Relationship Management and the Entrepreneurial Journey with Mike Muhney

Source: GeniusDen archive transcript checked against the recording. Administrative opening and closing material is omitted; the presentation wording is otherwise preserved with light readability edits.

So there's many directions that I could go, obviously, tonight. You see my home page on the slide deck. As an entrepreneur, which we all are, I think we can all relate to the tightrope we walk on every day, trying to keep our balance with so many different stresses and forces that are pulling for us as well as trying to push us away. And it's a challenge. It's tough. And so I've had a long journey as an entrepreneur so that how I was described just meant I'm an older guy. And so I've just had the benefit of living longer than most of you. And therefore, I've made more mistakes, more failures, et cetera. Oh, sorry. I don't know. I'll try to think of this as the TED Circle here.

Obviously, I'll do good. Yeah, OK. I'll try to think of this as the TED Circle here. And so really, I'm here just to share my story. We all have stories. I'm sure we could have each of you up here tonight to listen to your story and the stresses and journey that you've taken and are continuing to be on. I obviously have had a very successful journey in one regard, but I've had more failures than I've had success. And I've obviously learned things from those failures. And I'm here to also talk about those failures. I don't particularly enjoy listening to speakers who just talk about their success and how wonderful it was. And yeah, we had a few problems here and there.

But we came through and be like me. Well, I can tell that story if you want, but it won't be me. It won't be the real me. I'd rather actually, if I could, dismiss even talking about the success and focus on the failures, but that wouldn't balance out I think maybe what you would like to hear some of tonight. So I'm only going to be able to sprinkle across my journeys, you know, elements of all of that. I'm obviously very open to any question you have. Feel free to interrupt me. I don't mind that at all. And I'll answer the question or tell you that I'm going to get there. So just a little bit about me just so you have a sense of where I came from.

I'm born and raised in Chicago and any Chicagoans here. Born and raised in Chicago in a poor family. I'm the eldest of six kids. Went to University of Illinois in Champaign. Got a degree in finance with honors. And I was accepted to law school and life threw a curveball at me. And I couldn't go to law school for at least a year. I was out of a job. I had to pay my own way through college. I've always worked my butt off. I've been coming from a poor family. I worked as a laborer in the construction industry back in the mid to late 60s, making seven bucks an hour in a dollar-an-hour minimum-wage era. So I made a lot of money that allowed me to pay for my college education.

And I graduated from college with no debt. I never knew what it was like to have a day off. I always worked to be able to pay my bills. When I got laid off a week after I graduated from college looking forward to going to law school. This is part of my entrepreneurial journey in some respects because there are a lot of curveballs thrown at us as entrepreneurs. And so this is how mine began not yet as an entrepreneur but kind of enabled me to get accustomed to the fact that you're not in control of things all the time. And so what happened is a week after graduation from college there was a concrete truck driver strike in Chicago, Union Town. All the unions supported the strike. It lasted for a month.

That month of not working cost me the inability to afford to go to law school for at least another year. During that time a friend of mine, well shortly after they settled it, I knew I couldn't go to law school for another year. A friend of mine asked me if I ever thought about going into sales. And I said no, why? He worked for IBM in the mainframe era long before the PC industry. The PC wasn't even a gleam in anybody's eye yet. That's how old I am. But he said well there's an opening in our office, downtown Chicago. If you're interested I'll facilitate the introduction and then you're on your own. So I said hey it beats digging ditches. And so in that era it was lifetime employment once you got into IBM, if you got into IBM.

I learned from IBM so many things that I applied to the design and the purpose of ACT, the product that we'll get to tonight, that literally created a new software industry category and software industry today known as CRM. And it's still on the market. But back then you had to take an IQ test. If you didn't pass the IQ test, it was an hour long test by yourself in a private room and they timed it. And if you didn't pass it, they didn't interview you. I probably just passed it, but I passed it. And I'm not kidding. I probably just passed it. I then had three days of intensive interviews, two hours per interview. So six interviews, 12 hours of interviewing just to be selected to work at IBM.

But I made it and I had a great career. What they taught us in sales school over six months were so many principles that were universal. I applied as an individual that carried me well in my life to this day and always will to my death. And they applied equally as much, if not more so, in the development of a software product that I've been privileged to have some creative opportunities to design, along with my business partner at the time, Pat Sullivan. So they taught us, for example, that everybody sells. I've always used that phrase, in fact, before I came up with the name ACT, which was an acronym itself coming from IBM. It originally stood for Activity Control Technology.

But I purposely thought of the words to create the acronym that itself became the word. But I codenamed it YES, which stood for Yes, Everybody Sells. So I don't care if you're a doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer. Don't tell me, CPA, that you're not a sales person, sales person. No, I'm got my CPA. I've got my MBA, whatever. Yes, so what? You certainly sell because you have competition, right? Yeah, I do. Well, then sell me why you should be my architect. So I don't care what an entrepreneur, since we're a group of entrepreneurs here, if you don't embrace the concept that you are and should be the best sales person in your company, you're not going to achieve the greatest potential you otherwise could.

You at least have to understand and embrace the value of selling them. Think of all the things you have to do, raising money, talking to the media, trying to get to the media, trying to get to people to introduce you to other people, trying to talk to business partners, channel partners, recruiting new people. The list is long, and every one of those things is a selling effort, in my opinion. So selling is part of our lives, and it needs to be embraced. So you may already believe that, but I just want to reinforce that that's what they taught us. They also said there are two kinds of sales people. There's jackasses, and they can carry a heavy workload, but you got to kick them all the time, right?

We all know people like that. But you all, you IBMers, you are wild stallions, and we love that wild stallion attitude and effort, but when we're done with you in six months, you're going to be thoroughbred racehorses. And that's what they helped us to see ourselves in a different way. They said selling is a profession. When you hear people start to describe how you look, you begin to embrace that perspective such that now you carry yourself in that manner. So I'm just sprinkling a few things that they taught us that have served me well, but one that I am going to tell the story of, right up front, is they taught us a concept called what's on the walls.

Obviously this is long before Facebook and posting things on the wall of Facebook, right? All that meant was when you went to a company to call on that, and they always taught us by the way to call it the CEO level. Even if it was General Motors, when you get assigned to that team, you make an appointment to see the CEO. You'll probably get delegated down, especially a company that size perhaps, but that's okay to be delegated down because the person delegated down to knows that the CEO sent you to see them, right? So there was a different aura that we had as IBMers when we would talk to an executive. And of course we were talking to executives in a mainframe era, and we didn't talk to departmental level people.

So I was taught right out of college to carry myself in a manner to older executives, CEO types, DP managers as they were called back then today, they'd call them a CIO or CTO, it doesn't matter, but high level C level executives. And so with that perspective of how I had to conduct myself helped me to connect with older people in a very formal suit and tie era that we had to conduct ourselves in. So here's the story of the what's on the wall. So all that meant was when you went to somebody's office, notice the paintings on the wall. Notice, if I'm in Joe's office, for example, what's on his desk or the little drawings from his kids or grandkids or a picture of him in a boat and a yacht.

Hey, is that your boat? Yeah, it is. Really? How long have we had it? Oh, for years. Really? Where have you taken it to? Oh, we've sailed it across the ocean. Really? What's that like? Look, to do that someday, the whole point was it was personal. That was the whole point was to connect. And people love to talk about what they live for and work for. Those are people's passions. We all display them. I was talking to Jessica a moment ago and, of course, Scott and a few others—Jason— that know that I typically wear colored sport coats when I speak. And I do it purposely because colored sport coats are unusual for a guy. I mean, look at you guys. Brown, gray, black, boring. I'm a guy.

