The year was 1984 and two things happened, one was I was hired as the manager of one of the CompuAdd stores in San Antonio, the second was the release of the HP LaserJet printer. The two events are important…here’s why.
A friend of mine was a consulting salesperson for CompuAdd and the manager of one of the stores quit. He called me and said that I should interview for the job. At the time I had been instrumental in the creation of the first IBM PC Users Group there, and was a member of the the Macintosh Users Group as well. To help support all the PC users I started one of the first Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) which caught on like wildfire. The dedicated phone line to my house for the BBS was busy 98% of the day.
My reputation amongst the home computer users was the reason my friend wanted me to run a store. To be honest I didn’t want the job but agreed to go to the interview to get him to stop pestering me about it. I drove to Austin and met with the founder of CompuAdd in his conference room. Let me set the stage here, I went in wearing a polo shirt, slacks, shoes with no socks and sunglasses. Not what I would call dressing for success at the time.
The owner seemed totally uncaring about how I was dressed and asked just a few questions, one of which was “Why do you think you can bring this store back from the brink of being closed due to poor sales?”. My answer was one of those times the mouth fired before the brain. I told him “Well, I have reach into the PC community and if anyone can turn the store around, I can.” In hindsight I believe that my attempt a bragging would be enough to put him off and we would be done.
I thought wrong.
He was thrilled with my interview and offered me the position there and then.
I remember think on the drive home “What have I gotten myself into?”
The store was located on the near north side of town and was on McCarty street. It was also the smallest store in square feet of all the stores in the chain. There was another location in Austin that was huge and it had lots of storage for systems which means it was always number one in sales every month. After two months cleaning and changing my store I actually came up to the number two position. Suffice it say the owner was very happy with my work. The owner of the big Austin store…not so much.
Then HP announced the LaserJet printer. Everyone who had a home computer, and small businesses were all clamoring to get one. I had pre orders for a dozen right
after they announced the shipping date. If you have ever worked in retail sales you probably know about spiffs. These are special deals the manufacturer makes with salespeople to help promote the product. When the HP representative came to my store he told me that the spiff they were offering was for every 3 printers I sold they would give me one for free. This was almost unheard of. And my mind got to working on this.
I went to the users groups and made a deal with them. If four of your members buy a LaserJet I would give the club one. This worked way better than I expected. The warehouse actually called me to verify my order because they couldn’t believe that the smallest store was ordering so many.
When the delivery truck showed up we literally stacked the printers 6 deep across the entire front of the store. The next day we had a convoy of people coming to pickup their printers. It was an incredible time.
The cherry on top was when the store numbers came out, my store beat the big Austin store for the first time ever. That store manager was livid. I was overjoyed as were all the people who got one of the first laser printers.
That was one of those amazing times before the dot-com bubble burst and I consider it the golden days of early home computers.