades, highlighting all the extra graphs and timely billing reports, and hoped not to get slammed too hard.

      Instead, they told me to move my stuff to the customer service department. They were promoting me to Systems Analyst, along with giving me a substantial raise!

      Holy cow! I made Systems Analyst in two years, right out of high school!

      During that last year at CDC, I spent most of my time working user problems over the phone at a desk in customer service. It was a good learning experience, but it got old real fast, yapping on the phone all day and not having my hands on the hardware and hacking out software.

      This was back in 1984, and the oil industry was hurting in Houston. Since I was still watching the billing processes, I happened to notice a significant downturn in mainframe time-sharing services, which were CDC’s bread and butter.

      My girlfriend’s best friend got me in for an interview at J. S. Nolan and Associates in West Houston. After a few weeks of pursuing it, I got the job, and left CDC just before they started laying off people.

      J. S. Nolan was a group of a dozen or so PhDs who had developed an oil reservoir simulation program and made millions marketing it all over the world. My new job was to manage Nolan’s in-house VAX/VMS computers, and port the massive 150,000-line Fortran program onto every scientific mainframe and minicomputer made. This was the ultimate learning opportunity, since the first thing Nolan did was send me to Intel and later to Convex to learn the Unix operating system.

      The three years I spent with Nolan gave me tons of experience in programming, computer management, hardware troubleshooting, and software debugging techniques. Porting the program was basically taking a nine-track tape of source code, loading it up on the mainframe, creating the JCL to run the jobs, compiling the code, linking all the binary libraries, and utilizing the proprietary capabilities of the mainframe. These capabilities included double precision, vectorization, and parallelization on supercomputers such as Cray, IBM, CDC, Convex, Intel Hypercube, and many others. I was also exposed to the first version of Ethernet 802.3 10Base5 over thick wire coax cabling, which was my first real local area networking experience.

      The last year got rough after J. S. Nolan sold out to Dresser and the bean counters took over. As with CDC, I could see the writing on the wall, and started looking for a new position.

      In 1987, an opportunity came along with CogniSeis Development, who offered me a job as manager of computer operations. This consisted of managing seven people and more than thirty medium-to-large computers and mainframes. The good thing is that I was in management and making more than $40K a year; the bad thing was that during that next year, I went through both a divorce and the death of my father.

      The six prior years had been nothing but bits and bytes, with all issues black and white. There was no gray in my world back then. Management was entirely new to me, and I was just a babe in the woods. Right off the bat, I had two hardware guys and four computer operators reporting to me, while we all supported approximately 200 users working on VT100 terminals connected to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX/VMS mainframe computers, along with 50-plus smaller Unix-based computers and workstations.

      Over my fours years at CogniSeis, my divorce was finalized, I buried my dad, dated and broke up with multiple girlfriends, and actually started being a dad to my young son, who was with me for the standard visitation periods doled out by Texas law. After paying off the five-figure debt from the divorce and finally moving out of my sister’s place, I was able to buy a small but nice home in Bellaire, which is a small city within Houston.

      In 1991, my nephew had freshly returned from his Air Force service in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield and Storm. We celebrated by going to Hawaii and surfing for seven days and drinking for seven nights. When I got back, I had a call on my answering machine to contact a Michael Holthouse, who wanted to interview me for a position with a new company he was starting, called Paranet.

      The meeting with Holthouse’s right-hand man, Steve Ough, went great as far as technical interviews go, and then it was onto Holthouse himself and things got interesting. He explained to me that the goal of Paranet (with just seven employees at the time) was to hire IT experts, get support contacts, and grow as fast as possible. With a five- to seven-year time frame, his plan was to either sell Paranet or go public with it and take a big payoff for himself and the start-up team, of which I would be a critical member — if I joined up now. He scribbled out a $55K salary with a possible if not probable end payout of over $2,000,000 if we hit our objectives.

      This rocked my world! By this time, I had it made at CogniSeis, with a great crew that kept all the systems running well. I had it easy and smooth with a decent salary of $47K, working less than 40 hours a week at a location less than four miles from my home. Choosing a start-up company over the safe, secure, and happy environment that had nurtured me over the past four years was a hard decision.

      But there was one thing in Paranet’s favor: my fear that in five years, I would regret not having recognized this chance as the opportunity it was. After a weekend of deep thought, talks with friends, and several glasses of wine, I accepted Paranet’s offer the next Monday.

      The Paranet Days

      I’m detailing my time at Paranet because it was a turning point in my life, one that allowed me to later make another major life-changing decision — landing me in my current career as a rural computer consultant.

      The first year at Paranet was frantic, exciting, exhausting, and even debilitating. Going from a single-role internal IT support person to an external billable consultant was a major change, and it took all my effort, knowledge, and creative articulation (otherwise know as B.S.). I had spent the past ten years as overhead, never as the core of the business. Starting in May of 1991 at Paranet, I was a designated moneymaker and the primary focus of the company.

      Mike Holthouse, the main boss and owner, took charge of management and sales, and Mona Cabler, the office manager, handled everything else. That left the other five of us to be shipped out to IT clients in Houston at a billable rate of $75 to $125 an hour. The first year there was not only hectic, but also highly stressful. Though I successfully completed lucrative contracts at Tenneco, British Petroleum (BP), and GeoQuest, servicing so many new clients felt as intense as acquiring and starting a new job every few weeks.

      Holthouse would promise the prospective client that his IT crew could code, fix, integrate, or configure almost any hardware or software problem or project. We were often put in high-expectation situations and sometimes had to read up the night before on a software language, operating system, or computer system we had never even touched, then be able to perform flawlessly the very next day at the client site. This was major pressure and far from the internal IT support environments I was used to.

      There were days in those initial months when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to handle it, and should maybe bail out and go back to my old, comfortable position at CogniSeis — that would have meant taking a big step back and committing a major error. So to keep myself from running away from the Paranet challenge, I trapped myself by purchasing an expensive used sports car, the payments for which locked me into the new, substantially higher salary. I bought a Porsche 911 Targa that looked great and was a ground rocket. I was also the first one at Paranet to get a cell phone to keep in contact with my new clients. Back in 1991, cell phones were the size of bricks and airtime minutes were outrageously expensive. Between the hot car and the cool phone, I had purposely made myself dependent on Paranet’s healthy salary, along with its 10 percent raises, and guaranteed my dedication to this start-up company.

      The positive side of their high expectations was that it pushed me to learn fast, adapt quickly, maintain my cool, and interact professionally with new clients and various personalities while consistently accomplishing the assigned IT mission — all skills that