So I guess I have brown—bland, but I'm just saying as a speaker, I want you to remember me, but I want to put people in a comfort zone where they're willing to come up to me and not try to figure out what can I say to him or how can I break the ice. People come up and talk about my coat. Hey, that's a colorful coat. I like that coat. Where'd you get it? I mean, like one guy at the airport at one time at the Admirals Club say, you've got big balls to wear a coat like that. But we started laughing right away. That's the whole point. And I make fun of myself. And since you laughed at that, here's what I say to people. I say, yeah, I'm either colorblind, I'm old enough where I don't give a shit. Or I have big balls. Pick any two of the three.

But look, it creates laughter. And laughter is so powerful as a sales connection, a people connection tool. And IBM taught me that. Yes, it was more formal back then, but I live by and benefited from all of these little things that we either don't think about or take for granted. And who knew back then that it would lead to the creativity to get to create a software product that created a category in a global industry? Who would have thought? You never know how the dots are going to connect down the road from what we do today and what we have been taught to do. So I did that with every executive, except one executive commented on it years of my doing this. Most people would just answer the questions.

So yeah, this is, you know, whatever. And then we'd get down to business. But this guy, I came in unannounced and he interrupted me right away. And he said, Mike, I would love to talk to you about what IBM is doing in my industry, but I'm literally getting ready to go on a two week skiing vacation in Colorado with my family. Feel free to get in touch with me when I get back. That was a win. But what's on the wall piece that he gave me was he was going skiing in Colorado. That was something of interest to him, something to ask him about when I was going to call him later. So in my car in that time, I went, I wrote down in my Day-Timer two things, three weeks later. I thought I'd give him a week to get back and catch up, right?

I wrote down the executive assistant's name. IBM taught us to treat people, everybody, especially the executive assistant, just like they're the CEO. Everybody matters. Everybody. And ask him how his skiing vacation went. So three weeks later, I called him up and here's how I'm on the phone. I didn't have the benefit of body language. You know, hi Mr. Smith, this is Mike Muhney from IBM. Oh, hi Mike, how you doing? Hey, I'm fine, Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith, how was your skiing vacation? There was a nanosecond which seemed longer to me, obviously, at that time of silence. And I didn't know, do I say something wrong or whatever, I didn't know, but this is what he said.

And it's virtually verbatim because it made that much of an impression on me. He said, you know, you're probably a pretty smart guy working for IBM. And you're probably smart enough to figure out that your competitors have called on me too and they all have. And you're the last one to call me. I mean, at this point, you know, I'm in my mid-20s, right? And he's an executive. And I didn't know, is that good or bad? Does that mean I'm just, you know, disqualified? I didn't know. And he said, what that tells me is you paid attention to me. You cared about me enough to remember it and ask me about it. What it tells me is you are a professional. I do not like to deal with amateurs.

And yes, let's have that meeting. And yes, I ended up selling him an IBM solution. That's not the moral of the story. The moral of the story is, in his mind, how I conducted myself determined how he categorized me. And how he categorized me was he elevated me to professional, he relegated my competition to amateurs. In fact, because of that, he dismissed them and I stood out. Simply by asking the question that on the surface had nothing to do with business, but it had everything to do with business. And that was a light bulb that went on over my head from that day on the power of how people perceived how I conducted myself. I don't like the phrase relationship management, which is odd, counterintuitive because I'm the guy that created the category that's about relationship management.

I don't like the phrase CRM, customer relationship management. I don't believe you can manage a relationship. I never have. I can manage data. It's a software product. But the only thing I can truly manage, the only thing you all can truly manage is yourself. And how you conduct yourself, how you choose to present yourself determines your perspective on me and your perspective on me determines my reputation and how you speak about me or not. To other people in generating a growing, sustainable, thriving, powerful network which we all depend on for all of our lives, both business and personal. And as I grew, as I matured and just got older and more experienced, I understood these things.

So that's just a little bit of background, but it was my foundation. Little did I realize that as I look back, in fact, on IBM sales training, we were ranked nationally. I graduated sixth out of my class of 66. I had a great career at IBM. Little did I realize that they didn't teach us how to sell. They taught us how to deal with more people more effectively, the result of which would then be greater success by default. It's always about people. It's always about connection. In fact, I have a relationship statement. I always have had a personal relationship statement. And as my companies that I've had or been a part of in the past as an executive, yes, we have had mission statements.

How many of you have a mission statement in the room here? Do you remember what it is? No. Nobody remembers their mission statement. You got to go to the paper or documents to refer to what it is. But you know you have one, right? Well, that's fine. I mean, we have one too, and I can't tell you what it is, but I wrote it down at one point in time. But the relationship statement transcends business and personal in time. And it's simply this. People matter. I didn't say customers matter. I said people matter. The second part of my relationship statement is an individual, talk about it as a company, and you feel free to to plagiarize this, copy it and use it.

But I think every company should have this as their relationship. It should have a relationship statement, and this is it. I, or we, I believe in the infinite potential of close relationships. I believe in the infinite potential of close relationships. You know, Scott and I, for example, met about seven years ago, six, seven years ago at a conference in Las Vegas. And we had some small talk back then, but, you know, we've engaged with each other over time where our relationship today, you know, we look back on that and kind of laugh about it and talk about it, but it has grown, and it's continuing to grow, and isn't that what we all want, both in business and personal. The fact that maybe Scott is never going to be a customer of mine or prospect.

It doesn't matter because he has a network behind him, and if he likes me because of how I conduct myself, and, yes, let's assume I've got something of value that people might want. But he is an advocate for me. Every one of you in this room could be my advocate, even if you never buy my product. So why shouldn't I do the same effort of selling and treatment and regard and respect, courtesy, all of those things, the same as I would if I knew you were a prospect or customer? That's how I view life, and IBM laid that foundation, so let me get into some of the slides. Part of what I try to say is, because we think of software as clinical, but when you deal with software that's about people, it's not clinical.

It's about heart, and it's about soul, and I'd rather have somebody working for me that never even used software or CRM or any kind of software like that, but they were great in making real connections with people as opposed to somebody who's an expert in the software, but doesn't do as well in the real world connections, right? You would take the same type of employee as well, so I can disregard software, even though I'm a software entrepreneur, because it really is attitude. That's all points about attitude and heart and determination and perception of how you treat other people. So, let's get to my little bit more of the journey of ACT! now.

So, the very first product, we started the company known as Conductor Software. I brought the original document so you can see where it was like back in that era. We created a software product called MarginMaker. It was actually first known as QuotePro, and here's the first page, and here's the actual ad itself that ran in a weekly, in PC industry, magazine. This was now 1985, late 85, early 86. If it takes this much to try to describe what the product does, you know it's doomed to fail. Which you did. Let me tell you the failure story. So, it was a specific product. We all know as entrepreneurs, especially how many of you are funded by angels, by the way, I'm just curious.

Just two of you. So, the rest are generating revenue on your own, or you're wealthy, and mom and dad are taking care of paying the bills or something like that. Well, I've always been on the side where yes, the world's greatest funders are known as credit cards. And yes, I've had credit cards declined when you're trying to pay your bill at a restaurant or a hotel. Because you haven't paid your bill and you've reached your limit. I've been there. It's embarrassing. But that's what you do, because that's what you have to do, right? But most of my life has been dependent on angel investors. Only one time did we have a venture capitalist part of it, which were the latest stages of ACT!.

