I went to work for Basic/Four Corporation as the Manager of Marketing Plans and Programs. My job was to analyze and report on the effectiveness of each branch office.

​

Before I go into what I did at Basic/Four let me explain what type of company Basic/Four was and how it fit into one of the nation's largest out of court turnaround in US history. This situation was taught in most MBA programs for many years. It may still be mentioned in some.

​

Management Assistance, Inc. (MAI) had been the largest leaser of IBM unit record equipment. Unit record equipment is a term used to define the machines that processed IBM punch cards. IBM did have computers that processed the data after the unit record systems manipulated it, but most of the work on data in those days was done by unit record systems. Then IBM introduced the IBM 360 which was the first business computer that was used to do all of the analyzing of data. When the 360 came on the market MAI lost 90% of its business. Customers turned in their unit record systems and bought 360s.

MAI had four divisions; Basic/Four which sold a good minicomputer, a computer service division, a division that sold Basic/Four computers outside of the U.S. and a division that sold all of its old unit record inventory to third-world country businesses at a greatly reduced price.

​

When I went to work for Basic/Four its stock was selling for 12 cents per share. Sales were fair and the company was holding its own. Then in June the Board of Directors made a great move. They hired Ralph Stafford as VP of Sales and Marketing. Ralph had worked for IBM in the days of the 360 revolution and had made enough money in commissions to retire. He told me that he worked just to have fun.

​

I liked Ralph and we became friends. He taught me a lot about sales and marketing and about the business world in general. When he retired from IBM he was General Manger, Eastern Europe. That meant that he sold IBM product to the Soviet Union and East Germany. He had some great stories about going to Moscow and how the people worked and acted. He said it was not a nice place to live.

After he got to know me he added two things to my duties. The first was that I was in charge of the Sales and Marketing budget. When he first gave me the job it was because a new yearly budget needed to be created and he had no one on his staff who could do this. I told him that I could and so I did and from that point I was in control of the budget.

​

The second job he gave me was to write his month board of directors report. Because MAI was going through reorganization, the board required each VP to present a report of their division's progress on a monthly basis. My job was to take the Sales and Marketing data and spin it to show that Marketing was doing a good job. I had become a :"spin doctor." As it turned out I became a very good spin doctor. I learned quickly how to take raw data and structure it into any form you wanted. This has helped me to this day understand all the reports we get on the news about what the economists and political experts say.

​

Director, Financial Planning

Just before the 1976 budget was to be written the Director of Financial Planning left the company. This left a big void. As it turned out I had control of the largest segment of the budget and I was asked if I would take that position. It meant that I would move from Marketing to Finance. I took the promotion and created the 1976 company budget. I learned a great deal about Basic/Four during that process. The most important was that manufacturing had a very high overhead cost. Whether it manufactured one computer or fifty the overhead was the same. As it turned out this had a very positive affect on the company.

​

The VP of Marketing who Ralph replaced also had an IBM background and one of the things he carried over from IBM was that he would not give anyone a discount on their computer.  Ralph had been very successful at IBM because he had given discounts to his customers. He sold a 360 to the Russians and they wanted a discount but not in dollars. They wanted a discount in American office furniture. He ran the discount through a number of companies so it could not be traced and the sale was made.

​

So, when he came to Basic/Four one of the first things he did was implement a discount program. He had a formula that showed whether a sale with a discount was profitable. This single act was the key to the turn around of MAI. As I said manufacturing had a very high overhead. The company needed to sell twenty-four systems per month to cover it. However, once that overhead was covered the profit from any other sales was phenomenal. And Ralph's discount program caused a surge in sales.

​

The surge was so great that the VP of Finance had to start hiding profits. He was very creative and I learned a great deal about creative accounting from him while I worked for him. The reason he had to hide profit is because the stock market does not like to see spikes, either up or down. What it wants to see is a slow steady growth and that is what he was showing.

​

As I said, when I went to work for BFC, in December of 1975, the stock was selling at 12 cents a share. In June of 1976 when Ralph came to work for the company the price had gone up to 50 cents. Ralph bought a hundred thousand shares to show his confidence in the company. He could easily afford the fifty thousand dollars.

​

Because of Ralph's discount program sale soared and BFC made a great deal of profit. The slope of grow up was what the stock market wanted to see and in June of 1977 the company did a four to one reverse split. That is for every four shares you owned you now owned one. But the price per share was over twenty-five dollars. From 12 cents to more than six dollars a share in a year and a half. So let's consider what Ralph made on his fifty thousand dollar investment. He now owned twenty-five thousand shares at twenty-five plus dollars per share. That is a total value of six hundred and five thousand dollars. Take away the fifty thousand he paid for the stock and he made five hundred and seven-five dollars. So, things turned out very good for him and all other BFC stockholders.

​

Now, I should tell you about my job as Director or Financial Planning. I had two basic tasks. The first was to financially evaluate every program that was proposed. I had to determine whether it would be profitable to do the program. I turned my evaluation over to the VP of Finance and he would discuss it with the manager who submitted it.

​

My second task was a little more important. As I said, MAI was going through a major turnaround outside of the bankruptcy court and the SEC was looking at every move we made very closely. We had to submit a monthly variance report to it. This report explained every variance we had between our projected budget and our real spending. It was my job to write this report. Again I had become a spin master. I was never challenged because I was very straight most of the time and when I had to skew the facts I made it sound plausible.

​

I guess Ralph missed me because he asked me to come back and work with him in a higher position. I would be the Director of Marketing and act on his behalf if he was not available. I was the only person other than him who could approve a discount. While I had learned a great deal from the VP of Finance I really didn't like the man. So I went back to Marketing.

​

In 1976 I decided that I wanted to go back to college and get a Ph.D. What I really wanted to do was become a consultant and I felt the degree would be necessary to do this. So I looked around and found a non-resident program that was project-based and signed up. This was the time period when non-resident programs were just starting and it was difficult finding a good one. A year later it seemed that every university had one. By non-resident I mean computer-based.

​

In October of 1976 Ralph left BFC and a new VP of Marketing came in. We did not get along. I started looking for consulting clients and had found one when I was called into the VP's office and told that I was being laid off as of December 31, 1976. I was free to look for a new job on company time so I started to work for my new client as a consultant. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​