My new client was "The training Center" in Irvine. My job was to man the office because the owner was in Hollywood most of the time. His son was the actor who was the oldest son in the movie E.T. and he wanted to be on the set. My main job was to show business movies at lunchtime. This brought in business executives who wanted to watch them to see if they could use them at their company.

This was good for me because I got to meet a lot of managers and executives and that led to other consulting clients. I met one man who was a consultant to the white house and we became friends and developed a proposal that he could present to the right people at the White House.

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So I founded Owen International, my consulting company and we move forward.

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The Proposal to the Carter White House

During his first year as president, Jimmy Carter told Joseph Califano, his Secretary of HEW that the student loan program was out of control. The loans were being given out but many of the recipients were not repaying their loans and Califano was to get the program under control.

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When this happened it made the national news and everyone cheered Carter. I was in my first year of consulting when this happened. I had the perfect background to help turn this around and much to my good fortune I had a close business associate, Milt Waters, who had strong contacts inside the white house. Milt would go back to work in the white house every month or so.

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My partner Mike Christopher and I talked about the demand Carter had made on Califano, and a demand it was, and I told Mike I had the perfect plan to solve this problem.

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During my last days at IBM in the late 1970’s I held a seminar that trained new IBM sales office credit managers. I took them through every part of the credit manager process, including collecting delinquent accounts. I told Milt I could write a proposal to Califano that would include a program to train people to collect delinquent accounts. It was then that Mike (my partner) came up with the “who” that we would train.

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Mike’s idea was that we would propose a year’s training program for handicapped people to learn a skill that they could take out into the labor market. Having had a good training program and a year of experience working for the government would make it very advantageous for them to get employment. It was a beautiful two-pronged program that held great promise. We talked with Milt about the concept and he thought it was a good idea. He said we would have to write a detailed proposal to Califano. Milt would give us the style template for writing the proposal.

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It took almost three weeks to complete, but when we finished it all three of us knew we had a good program that would bring down the delinquency balance for student loans and train handicapped people to become productive workers in the business world.

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Now it was Milt’s turn. He was headed back to Washington and he had our proposal in hand and assured us he would get it read by the right people. The beauty of having someone on the inside. We just waited for the call that would summon us back to Washington to make the presentation.

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When you think about the program we had put together it had to be a natural.  Not only would Califano get his job done, but Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall would get a new and very visible program. It seemed like a slam dunk until Milt ran into the single person that our program would hurt, and he was the one with the real power.

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Let this be a lesson on how our government runs and who really controls how it operates on a day-to-day basis. Milt was talking about the program to one of his good friends, a high-level bureaucrat in the labor department one day and the guy said it was a great plan but it would never fly.

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It seems the one person who was going to be hurt by our program was the bureaucrat who ran the student loan program. He was a real mover within the Washington bureaucracy but he had reach a ceiling. He couldn’t go any higher in GSA ranking (his pay scale definer) given the current organization. The only way for him to advance was to wait for his boss to retire and take his job.

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Well, there was one other way. He could build a very large staff that would require additional management levels and this would mean that he would be able to go to the next GSA level. But the guy from Labor told Milt that this wouldn’t happen if the loans were collected and the need for personnel decreased. The only way for the bureaucrat to advance was to not be able to collect the loans, thereby requiring more staff to help collect the loans. The staff would finally reach the point where a new organizational structure would require new managers within the department and they would require a manager with a higher GSA level to manage them.

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This was my first look inside our government and how the bureaucracy really has the power and really runs things.

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There are most generally good things and bad things that come out of situations like this. We didn’t get the contract to collect the delinquent student loans (which are still badly delinquent) but I did come out with a very detailed outline of a credit management training program which ten years later I turned into a book.  The book was published by AMACOM, a division of American Management Association, the largest training organization in the world. Not a white house contract, but residual payments for ten years.

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My Second Client

I met a very interesting fellow name Gordon Brown at the Training Center during the noon movies. He had created the “Howard Hughes Will Kit” and had made a good deal of money. The story is that a man came to the authorities with a hand written document saying that he was to get a sizable piece of money when Howard Hughes died. The man said he was out in the Nevada dessert and he came across another man who needed a ride.