But mostly angel investors. So, for this, we have a specific target which any investor likes to know. Who is your target audience? Who is your customer? Are you focused? Well, when you have a finite industry and a finite segment within that industry, that should serve you well. And we did find an angel investor out of Boston who put in $100,000 based on the margin maker product, which was a configurator. And all that meant was if you came into a computer store back in that era where we all had to go to buy PCs, most of you look older, you should remember things like Businessland and Computerland, computer land, CompuShop, the stores. Well, that's where you went to buy an IBM or IBM compatible PC, a compact or whatever back then.

This was for their salespeople, so that if you came in as the prospect and said, I'm a department head of TI and I want to buy 25 computers. I can only afford one of these powerful 286s, the rest are 8880s, right? And I need 20 dot matrix printers. I can only afford five laser printers. And I need a lot of Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, whatever. You could configure that product, the salesperson could, you could line item a discount back self margin, but you would assure that it was at a profit that you weren't going to sell it and quote somebody at a loss, right? Which would probably cost you your job. And it would print out and the salesperson could give it to you so that you felt, wow, they gave you a document and they said they'd stand by this price firm.

30 days, you'd then go to competition and then you'd say, oh, that's probably 75,000 bucks or they're not. Which one would you feel more confident in? We were always trying to impress and strengthen the perspective of that salesperson more professionally versus amateur. Okay. It failed. $85,000 into this product, which was $700 a copy. Pat and I came to the conclusion, we literally said each other, this dog ain't going to hunt. We're dead. And here was the problem further complicated by that fact. Was if the angel investor up in Boston was coming down in about three weeks and he thought everything was cool, he didn't know that we were dead or that we couldn't sell it.

Now, I told you the IBM story about the light bulb that went on to me because this is where I applied it 10 years later and the impact it had to this very day on my entire career. So, one of the guys, one of the CEOs, I've always called it the CEO level, one of the PC stores was known as CompuShop headquartered in Richardson of all places across America. That would have been 54 copies of margin maker to sell. I schmoozed the executive assistant, I got through to John Purtell who was the CEO, of course I called him, John, Mr. Purtell back then. But the moment I first walked into his office, he stood up from his behind his desk and he was about this tall and he came up to me and he's got a very good voice.

And if you were to call him, he would answer the phone like this, Purtell here, very intimidating kind of guy. So, he gets up from his desk, I walked in, we're shaking hands, I'm looking up to him and he's about four or five inches taller than me. He's holding my hand and this is what he said. How the hell did you get in here to see me? That was my greeting from him. And while I'm still holding my hand, I looked at him with no delay and I said, Mr. Purtell, I know your executive secretary better than you do and she let me in. And he laughed. Laughter is that elixir and now we were kind of cool. Okay, this guy's all right, you know, whatever. What can I help you with, right?

And he did delegate me down to the purchasing department. He never bought the product but he liked me and we actually stayed in touch. He met me for coffee later because he was in the industry, the head of a big company, right? A local mentor, if you will. As when Pat and I came to the conclusion that MarginMaker was dead and we didn't know what to do, and the angel investors coming down, John Purtell, in that same publication that we ran that ad in their annual edition of the 25 most influential people in the PC industry, I'm talking Bill Gates, Jim Manzi from Lotus 1-2-3, you know, long ago names, John Purtell was one of those 25 and here I knew the guy, right?

So I called up John and I said, John, can we talk with you? And we did, and we said, we don't know if we should get the 15,000 we have left to the angel investor. We don't know if we should tell him. Can you give us any advice? And this is what he said. Now, a lot of times we look for advice that's kind of really sophisticated that only a really, really smart person could come up with and nobody else could see, right? I mean, just crystal clear vision into something. But sometimes we dismiss the total practical right in front of us. And this is all he said. He said, look, you two guys are smart guys. Next week is July 4th, 1986. Why don't you just go have a brainstorm breakfast at a restaurant for me until noon and then enjoy the rest of the holiday with your families?

And Pat and I said, well, we could afford coffee and toast. Okay, so we'll go have this breakfast. And when we sat down at the breakfast, oh, by the way, sorry. This kind of just all I want to say this for is that it demonstrates the need to act. And I showed this one from Ben Hogan because this one says act. And both of them, the message from both of these slides is simply be forward looking as opposed to being bogged down in the problem at the moment or being stuck in it even if not paralyzed as a result of it. We could have said to ourselves, you know, the best thing to do is just give the 15,000 back, hang our head in shame, and we'll go back to the corporate world.

No problem there. Pat was a salesman too. He had worked at 3M. So we weren't concerned about getting back into a job and we could have done that, but we were forward looking. So in the era at the breakfast that we sat down at, before we started, this is what we said to each other. These were the guidelines that we established how we were going to conduct ourselves. Whatever we came up with had to be useful to us. We had to give each other unmitigated veto power. So these were very practical things. And with it, we then began a dialogue of, well, what could we use? And in that era, it was a Rolodex. Anybody familiar with the Rolodex?

You're not familiar with the Rolodex? Wow. Okay. Well, the way people used to keep track of, you know, information about people, right? It's always about people. What's their address? What's their phone number? And these are all landlines. There were even fax machines back then, okay? It was a long time ago era. But those were, you know, organizers, which are still around today, and people were lying. So John's writing notes down in a book. John and I applaud you for that. But guess what? That book is going to sit somewhere back at home. And when you fill up that book, it's going to sit on the shelf and you'll have a new book. But there'll be things in a new book that could tie into information with maybe a certain person in that book, but it's not aggregated.

So what Pat and I did is we looked at the state of the world. Back then we said, boy, if we could just come up with a software product that could combine very practical elements in one solution and simplify our lives, what could we use? We could use that. We couldn't use our configurator, MarginMaker, because we didn't work at a PC store. We built it for somebody else. So, the need was the motivation for something we ourselves could use, and here is the napkin we left with that morning. This is the original napkin, July 4, 1986. Now, it doesn't look like much, but this was the rudimentary menu structure of the product. So, there it is right there. And what I did over the next two weeks, two to three weeks before John McNair, the Boston Angel investor, came down, was I taped together.

Here it is. Four pieces of graph paper, too. This is how you design software back then. This is the decision tree, the site plan. Now, every one of these menu items had a sub-menu and then screenshots to go along with that item, right? So, here are all of the documents, all of the architecture, if you will, every menu item, screenshot, everything. This was what Pat and I worked on furiously for the next three weeks in preparation for when the Angel investor came down. We had a little bit of hope that maybe we could salvage what otherwise was going to look like a very bad situation. So, John McNair did come down. We picked him up at the airport.

Our office was in Las Colinas at Williams Square. We had an executive suite, ten by ten. It was like a closet. But we were in Williams Square. We looked good. We looked successful, right? But we went to lunch and we said, John, we've got bad news, but we've got good news. And he said, well, what's the bad news? We told them, MarginMaker's dead and we told them why. But we have good news. Well, what's the good news? We told them all about this product that I had codenamed ACT. We showed him these documents and who could use it. And it was just, it was bigger than MarginMaker could have ever been, right? And this is what he said. We didn't have any idea how he was going to respond. None.

We were hoping it would be positive that he would like this again, but we didn't know. And when we were done talking and we finished up, this is what he said. I didn't invest in MarginMaker. I invested in the two of you guys. And I'd like this idea better than MarginMaker. Do you need any more money? We totally did not expect that. And he had already put in this $100,000, right? We said, yes, we do. And he said, how much? And we said $50,000, spontaneously $50,000. And he literally went to his suit-coat pocket, pulled out a checkbook and wrote a $50,000 check on the spot. And I went back to John Purtell, the guy who I had spoken to a month earlier, to catch him up.

