Start & Run a Rural Computer Consultant Business. John D. Deans
to me as a rural computer consultant.
By the end of the first year, our initial Paranet team of eight had grown to twenty, and we had billed more than a million dollars. Also, after surviving that first year, I was getting used to going on sales calls, making big technical promises to prospective clients, and then actually accomplishing the project in a timely manner. In other words, my Paranet peers and I were successfully achieving our goals and satisfying our clients, which in turn brought us more business.
The early 1990s at Paranet consisted of fast and furious work along with hard-playing fun. Both the single guys like me and the married fellows worked our butts off during the day and drank together at night back at the office between interviews of potential new Paranet employees. This hard-living fun was especially the case at company parties. I was particularly into it since I was basically single — only getting to see my son on Wednesday nights and every other weekend.
By the end of 1993, the company had grown to around 100 IT professionals billing at a 90 percent utilization rate. That means we were at client sites making money the vast majority of the time. Later that year, I was running two major IT-support teams at both Amoco and British Petroleum that were right across the street from each other. My sales guy had negotiated a dual contract for me to manage a network support team at BP and a desktop support group at Amoco, with an office just for me at each location.
I was constantly running between buildings, attending meetings, and trying to put out technical fires on a billable 10-hours-per-day basis. Needless to say, this was quite demanding and took its toll. Things got even rougher after I handed the smooth-running dual team over to another Paranet colleague and was sent to the infamous Enron to rescue our contract there. It had accumulated $500,000 in unpaid invoices and placed our support presence in jeopardy.
The first month there was pure hell. Enron’s corporate culture for contractors and consultants was all stick and no carrot. We were constantly threatened with being fired and were greeted at the beginning of each day with a scowl, a problem list, and a hearty “do this now or else.” I worked 12 to 16 hours a day, was on call 24/7, and was harassed by the extremely difficult Enron senior staff, which included Jeffrey Skilling. (A couple of years after the whole company came crashing down in 2001, I took glee in seeing Skilling do the perp walk into federal custody on TV.)
For most of 1994, I was the primary network consultant for Enron’s gas and electricity trading floors. Not only did I solve the initial disaster of a situation for Paranet at Enron, but I was also able to resolve multiple network problems and collect the $500,000 they owed us. By the end of my Enron tour of duty, I was developing chest pains, but I was able to pull off a Paranet first by billing over $250,000 in a single year. After a year of dealing with Enron, Paranet actually fired them as a client due to the negative way they treated me. Our founder bragged about that one at a large biweekly company meeting, which made me feel appreciated.
By 1995, Paranet had 22 offices and 500 billable IT professionals making the company $31 million in revenues, and I was getting married! I had met my lovely bride, Beth, at Young Brothers Tae Kwon-Do Martial Arts School in 1993 when she was a second-degree black belt and I was a lowly beginning white belt. After dating a year and a half, we were married and all my buddies from Paranet were at the wedding.
Later in 1995, my first wife and her current husband decided to leave for Dallas with my son, which I fought legally and lost after dropping more than $20,000 in legal fees in less than a month. This hurt badly, and now I had to fly my boy home every other weekend to see him. This grief made me work even harder to help Paranet achieve that big payout goal Holthouse had told me about back in 1991.
Things got mellower after the Enron days. I landed long-term contracts with Amoco, building out their network in a remodeled building in Bay City, and then a two-year-long gig with the Houston computer maker Compaq. By 1997, Paranet was pulling in close to $100 million in revenues with nearly 2,000 employees, and things were popping.
Then the big one hit. Sprint offered us $425 million in cash for a complete purchase of Paranet. We took it, of course, and all ran home to our six-year-old spreadsheets that calculated the worth of our private stock share and options. Though we worker bees only had a small cut of the pie, even little cuts of such a large pie were worth a great deal. Just before the close of the buyout, Sprint pulled a fast one that delayed our payout for three months and discounted the purchase by $50 million, so we settled for $375 million.
Since it was in cash and not stock, the funds were immediately wired to our accounts — and then we learned the meaning of capital gains tax. Some of us paid six and even seven figures in taxes to the federal government, which was very painful.
Though most of the 1990s had been very stressful, 1997 brought me an opportunity to take a new look at things and see what needed to be changed. After almost two decades of working and driving in Houston, the traffic was becoming unbearable. The major vehicle arteries such as Loop 610, I-10, and even the county Beltway 8 were becoming parking lots for most of the day. Carjackings, robberies, and home invasions were constantly on the Houston local news. I had started legally carrying a .45 calibre handgun back in 1995, and almost had to use it on a couple of occasions. Country life was starting to look good.
During the period of the pending Sprint buyout, Beth and I looked at places in the country to the far west and northwest of Houston. Just eight miles west of Brenham, we found a wonderful 115-acre ranch on a hill, with an updated farmhouse built in 1881, a guesthouse, and two barns. After the Sprint deal finally closed in the fall of 1997, we immediately purchased it at a great price from an elderly couple and started spending our weekends up there.
I was still working for Paranet, but was now at Compaq, building one of the first Gigabit Ethernet campus networks, which was also one of the largest at the time. After the buyout, the original start-up group of us had lost interest in growing the company (now called Sprint Paranet) because we were so burnt out and wanted to enjoy life a little.
Our weekends at our new ranch were great for me, but a bit trying for Beth, since she was raised a city girl and liked being close to the malls and her family. I immediately adapted to and adopted the rural life and could not get enough of it. The Friday nights driving to Brenham were full of the anticipation of getting away from my growing dislike of Houston, but the drive back on Sunday evening was full of the dread of returning to traffic, crime, and full-time work for Sprint Paranet.
In April of 1998, another turning point happened when my son’s mom moved to Anchorage, Alaska — leaving me with only seeing Dustin three times a year. This loss of time with my 12-year-old son made me have second thoughts about not having any more kids, as I had always told Beth. Soon she was pregnant, and in October of 1998, our beautiful first daughter was born.
That was part of the “deal” I made with my wife to let me sell our Bellaire home, quit Sprint Paranet, and move our new family to our country place, which we had named Seven Eagles Ranch. I gave Beth a new BMW and a grand piano, and she gave us the thumbs up to head to the hills of Brenham, with our gorgeous little baby girl.
My last day at Paranet was December 18, 1998, which just happened to be the same day as our company Christmas party. With Beth at home with her first baby (she wasn’t ready to leave her with anyone else yet), I took my son to my last Paranet party, and we had a ball. The goodbyes were heavy and they got me up on the stage in front of hundreds of my Paranet peers and presented me with a nice plaque and a great send-off. Wow — what an excellent ride! In so many ways, Paranet was the greatest company I had ever worked for.
The very next day, we started packing up and moving out to Seven Eagles Ranch to start our new life adventure.
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Rural Computer Consulting: Is It for You?
The journey that led me to being Washington County’s rural computer consultant was not a planned one. If someone had told me back in 1995 that in ten years I would not be designing and building large enterprise-level computer networks supporting thousands of users,