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This mysterious man identified himself as Howard Hughes and he said if the guy would give him a ride he would write a will that gave him a sizable amount of money. When the man came in and presented his document to the proper authorities it raised quite a stir and was a big news item for months. My client saw the possibility of making money by selling "Howard Hughes Will Kits" and he created a kit and sold many of them.

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Well, now he had a new product. This one was a real tangible product that had potential. It was a small sensor that sensed movement of light forms in the area surrounding it. The basic business plan was to sell it to stores that would put the sensory device on some of their displays and when a person walked up to the display the sensor would sense the change in light patterns and an audio tape would play a "pitch" for the product. It seemed like a good plan and so I took the project.

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The first day I went to the office there was another guy there and he was introduced and we were told that we were both consultants and that we would work together on this project. We both wondered why two consultants were required but we took the first project that was to write and record a description of the product. This would be placed in the waiting room along with a slide projector and as the prospective customer waited to talk to the company owner they would see and hear a pitch for the product.

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Well, we wrote a pitch and divided it into four sections. I took the first and third sections to write and Mike Christopher, the other consultant, took the second and fourth sections. Two days later when we got back together with our finished products it was almost eerie. The four sections fit together like a single person had written them. It was that day that Mike and I became partners.

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While Mike and I worked very well together, our customer was a little, no, not a little, a lot, out of touch. He had made a great deal of money from his Howard Hughes Will Kits and he thought he knew everything there was to know about starting a business. Literally, he would start his business over each morning. He had new letterhead, a new business plan, etc. every morning. The company never got off the first day. Finally, even though I needed the work, Mike and I said we couldn't work under these conditions and we walked on the job.

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The Dark Times

As I have said I found two clients through The Training Center and was going along nicely. Mike and I had become partners when we answered an ad that seemed to be a lead for another client. As it turned out it wasn't and the man who we contacted, Harold Batemen, said he would keep in touch.

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In April of 1978 I got a call from Bateman and he said he had an idea and needed some consulting. So I met with him. He wanted to start an employment agency for sales people.

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After looking at his business model I tried to change things so they would work but it had a fatal flaw. Employment agencies charged their client companies a percentage of what the employee they brought to that company. Sales people are paid on a commission basis and therefore it is impossible to calculate how much money they will make the first year.

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We threw around ideas for two or three weeks and to make a very involved situation simple I ended up forming a company.

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Owen International was a marketing training company.  Well, it was more than that it was a company that taught people how to start a business. These people were a very select group. They were people who had bought in to a multilevel marketing system such Amway, Shaklee, Mary Kay, etc. There were many of these companies in those days.

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In 2009, as I write this piece, multilevel marketing is thought by most people to be a very bad type of business. If it’s multilevel marketing - stay away. Again, to net it out, MLM is not bad in and of itself, it is what is done with it that makes it good or bad. MLM is one of the most powerful marketing plans that can be used to build a sales force.

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In fact, I decided that since my target market was MLM participants I would build one of my sales forces using an MLM plan. Bateman was to be my sales manager. He called me for help and as it ended up he was a consultant to me.

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As I have said the business was to help people who had signed up with an MLM program to start their business and succeed. To do this we held seminars that explained how you find the right product, determine who your market is and market your product to those people.

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The other side of the business was setting up sales offices. I had taken Southern California and divided it into territories and I would offer to establish an office in a territory for a consulting fee. Then the owner of the office and Owen Intl would share the profits. That meant there were two very different sales teams. The first was a traditional team that found people who wanted to set up a sales office and were willing to pay the established fee for Owen Intl to do it. This office would find clients and hold seminars.

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The second was an MLM sales team that that found the people to attend the seminars.

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Things were moving along great and we were building both sales offices and the sales team that got them participants for their seminars.

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My First Panic Attack

It was in July of 1978 while I sat at a stop light in Orange, CA when I had my first panic attack. I don’t know how to describe the sensation of a panic attack. Many people think they are having a heart attack and go to the emergency room. This is quite common.