He didn't know that we had the breakfast. He knew nothing. So I gave him the whole sequence. And the John McNair loved it. Then he wrote a $50,000 check. And here's what John Purtell said. I like that idea too. In fact, I got a couple guys that also might like this idea that might be interested in investing. Let me pull together a meeting and you guys do your pitch. Which he did. And we did. And at that meeting, or days afterwards, we had $400,000 in the checks written for us. We were that close to death with MarginMaker. $15,000 left in the bank, which wouldn't have seen us very long. It was over. But we took advice. We had the initiative to humble ourselves, to pursue something ahead, rather than whimper about the failure, et cetera.

And my training from IBM, from my speaking, from my part, Pat obviously had his own training too. But calling on the CEO, that led to John Purtell, that led to, I mean, you never know how good something could come from what seems insignificant prior with a person. Therefore, that's why I said, people matter. Everything always counts with people, no matter what. Don't ever have this attitude that, well, I'll listen to you, but I'm basically tuned out because you're never going to be a customer anyway. So, yeah, it was nice talking to you. Hope to see you again, right? Don't ever be like that. And we've all met people like that. Three months later in PC Magazine, I was in California, Pat called me, and said, Michael, go buy a copy of PC Magazine right now.

There's a two-page article written in PC Magazine, all about ACT!. And look what the headline is. What qualifies as great software. So there was the product, there's the two-page article. Here it is right here. We did a reprint of it. And it was all about how it was going to change the world. And even CPAs could use this product. The reason he said that was a CPA at what was called Arthur Young at the time, before Ernst & Whinney merged with Arthur Young, who worked at the Infomart, got a copy of ACT! and loved it so much, and he knew Jim Seymour, the journalist, that he said, you want to take a look at this new product. I think you'll like it, Jim, and Jim, we didn't even know Jim Seymour.

He wrote an article and our sales went like this. It took a nice sharp upturn, right? So, in context, how much time do I have left? I know I'm only going to go. I'm going to have to skim through this so fast. I'll tell you that. By the way, [Unclear numerical aside about 1986 dollars]. Wow. Interesting. What was I saying? Oh, so 13 minutes left. Okay. I'm going to talk fast. We went to COMDEX in Atlanta, the junior one, in April to observe how COMDEXes were conducted and how exhibitors at COMDEX conducted showing their software because we were going to go to the big one in November, every November in Las Vegas, where over a hundred thousand people would come to talk to people like us. There was no internet.

People had to go to learn and talk to the actual people and get freebies and all that, whatever. So, we observed one thing at the Atlanta context that the exhibitors would have a pedestal with the monitor. You'd come up and answer your question and show you the demo of the product. And then you'd come up and you didn't erupt and ask me a question, but it was a question here. So, he walked away and I was, you know, the people were doing it one at a time. How inefficient, unproductive. And Pat and I said, we're going to go big. We're going to get a 20 foot wide and 50 foot long booth and it's going to cost us about $50,000. But we're going to go big and we're going to get 50 chairs so people can sit down and we're going to do a presentation every hour on the hour, which we did. Now, the thing we didn't realize, so let's say you're the 50 chairs and you see that there's three aisles around you and exhibitors, 10 by 10 exhibitors, sprinkled around these three aisles for a whole week from the third presentation

on it. I'm the one that did 95% of all of them. I had to have a break every once in a while to go eat. But I literally did about 95% of them. Every chair was filled, even if people were just resting their feet. But the phenomenon that even we didn't understand would happen is people would stand around and say, well, there's no chairs left. But what are they watching? And they would watch the demo standing around and block the exhibitors, which made them stationary for those exhibitors to talk to them—kept the bodies. Well, this guy over here who saw every one of my presentations and knew all of my jokes by the end of the week. When they were shutting down the lights, you know, the COMDEX was done, Pat and I packed up our bag. We had eight of us there. We sold 500 copies of ACT!. 500.

And the contract said, you couldn't sell product. Our attitude was, screw that. What are they going to do? Kick us out? We're going to sell product. We were renegades. We were mavericks. You can't abide by the rules as an entrepreneur. And we didn't, we don't like rules. Obviously, we all have to contain ourselves and stuff. But the point is, I'm going to stretch it as far as we can and we're selling product and we sold 500 copies that day. So this guy in this exhibit over here, who is the only guy in this booth the whole week, ran up to Pat and I, I mean, literally ran up as we were walking out and he said, I'm going to buy your company. I love that.

It's going to be a fantastic, successful product. I have a million dollars on wire transfer to you next week. Can I buy your company? And we were like, who's this guy? But we went, no, but thanks. But inside, of course, we talked about this later. We both went, holy shit, somebody just offered us a million dollars. Again, we were almost broke, dead, 16 months earlier, whatever, 17 months. That guy was Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. Kevin O'Leary, no, he wasn't the Kevin O'Leary then, that we all know him, but it was Kevin O'Leary, he offered us a million dollars for the company. So you saw, you see how close we came to our demise, and I know I have time not much on this, so I'm skipping over so many things.

So, make a long story short, we ended up selling the company to Symantec in June of 93, by the way. Let me tell you some of the bad side of this, which is more difficult to deal with, success or failure? Success. Absolutely, why? I don't have time to listen to your answers, but I'm sure that I would agree with you. Failure, when you hit bottom, you can't go below this concrete floor. You hit bottom, that's it. But success, the sky's the limit. Well, when you're successful, it's kind of cool. I've experienced in my life for a number of years, during ACT, what I will call the closest thing I probably will ever come to be in a celebrity, literally.

I mean, I was asked to speak all over the world. I was filmed in General Motors headquarters, shipped me up there to be on their internal nationwide TV network to talk about ACT and how dealers, I mean, you know, we had things written about us. We were celebrities. We'd go to COMDEXes and be able to say, you're the ACT guys, come to our party. You know, we want you to our party, right? Because they were using ACT. I don't care if it was Intel or any company, they were all using ACT. And they loved us, but we were fun guys to be with. And our culture was one of fun people to be around. We weren't stoic and stale. And yes, if you talk to somebody at Microsoft today, for example, or Google or any of those, I'm sure they're kind of like, yeah, I work for Facebook.

And who are you? What are you? You know, people have this, I'm better than you, attitude. We avoided that. You liked to be with us, and we liked the fact that you liked to be with us, and we took advantage of it, right? That's who we were, and our product reflected it. Anyway, I lost a 19-year marriage three years before we sold the company, because I allowed ACT to become my mistress. The attention on me was so profound, I traveled so much around the world that I literally lost balance with my family. And during that time, my ex-wife fell in love with another guy whose wife worked for American Airlines, and she traveled a lot, so they commiserated.

And it cost me a marriage that I take responsibility for because I lost touch. Three kids, 19-year marriage, and the pursuit of success for a family financial independence, whatever that might mean later, whenever best company might be sold or whatever. And I lost part of the very reason I did this personally, and for my family, lost it. Pat and I is the two co-founders. We were best friends, that's when we started the company. We began to not be able to stand each other, and we basically had to stay out of each other's way, because we were both the parents and the success, and the demands and all that were so profound, that our ego's got in the way, and parents don't always agree on how to treat the child.

We always loved the child, our child, and we would never hurt our child, but I couldn't stand you anymore, and we basically wanted a divorce, but we had to stay together in separate bedrooms, figuratively speaking. We just couldn't stand being together because of the success of that. So it cost me a marriage, it cost me my best friendship. Yes, Pat and I reconciled many years later, but we did still, to this day, I would say we lost our best friendship. We had a long history together, we talked like older guys now, and remember when, but it's still there. I can feel it, and I know he can feel it. He was in town a few weeks ago, we had dinner together.

