Computerland Pt. 2 (1985)

I was not the highest selling salesman at Computerland, but my sales had the highest margins. The other salesmen (they were all men) strived for volume, trying to sell as many systems as they could. This usually meant discounting way below BusinessLand, MicroAge, and the other competitors at the time.

This puzzled me since sales commissions where based on profit margin, not gross sales. These guys would hustle all month trying to wheel-and-deal with vendors and customers try to get the best prices, only to see me make more money.

My sales made more money because I sold more software with each system. The typical system at the time included an IBM or Compaq computer, extra memory, a video or multi-function card, a dot-matrix printer (like the classic Epson FX-80), a modem or network card, and maybe a hi-resolution (at least for the time) display.

Since that configuration was generic, it was easy to price shop.

My strategy was to build up a custom system with hardware and software that provided a complete solution for the client. As the Mac specialist, I spent many mornings reading through MacWorld and MacUser magazines searching for new products to suggest to my clients, such as file servers (very expensive), removable hard drives (the 5mb Bernoulli Box), an add-on PC co-processor (MacCharlie), and more. These niche products all had high prices compared to PC products (what else is new?) and therefore meant higher commissions to me.

My clients loved me for it, because I found products they didn't know existed that helped their productivity immensely. That I would learn these products myself then offer to teach them was a bonus. It didn't take long for the clients to start offering me work on evenings and weekends helping them set up and use their new Mac equipment. By the fall of 1985, I was making more money consulting and training than I was earning in commissions.

That summer several clients ask me to find software to manage their business, (very) simple things like mailing lists, billing, time tracking, and inventory management. Windows 1.0 had just been released, so almost all software ran under MS-DOS and had virtually no user interface. My Mac clients, of course, wanted real mouse-and-window based software, which was nearly nonexistent. That summer I got a free copy of FileMaker from an Apple sale rep and start developing my own database applications. Within a few months I had a half-dozen clients for my custom database work.

By today's standards, those databases were crap. The designs were crude and and the user interfaces clumsy, but they did the job the clients wanted. And compared to the databases found in the DOS world, they looked ultra-modern. As I got better and more ambitious, I experimented with Helix, MacLion, FileVision, Panorama until I finally found Omnis. Omnis gave me the tools to create database applications that looked like regular Mac programs and didn't force the user to learn the database itself. I've used Omnis in all of its evolutions ever since.