Accidental Capitalist (1985 – present)
My “brilliant career” is a fulfillment of Mark Twain’s aphorism that, “The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.” Computers were a hobby that turned into a business for me. I was lucky to get interested in computing just as personal computers were coming to market. I never took a computer class, but I have taught a lot of them. I wound up making a living by playing with the newest electronic toys that fascinated me, and by always staying a few steps ahead of my clients in the process.
The road that led to me becoming an “accidental capitalist” began in the mid 1980’s when I returned to Baltimore from living in Olympia, Washington, determined to become the next great American novelist. It was my hope that by using a word-processor (something I was completely unfamiliar with) I could more readily achieve my literary ambitions.
With this goal in mind I entered a marijuana study being run at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in order to earn the money to buy a computer. My friend Curt fronted me the money I needed to buy my first computer (a Commodore 64 which I took into the study) with the understanding that when I came out of the 25 day marijuana study I would pay Curt back with the money I earned through my participation in the study.
So my introduction to computing began in a marijuana study where I taught myself the basics of computing and some rudimentary BASIC programming, while getting righteously stoned on U.S. government, Kentucky- grown, killer weed. What a country!
By the time I left the pot study I was already pretty convinced that I was better at programming then I would ever likely be at writing fiction. I spent almost every waking hour of every day learning to program, and learning how to get the Commodore 64 to interface with the real world through sensors and servos, etc. It was great fun, and a completely unexpected turn of events—I was a humanities major in college and was always a terrible math student. But there I was writing code that made lights turn on when motion was detected, and plotted the time and temperature of our greenhouse garden, etc. (I also began to draw up plans for creating a sensory deprivation tank in the greenhouse space but construction never went further than a wooden shell with a metal swimming pool with a plastic liner inside which was filled with water but never heated.)
At this time I was living in and sporadically renovating an old carriage house in Irvington (a Baltimore neighborhood) with my girlfriend Daria. I can remember one day Daria coming home exhausted from standing on her feet all day working as a waitress in a restaurant in the city, and then having to walk home from the bus stop blocks away and, seeing me again splayed out on the floor with my books and wires and motors, saying something like: “OK Dave, if you want to keep eating you need to get a job!”
So we got me cleaned up, I got a haircut, put on some decent clothes and went looking for a computer job. As I had already been a stereo salesman for a short time in a department store in Olympia, I answered an ad in the Baltimore Sun for an assistant manager and salesman position at a small computer store called Software Unlimited in Dobbin Center, in Columbia, Maryland, about a half-hour from our house.
This was the time of the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and the first IBM-PC clones. Software Unlimited sold all three and I was the Commodore expert. But I soon noticed that most of our customers were mostly interested in the Kaypro and later the Leading Edge IBM-PC clones that we sold, so I turned my attention to learning MS DOS. A few months after I started working there, the store manager left and I was promoted to manager, and was the in-house IBM-PC and Commodore 64 expert (in short, everything but Apple.)
It was at this time, in 1987, that I accidentally started my own computer business. A customer who owned an auto transmission shop in Catonsville needed help setting up a Pont-Of-Sales (POS) system and I volunteered to try to help him. I went to his shop and tinkered around for a couple of hours and got the POS to work, and created a routine to export the end-of-day sales data into a custom spreadsheet. He thanked me, and as I was leaving the store he asked, “So what do you want for your work.” I actually hadn’t even thought of charging him because it was just fun trying to figure out how the system functioned, so, off the top of my head I said, “How about a pizza?” He smiled and said, “I’ll get you a pizza and give you twenty bucks, OK”? It was like hearing the heavenly choir singing for me– I realized at that moment that I could get paid (and eat well) just for having fun!
So that was it. I worked days at the store for my boss and evenings and weekends for my own business. Through word of mouth I picked up a new client every month or so and soon found myself writing database (Q&A Database) and spreadsheet (Lotus 123) apps and building, upgrading and repairing PCs. When clients needed to connect multiple PCs together I learned how to make Local Area Networks (LANtastic); I was offering my clients multi-tasking on IBM-PC clones (DESQview) a year before Windows was released.
When I moved to Pikesville, Maryland, I began to hang out at a small PC shop just a few blocks away from my house called VF Associates. I became friends with the manager and helped him assemble the new IBM-PC 386 and IBM-PC 486 computers, and bought computers for my clients there. When that store closed some of their clients became my clients.
I got some business cards printed that read PC Hardware & Software. When Software Unlimited closed I was recruited by a headhunter to manage a new store for a national retail software chain that was rapidly expanding. I managed the Egghead Discount Software store in Baltimore for about a year before being recruited by another headhunter to become the project manager at CompuCare, a systems integration company in Pikesville.
But all the while there was tension between working for my bosses and working for myself, and my growing base of clients grew restless waiting for me to help them only on evenings and weekends. So I bit the bullet and quit my day job and focused exclusively on growing my own business. And for the past 36 years I have been the President and sole employee of PC Hardware & Software, Inc. I haven’t gotten rich but I have been able to support myself and my family through my business. And I really like not having to answer to any boss.
In the mid- 1990’s I teamed up with my friend Norm who owned a home remodeling business and together we created an add-in for the popular contact management program called ACT! Our add-in (which we called BetterACT!) was a customized contact management solution for builders and remodelers. Norm hawked the software at industry trade shows across the country and we wound up selling enough units to sustain the support and development of BetterACT! for a few years. It was money from that enterprise that covered about one-third of my down-payment for the house in Woodstock, MD that we continue to live in.
The other two-thirds of the down-payment for our house came from income I received working a steady gig for a client I got through a lead from a barter service company I was associated with. For a couple of years I taught an Intro to Computing class three mornings a week for recovering drug abusers that was sponsored by a joint state and city partnership. In fact I was just getting to the classroom (across the street from the historic Shot Tower in Baltimore) the morning of 911 and had to close up the classroom and get back on the metro train as everyone in the city was told to return to their homes.
With the enormous help of my associate Joe, I was even able to sustain (and grow) the business during the years that I was Mr. Mom three days a week, as my wife Lisa and I homeschooled our daughter Skye. It has been an exciting and challenging path that took me from would-be novelist to accidental capitalist. And it all seems to fly by at the speed of an electron!