When he lives in Scottsdale, when I go to Scottsdale, we get together. So we had reconciled, but it cost me the friendship. So, I could talk about a lot of things, I'm just going to quickly go on to the [unclear transition]. I was despondent after we sold the company. I literally lost my way. I mean, I went from this fast train, this glamorous, in my life, what I would consider, glamorous lifestyle, going all over the world, obviously company expense, and meeting some really fun people, et cetera. And just, you know, the association of, you're the guy, you're one of the guys who did this, to nothing, nothing. And I lost my way. Now, I didn't need pills, I didn't need to go see psychiatrists, but I didn't know who I was anymore, because my identity was wrapped up in ACT!, obviously it was.

I'm proud of ACT!, it's still on the market today, but success should be a springboard and not a hammock. I've also learned that failure should be a springboard and not a hammock or a prison, because you fail, right? Going back to those two sides in the beginning, being forward looking. So, a couple of years later, what I did become was a Mr. Mom, just so you know. My ex-wife now moved back to Chicago, she gave the kids the choice you want to live in. And if you want to come to Chicago with me, of course the kids traveled, but who was the primary residence? And the kids said, we want to live with Dad. We haven't seen them much over these years, we'd like to hang out with Dad.

And so I literally became a Mr. Mom. Doctors, appointments, and PTA meetings, school, plays, the whole bit. I was a full-time Mr. Mom, and I loved it. I wouldn't trade it for anything, but it was a heavy price to do that, that I didn't, you know, have to have a divorce to make it become so. But that's what I was, well, I invested in, I was one of nine investors, I invested $100,000 in a company called Michael Jordan Golf Company. Michael's playing for the Bulls at this time. And I got to be with Michael. It was kind of cool to be with Michael, who wouldn't want to be with Michael Jordan back in that era, right? Even today people would think it's cool to be with him.

Anyway, I was at an event with him in Aurora, Illinois, a suburb, and I could not believe the crowds and even the cops who were there waiting for him to drive up in his Porsche for this event. Opening up the first Michael Jordan Golf Center, which was a brilliant, beautiful, manicured, Masters-oriented-like driving range and clubhouse with everything Michael Jordan keychains and wallets and business cards, everything pictures. But Michael Jordan was the vicarious experience of being with Michael Jordan for all of us. That's why we like sports and go to these things that vicarious touch with that person. And when I saw that I said, there's a business opportunity here, and so I came up with the concept of celebrity software, where I was going to create a game around already branded individuals who already had a lot of sponsors that I was going to get prepaid advertising from rather than give away equity to save

the dilution of the company, and it wasn't going to be Michael Jordan playing basketball. By the way, Electronic Arts didn't have two NBA players at that time in the NBA games because they wouldn't license their rights to them, and those two players were Shaquille O'Neal and Michael Jordan. So Michael Jordan didn't exist on the Bulls. So I wrote a concept paper, I thought, I'm going to create a game Michael's Real Love is Golf. I'm going to create a fantasy golf game where the ball would go in the hole, the first hole at the first green, and it'd go down to Middle Earth and the Flash Gordon-like clay people would come out, and the golf clubs would be weapons, and it'd be treacherous to get through, 18 holes of golf.

And you could have your own likeness kind of playing in the game with Michael, and it was going to be a Willy Wonka concept where I was going to have these annual winners who got the golden certificate in the box and [unclear description of the online contest]. The top five Internet winners, along with one guest, would have a day with Michael, and I talked to Pat O'Brien, and Pat was going to put this on MTV and show the day with Michael, and all Michael's sponsors were going to give everything to the people. This was a brilliant idea, I will say so myself. So I wrote a concept paper, and ultimately a business plan, here is the business plan from back then, and David Falk, his agent, who had just signed Shawn Bradley, the center for the Mavericks at the time, when Ross Perot Jr. honed it, came down to meet with Russ Throw for the first time and said that I gave the CEO of the Michael Jordan Golf Company my concept paper, three-page paper, to give to David Falk, hoping he would read it and like it.

Well, he did, and he said, had this kid meet me at the Adolphus Hotel, and this morning at 8 o'clock, and I'll talk to him before I go to my meeting with Ross Perot Jr., whatever. I went to the Adolphus Hotel, which interesting I drove by coming here, I thought, 20 years ago I was sitting there with David Falk. I go up to his penthouse room, and he was very tall guy, David Falk was a super agent, he had Patrick Ewing and Dikembe Mutombo, and a lot of the NBA All-Stars. I mean, the presence of people that were a whole lot higher in wealth, and prestige, and influence, and black book networking, the little black book address, we like their black books in our contact database, right?

And here I'm dealing with these kind of people, and I'm just me, I'm a regular down-to-earth guy, the guy had a success, so he sits down and says, Mike, can I get you some coffee or juice? I'll have some juice. He says, well, tell me about yourself. I read the paper, but tell me again, so I said, well, it's an idea that, you know, it does this, and blah, blah, blah. Well, what have you done? Well, I'm a software entrepreneur, I had a successful product. Well, what did it do? Well, it did this, and I never named ACT! I never told him the name of ACT!, ever. The door knocked, and it was one of his other lawyer associates who came in, and he just sat down on the couch.

Beside, David and I had a couch facing each other, and then another couch, and he just sat down and kind of listened to my answers to the questions [unclear phrase], until he finally said, can I interrupt you for a minute? Mike, and I said, sure, what product are you talking about? I said, well, It's a software product called ACT!. He said, well, what about that? I said, well, I'm the co-inventor of ACT! You're the co-inventor of ACT!, and he immediately looked at David and he said, David, that's what we use at the company to keep track of all of our clients. We use ACT!. All of a sudden, I had great credentials, greater credibility, as you can imagine, and David Falk said to me this thing at the end of my pitch with them.

He said, I'm going to give you the green light to pursue this. I like this idea. You are not a newbie. You've done successful software before, so you know what you're talking about, and I like you. So go for it. I arranged with John Romero, who I contacted, the creator of Doom, remember Doom. He was going to invest a million bucks and provide me the game developers. I went to Ross Perot Jr. Actually, here's what happened. I was up in David Falk office a month later. He wanted me to come up to Chevy Chase to further the discussion with him and my progress. And while I'm talking to him and Chevy Chase, he turned around in his credenza where his phone was and he called Phil Knight from Nike. Phil wasn't there, but he talked to Secretary. Right in front of me, he said, Have Phil call me. I've got a kid in my office here that's got an idea that I think Phil would love and love to have in Nike, all the Nike stores across the world.

You don't find software in a Nike store, right? He then hung up the phone and called Ross Perot Jr., who wasn't there, talked to his secretary. The next morning, my phone rings. I flew back home and it's a lady. She says, I'm looking for Mike Muhney. I said, this is he. She literally woke me up. I'm sure I sounded groggy. This is he. She said, Hold on, please. I'm going to connect you to Mr. Ross Perot Jr. from his helicopter. And he talked to me from his helicopter. And he said, You have a business plan. I said, Yes. You can deliver it to my office at Hillwood later today. Yes, I can. And he was going to put in three million bucks. I gave Michael a third of the company, gave it to him, sweat equity. I was never going to get much of his time. As a matter of fact, the contract had eight hours.

The thing about it was that he never signed the contract. I mean, I'm going at this for 18 months and I have to say to David, David, they're not going to put their money in. You're not going to write the check until Michael signs the contract. Oh, he'll sign it until signed. Except he didn't. And 18 months later on a morning phone call at my house, I had just been selected to be one of 25 companies selected out of 250 to make an annual presentation in Austin at one of the big hotels on 6th Street in front of 300 angel investors and venture capitalists out of the 25 companies in a week before this event. David calls me and he says, Mike, I have bad news. Michael told me to tell you and two other companies that he has sweat equity in. He doesn't want anything to do with your company unless you pay him $10 million. I don't have $10 million.