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I was in the inside traffic lane and couldn’t get away from the stoplight and I was coming completely unglued. I didn’t think that I was having a heart attack that time but I was having a very serious attack on my nervous system. All I could think about was getting away from that stop light, but I was trapped.

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I was trapped, that was the whole key to the panic attack. While I did not realize it at the time I must have known it at the subconscious level. Bateman was not performing his duties as sales manager as I wanted him to, but by the time I realized what he was doing I also realized that he had taken over the sales department to the extent that I could not release him and find someone else to do the job without losing my entire sales team, and probably the confidence of my sales office clients.

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It all came to a head in August when I was fed up with Bateman’s antics and I asked him if he would like to buy me out. I said we could work out something with a small down payment and a percent of the gross sales for the next five years. The company had taken off like a rocket and I knew that future sales were virtually insured. We finally agreed on a price (we had a CPA evaluate the company value) and he bought the company from me for enough money for me to retire for the rest of my life.

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Things looked very good for me. I could spend time with Ruth and the kids and I didn’t have to worry about income. I had made it. Well, that’s what I thought. Then I got the call from an FBI agent asking me to come to his office the next day at one o’clock and discuss Owen International.  I said that I no longer owned OI and that he should talk to Harold Bateman. He said he needed to talk with me.

When I got to the Federal building and had my interview with the agent I didn’t know what was happening. It seemed that the agent was investigating me for some type of federal crime. I had brought my sales agreement to the interview and showed it to him and he carefully read it and looked at the date. Now I know the date was the critical item on the agreement. But by the end of the interview I didn’t know whether I was a suspect or not. This brought on anxiety and I was having panic attacks on a regular basis.

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I went to my doctor. He didn’t know anything about what was happening to me but gave me a prescription for one-quarter of a milligram of Xanax to be taken in the morning. This did nothing to alleviate my panic attacks, but it was all I could get.

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As it turned out, I found out from a friend who had stayed on to work for Bateman that Harold had changed the wording in the contract that I had written to establish the consulting agreement for the sales offices into a contract that offered equity in a company. A company in which Bateman held the dominate role. Very much against SEC rules. If you are not a licensed securities agent/broker, there are very strict rules you must follow to sell any type of product that even seems to be a commodity.

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Well, it seemed that Bateman had gone to Detroit and he had brought back over a hundred thousand dollars in “investments.”  And, he had not followed up to establish the offices and the investors complained to the feds and the FBI was investigating Owen Intl.

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The very bottom line is that Harold Bateman went away to a federal penitentiary for a number of years, but I lost Owen Intl and everything I had. That is everything but my on-going panic attacks which I still have and will have for the rest of my life.

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It seems that they are caused by a broken gene that is just sitting and waiting for a highly emotional or highly physical act to take place to start screwing up your brain chemistry.

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I went for eight years with no medication and then I found a book that described my condition and said that anyone with the symptoms described should go to the nearest medical school which all had a new program that was exploring these symptoms and developing ways of helping their patients. I went to UC Irvine Medical School and was tested for two day and accepted into their new program.

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I have been on meds since and it helps but does not take away the symptoms. I have my good times and my bad times. Large groups or groups that are highly charged are things I need to avoid. So, that’s what my life has been like after Harold Bateman.

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Oh, one last thing. After the company had imploded I attempted to resurrect it but the people had been treated so badly by Bateman no one wanted to get involved. In talking with one of the men who had been part of Owen Intl I found out that Bateman was a professional conman who had been doing this type of thing for at least twenty-five years.  From our very first meeting in 1977 Bateman had been setting me up.

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So, here I am with a blood disorder that affects my emotional outlook. I have two or three full-blown panic attacks a year. Most of the time it happens when I’m in traffic. Being in a large group or sitting in a theater creates a buzzing and jitteriness in my nervous system so I stay away from them.

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About a year ago my doctor decided that the meds I was taking were old so he thought he’d upgrade me. That’s when I had a very bad time and had to drop out of many of my activities. As it turned out the new meds just didn’t do the job. I’m now back on the old ones and thing are settled down – as best as possible.

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