This could be a huge public company. He'll make more money from his ownership from anything else he did in the NBA. Yeah, I know, I know, and it died. Before this happened, though, on my own, I got Charles Barkley and gave Charles 5% of the company as part of the agreement to get Charles Barkley. And David talked to this guy, this other sports agent, who I had never met, who called me up one morning as well. And he said, I'm looking for Mike Muhney. He said, Mike, I'm David Mitchell. I'm Muhammad Ali's agent. I'd like David told me about your idea. I'd like to get Muhammad to be one of your, you know, game guys. Fantastic. I mean, look at what was unfolding in front of me. But Michael killed it.

I have a different attitude about Michael Jordan than you might. Okay, so we died. But for 18 months, I was in heaven. I was having fun. I was going to places, tickets to the Bulls game in Chicago, front row. I mean, it was cool. It was fun for a while. But everything is temporary. Happiness is temporary, et cetera. Success is temporary. Failure is temporary. The only thing that matters is meaning that you're doing something meaningful, where you can make an impact. And I was involved in something that I loved, that I knew had meaning, to me at least, and gave me purpose. So it died. So what do you do when you don't have that anymore? So I did some other things, but fast forward again.

I started a company seven years ago called VIPorbit Software because the Apple iPhone now hit the market. And it had been on the market for two years and nobody had done anything even close to ACT!. And now I had a device on me 24-7, and there wasn't any product at all like I once enjoyed it as an ACT! user myself. So need was the mother of invention, and I raised a million bucks. I went on to raise $6.7 million from angel investors. And I'm presently right now standing in front of you, shutting it down. It's dead. It's over. Not that it's a bad product. In fact, we won numerous awards for this product. Go figure that out. So here is an example. This has a 350,000-person paid subscription base.

So It was, obviously, all Apple. It was a native Apple app. Before Apple even announced the iPad, and so we ended up creating an iPhone version. Then they announced the iPad version. Then we had to have our own sync engine. And then we had the Mac version, but it was all Apple in the era. Go back to the context seven years ago. Android wasn't anywhere close to what Apple was back then. Apple owned the world. Now it's changed fast in the last seven years. The cloud is the thing today. Subscriptions are the thing today. But here, for two years in a row, in the annual subscription's Top 50 Best Business Apps.

Out of the Best 50. We ranked number one. I'm talking about Evernote. I'm talking about Keynote. I'm talking about major applications. We were ranked by this, yes, it's a magazine. I get it, but pretty sizable subscription based. Number one, the cover of other publications that you would buy at Barnes & Noble, for example, they put VIPorbit, the product on the cover of those books that had to do with learning the iPad, everything about the iPad. So I had success, but success didn't create or didn't overcome the ultimate failure. I could get into all the reasons I failed. I know I'm past my time to speak. I appreciate that Joe hasn't pulled me off the stage yet, and you're still attentive to me.

I skimmed over so many things that I could have stayed back on before I even got to this point, but I'm just giving you a sense of to conclude the way you might see me as a success because of that. Act sold over 10 million copies in an era as well that there was no copy protection. You'd buy in that box the diskettes and you'd say, well, hey, I already bought it. Just take my diskettes and put it on your machine and copy it. So we've been told, I'll never know, but we were told for every one of those 10 million people that bought it, there were probably easily another 10 million people, if not 20 or 30 million that stole it. But it created competition, success created competition.

But the point is, you might see me as this what I call gross success guy. I don't see myself that way. I'm net out my failures, my mistakes, the loss of marriage that you cannot put a price tag on. And I'm netted out and I, to me, am a net success kind of guy. And I refuse to look at anybody successful in the world. I don't care who you are as a gross success individual and give you a sense of adulation because you were so successful. Bullshit, okay? It doesn't mean anything to me. I can't relate to it if that's all you're going to portray yourself as be real and we're people. We fail. Entrepreneurs fail all the time. We all know that mostly fail rather than succeed.

So I choose to be the same person as an individual. Personally, as I am in business on how I conduct myself, that I will tie back to how to see myself in business at least and my parents for my whole life personally, but the combination of how I wanted to, what I wanted to be seen as by you. So that I would have a good reputation and that, however far it would go, would serve me well. And that's how I believe and that's how I live my life every day and what I do. I still have the entrepreneurial urges. Obviously, I'm starting a company right now. Again, another software company dependent on raising money, but I'm going to go straight to the cloud.

And I'll even tell you the name because I've already secured it on GoDaddy. You know, so hard to name today, right? Seriously. So you can't find a name anymore. We've all squatted on names. I mean, they're stupid names, stupid spellings, or you have to have five or ten words in a sentence. That's the name of your URL, right? .com. I finally found a word that it was at least a placeholder. So if I'm able to pull this off, maybe down the road, you'll one day know or hear about a product called Gluzed, G-L-U-Z-E-D dot com, which is a single, a syllable. It's a verb and it's kind of playful. Hey, Gluzed, what are you Gluzed to? But Gluzed conveys connection, inseparability, right?

And I'm going to create, if I can pull it off, another software effort called Gluzed and branded, et cetera. I'm not done. I'm 66 years old right now. And I'm only getting started. I'm only getting started and I'm going to capitalize on everything I've learned. I'm also launching a professional paid speaking career. That's like starting another business, too. But I'm doing those in parallel because I love to speak. If you can't tell. But anyway, I do enjoy it because I feel I have a message to tell people, so I have two passions in my life. As far as how I want to continue my pursuit of what I am to become. So I'll let you read this because I've lived this.

We do look back on the dots of our experiences to then help guide us to where we go in the future. I'll give you another 10 seconds to read it. Okay? And then I'm going to finish with this, the quote from Winston Churchill. Although I have one more quote that I'll tell you, too, that I don't have a slide for. But I agree with this because I've lived it. Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. I'm still here and I'm still excited even though I've had failures. But I do have the courage to go on and that's all that matters in my life. So I'll leave you with this quote because I have my dark days a lot. I think nobody likes me. I'm not going to be able to do it again.

Nobody's going to invest in me anymore. The market seems already full of software. There's no room anymore. I mean, I go through that all the time still. But I have to set it aside. And the quote that I sometimes use myself to say, Mike, get your head together. It's okay. Don't give up. You know, I'm damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. This is war. Entrepreneurship is battlefield war. Right? And I describe, by the way, if the commerce and all businesses in the world can be equated as a military, entrepreneurs are the special forces. We have a higher level of juice. The risks are greater. But we're more trained and we're more focused and we're more determined.

And I do view being an entrepreneur as a special force, I would love to have been a Navy SEAL—it wasn't my calling. But I want to, I can be one in my attitude and my entrepreneurial pursuit. So here's the quote from a poet by the name of John Greenleaf Whittier. 1800-era poet and I'm not a poet, a kind of guy. That's for sure. But I like what he said. He said, I'm going to say this very slowly because it's that profound. And I'm going to stop after the first two words to make a comment. Here's the quote. Of all. Right away, the first two words, two single syllable words of all, there's no room for it, but except for, no. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, what might have been.

I live to realize my full potential. Act was just an element on my life journey. If I can do that, what more am I capable of doing? I don't know what that is, but I know I'm not done trying to figure it out and walk on a path that hopefully leads me to it. So on my deathbed, God willing, I had the wherewithal to know, you know, I did everything I wanted to do. I tried everything I wanted to try, even though I failed a lot, but I did it. Because I want to be proud of myself on my dying day. Thank you very much. Questions? Yeah, questions? Anything. Again, I could have gone so. You know, we had affairs. We had in the AIDS crisis era where people thought AIDS was contagious.

We had cocaine being distributed in the company. I could talk about so many stories of my experiences. You get a kick out of it. Okay. But open it up. Ask me any question you want, even if I didn't talk about it. [Audience question about a brainstorming session is unclear.] As I said, I love to give back. I love to get back and that's partly why I'm here. You know, I'm an elder statesman now. You know, I had to benefit in my younger days of hearing other, like the John Purtell, going to him and, you know, an influential guy in the industry. So, we ought to give back. So, I would, let's talk about it.

How's that for an answer? Thank you. Yeah, I'll give you my card. And then you can contact me if you don't have a card. Send me an email and I'll talk. Yes, come. So, being a coach that works with entrepreneurs, there's so many entrepreneurs that go through who lost their family. What would you say to those guys who are so vision-oriented they don't see this other stuff that's collapsing around them? Like, what would have gotten through it if anything? Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, any relationship, any marriage or boyfriend, girl, whatever you want to call it, right? Any relationship like that is complicated. So, I don't pretend to be, you know, an expert on this by any stretch of the imagination.

So, my answer to your question from my mind, how I would do things differently, because I'm often asked, would you do it again? My answer is absolutely I would have done that. Of course I would. But I would have done things differently. I wouldn't have let it consume me like I allowed it. It was a choice. I couldn't wait to go to work on Monday morning. Work was so much fun. The culture was so vibrant. Everybody loved being there. We didn't have to tell people to work late. People were on their own staying until eight or nine at night. I mean, because everybody was associated with something that everybody loved that was successful.

It pervaded the company. So, the weekends, to me, yes, I obviously did things with my family, but my mind and my discussions or my focus or whatever, I allowed myself to be distracted, not where I couldn't wait until Monday morning happened again, right? And that's why I say I allowed it to become my mistress. I wouldn't make that choice anymore. I would say I do love it. I'm going to take care of it. It's my child. But you know what? It's time to go home. This would be before internet, before smart phones. Shut your computer down. Go home and be with your family. Pay attention to your kids. Don't say no. I can't do that. I can't go to your soccer game, Michael.

Because I've got this thing to prepare for work next week, right? I did things like that. And I can't take that back. I can't recapture time. None of us can. And so I would have managed my time and my attitude differently. Yes. Is there one of your failures that you would say is your best failure, your favorite? I never had that question, wasn't it? My favorite failure. Well, I mean, if you gave me more time to think about it, I probably could come up with the number, but you saw one of them, my favorite failure to what you know about me from tonight has to be MarginMaker. Because that failure led to going deep inside, Pat and drawing from something deeper in us that produced ACT!.

So that has to be it. We all have, in my opinion, a reservoir that we might not even know we have. I'll give you an example. Again, no-Internet era. So you basically had the Yellow Pages and local companies back then, as far as vendors who provided services. So we had to come up, we could name the product, yes. And we had to come up with a name for the company, for the product. Ultimately, eventually when we were going to launch it, you know, get materials ready, right? It was a hard-copy-materials era back then. And so one of the, we talked to another companies in town here. And the one we liked the best said, we could come up with a name. It's going to cost you $20,000, but we don't know that there's no guarantee you like the names, but it costs you $20,000.

Well, we were going to have to do that. Ultimately, but Pat and I kind of brushed it under the rug. Oh, we don't have to spend the $20,000 today, and we'll get to it, right? So that's what we did. I was in New York City. I was in New York City in the early beta stage of the product priming this pump of people that were going to sell it in the industry. And the guy, the CEO of the company that I was having lunch with on Friday in Midtown said, Mike, have you come up with a name yet for YES? And I said, his name was Peter O'Connor. No, I haven't yet, Peter. He said, look, you think it's about time that you've told me you think it's going to be launched in like two to three months.

It's going to take you a while to produce everything. And blah, blah, blah. And I said, yeah, you're right, Peter. So here's what I did myself. Nobody knew about this. And if I could come up with something, nobody would ever know that I failed at my attempt. So on the plane, keep in mind, I know you can go back. But I'm so here was the decision tree of YES again, right? Well, I set some criteria for myself just like Pat and I did when we sat down at that breakfast. I said, if I can, I want to come up with a name that starts with the letter A. So on any comparative, competitive list, we'd be first. Well, I was going to be first. It wouldn't want to be.

Number two, if I can, I'd like to be one syllable, just why I love glues. I guess I didn't learn anything when I first named my other product, VIPorbit. Single syllable and, if possible, I'd like it to have playfulness, kind of a, you know, mischievousness to it, you know, with the exclamation mark for the emphasis and dynamic and, you know, whatever. Okay, so I set my criteria. This is what I did. Okay, where do I spend most of my time in, yes, with an item, if any, that starts with the letter A? Well, there it is right there. The action, the very first one, and the action menu, as you can see, led to the majority of the drop down other menus of things you could do.

Well, there was my A. Again, I was looking for a word that I could steal the first letter from to then create an acronym that itself was a word. Okay? So there was my A. Okay? Let me go to the B's now. Is there anything, any word that starts with the letter B? And I have a finance degree, remember. I don't have a marketing degree. Starts with the letter B that I can add to the A that can create a single syllable word, and I couldn't come up with a B word. Okay, let's go to the C's then. And I said, okay, what does the action menu help me to do? And I'm sitting on the plane. I have three and a half hours right back to Dallas on a Friday night.

I said, well, ultimately I came to this conclusion. I said, you know what? It helps me to control my contacts and my calendar and everything else. So there it is. ACT!, the word ACT!. It was evident. I was so excited. My wife at the time. Later divorced me. When I told her this whole story, she said, no, no, no. You need a full word for each of the letters because I took the control. CT control activity action, you know, activity control. She said, no, no, you need a full word for each of the letters. You should call it activity control technology. And I drew, I challenged myself with no training, but I had the need. And I certainly wanted to save money.

And if I could, who doesn't want to have the spotlight shining down them to say I came up with something, right? And that's how the name was born. I'll never forget on Monday morning I was back in the office at Williams Square, Pat was there. Our two programmers that were there. John Purtell, the guy that said, go have this breakfast. He became our second investor. And he was the chairman of the board for the life of the company, by the way. [Unclear brief phrase.] I was telling them the story just like him. I challenged myself. And here's what I went through. I came up with the name ACT!. And when I said ACT!, thinking that I'll go, wow, this is how they all responded.

Act. Okay. And I'm not exaggerating when I said it, within an hour, even less than that. Every one of them came back and said, I like that name. I can't get rid of it. I mean, it basically says act. Do something. Be progressive. And so I even had to sell. I had to sell my own people on the name of the product. But I drew in a reservoir that I wasn't trained for. How do you go from selling hardware as an IBM sales guy to becoming a software entrepreneur? How do you do that? I don't care if I didn't do software before—who says I can't do it now. You don't know what you're capable of becoming. You don't know what's in you to draw from until you put yourself in a corner and you demand it of yourself sometimes.

And I did that. And I'm doing it still. And so your question? Okay. Other questions? Yes. Mike Baum. My name is Diego. I did talk briefly about people and relationships and having interaction at a personal level. How do you do that these days where people really, they don't answer their phones anymore. Their text, their own phones, all the time, and email. You know, you were talking about a few years ago and that was the way to do business. Visiting people, having lunch, having breakfast, a dinner, or meeting somewhere. No, very good question. And it is hard to do. On one hand, we could all probably say, well, because of social media and technology, it's easier to stay in touch with people.

But the means by which we think we're staying in touch with people, in my opinion, is at a greater risk of erosion rather than strength. Not that I needed this at all personally, but it's nice when sociologists do a thorough research study and determine. There's a study out that was out a number of years ago on what constituted the necessary four elements in order to have a real relationship. I'm glad science studied that. And here's what they came up with is the four essential ingredients. You all know, at least one of them. If I said to you, what constitutes having a great, real relationship? Trust, trust. I got to trust this person.

If I'm going to be a friend of theirs and I'm going to let them into my world and my life and talk with them, the real me, I need to trust them. We all get the trust factor, or we at least are aware of it. We may not get it, but we're all aware of it. The other ones, though, the other three are time. The time that we spend with each other. So if I were to ask you this question, is this the one the same as the other? And here's the two. So if I invited all ten of you, let's just say the first two rows of you, ten of you, to my house for a candlelit, wonderful dinner and wine around the dining table, and we sent and talked for two hours. Pretty intimate scenario, right?

I mean, hey, those people that got to be close to, those people that have a situation like that, yes. But is it the same as spending two hours individually with each of you? No, it's not. You need to do both. But one can't displace the other. So trust, time, the intensity was the third ingredient, the intensity of the effort. We all have had, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we have a dismissive position sometimes with people, right? So there is no intensity. Intensity is essential. And the last one is reciprocity. Reciprocity. If you are always inviting me to your home for dinner or to, you know, whatever, and I never invite you to my home for dinner, there's no reciprocity in things that, in that scenario over time are not that they will, but they're likely to fade away.

You know, he never calls me. She never calls me for anything. You know, screw it. I'm done with it. And we allow ourselves to get there. I would suggest there's a fifth element, and I'm not a scientist, but I am a street fighter, and I'm a practitioner, at least in my own eyes. I'm going to call it consideration. What do I mean by consideration? I believe, let's, for example, I'll use Scott. Scott is the significance expert. His whole focus in a lot of what he talks to people about is the need for our lives to have significance, to live a life of significance, right, Scott? Okay. Let's say, you know, he spent a lot of time sharing his heart with me about this, and that's, you know, this is passion.

When I go to Barnes & Noble, or I'm at the Kroger, you know, Tom Thumb, checkout line, and they see a magazine where there's been some new revelation or book on significance, the power of it, or whatever, that moment with Scott not even knowing about it, and he might never know about it, my thoughts go straight to, oh my gosh, it makes me think of Scott. I bet Scott, if he doesn't know about this, I need to let him know about this. I either buy the magazine or the book for him, or if it's something I've read on the Internet, I'm going to hit the link to it, I'm going to email it to him and say, Scott, I was thinking about you, and I thought you'd be interested in this thing about some new revelation on significance.

That was consideration toward Scott without him even knowing that I have been thinking about him, and so I consider those are the five key elements. Now, how you employ them is up to you. We all live busy lives, very busy lives. We are inundated with stuff that intrudes on the old days, as I remember them, right? And that's okay, as long as we don't dismiss or exclude or relegate to now an unimportant level, something that once used to be. So I have, here's what I do practically. I'm going to give you a practical solution, what I've done. So in my, I still use, it's called Vipor Plus. I created what I call orbits, an orbit can be anything you want.

It could be your golfing buddies, could be your customers, could be your investors, could be the media, could be everybody you know at GeniusDen. Whatever. Orbits can be unlimited, and people can be in multiple orbits, whether they're business or personal. So you could be in my golfing buddies orbit, but you could also be in my customer orbit. You could be in as many places as they want, and it's something that I can do with people in that orbit that makes me very productive way beyond the inefficiency of how probably most of you deal with more than one person at a time, because I'm still about efficiency. We all have 24-7 constraints. One of my orbits is called Touch Base.

I have a special group of people, however I decide that I categorize them that way. It doesn't matter what you think, that's stupid Mike, I don't get that rationale. It doesn't matter what you might think. How I say, I'm going to put this special group of people, to me, whether it's permanent or temporary, in my touch base orbit, in addition to all the other orbits they're in, and then in my own profile, every Friday is funny as this sounds, every Friday at 4 o'clock on my Vipor calendar, it says check Touch Base orbit. And all that does, only I don't forget to go there, so I go to my orbit, and all I do is I open up that orbit, and I scroll through the list of people, and I, you know, maybe Scott's in there, or Jason, or Joe, and, you know, I think, well, you know, I'm going to be in Deep Ellum next week, and that's where Joe is.

I'm going to contact Joe, because he's in my Touch Base orbit, to say, hey, can we get together for coffee or lunch, or I'm going to, whatever. So, by seeing the people, by seeing that list, it triggers knowing what my schedule is going to be, or something I might have done this past week, that I go, oh, yeah, I forgot about that, let me get in touch with them, and I either call them, or email them, or text them, but it ultimately leads to a connection. So, I, through organization, and a, a reiterative reminder, if you will, as groups that I classify as important or unique, [unclear description of how the reminder prevents losing touch]. Now, I obviously take people out of them, and they no longer are, you know what, it just didn't go like I thought, because some of our relationships are temporary.

We all know that we all have temporary relationships, but we also have long-standing ones that have this infinite potential. I just don't know which way it's going to go, because all relationships are permission-based. You sitting here listening to me have given me permission to take your time, because you could be walking out the door. I gave you permission to have me here, because I could be home with my wife. I did get remarried fifteen years later. I could be home with my wife, rather than being here with you. So we, all relationships are permission-based. That's a good thing. But if there's not that reciprocity in the permission, they fade away.

That's okay. When I go to Home Depot, I don't expect to develop a relationship with the guy, or gal. It's a transactional relationship. But I have other ones like this. Jason, Scott, certainly of all of you. Scott, certainly Joe, is a fairly new contact. We are working on developing relationships, and I'm doing my part. If they do their part, the sky's the limit. If I detect that they don't, and they begin to not answer my calls, or whatever, I'm going to prune them. Take them out. Okay, I made a mistake. I make mistakes. I misread people. But I try to rely on my instincts and my training because of my focus on the value of people. I say that you ought to describe or look at people with what I call the three P's.

What are the three P's? What are relationships in the three P's? Every relationship has the potential to be precious, purposeful, and priceless. And you can't put a price on priceless. I can't define the value of John Purtell allowing me into his world and suggesting that we have a breakfast. I can't define the value of Pat Sullivan, and he and I being the best friends, and the two of us together, two sales guys, creating something that made an impact in the world and changed the world. Literally. Us. The very first angel investor that we were hoping was going to write that check before John McNair did. We had many meetings with him at the Marriott Hotel.

The final meeting we thought he was going to write a check, and we, here was his offer. I do like margin maker. I'll invest $50,000, but I want 51% of the company, and I want exclusive check writing control. And we said, no. It's like, huh, we almost had money. We're broke. We almost had it. But we couldn't take it that deal. And when we told him we didn't want the deal, this is what he said to us. He was about, I don't know, 10, 15 years older than us. He said, oh, what do you two guys know? You're just sales guys anyway. Basically, it was his attitude. That's him. The real him came out at that moment when we said no. We all encounter people like that.

I don't want to be one. Now, I've been betrayed. I've hurt people myself. I'm human. I make mistakes. But I have a sensitivity far beyond the majority of people. And that sensitivity is why I continue to pursue software to help people like you develop a lot more meaningful and effective relationships both business and personal. But you've got to pick your scheme. And you got to stick to it, be committed to it, and disciplined with it. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Muhney.