I may not have mentioned earlier, but my good friend, Greg Grosh, who had joined Cullinane in 1974 about a half year after I did, had left the company some months ago. He and I were still good friends, even though he still lived in San Francisco and I in Chicago. I had roomed with him a couple of years ago when we were both working on a Cullinane Product called EEO-REPORTER.

Two years ago, Greg and I had tried to start a firm that would provide software support to bank auditors. We called it Audit, Inc., and we wrote some programs in BASIC to do the kind of record-keeping that bank auditors spend a lot of time taking care of. The product worked, but it was a hard sell to Auditors. We were able to do this mostly in our off days from Cullinane, but Greg had eventually left Cullinane to devote more time to it. While he was doing that, he found another job that would help pay the bills while he worked on Audit, Inc. He took a job with IST (Improved System Technologies), a company out of New York City that sold classes and consulting to systems developers.

Greg's new job entailed teaching classes in systems analysis and development for Trish Sarson and Chris Gane, the principals in the firm. They had made a name for themselves based largely on their book, Structured Systems Development, and firms came to them to ask them to teach the techniques outlined in that book to their development staffs. When their workload got to heavy, they hired three or four other systems people to help them, and Greg was one of those people. Greg and I talked fairly frequently, and I began to hear about how much Greg liked the work and how much he appreciated the relatively high salary for that work. In some of our conversations, Greg suggested to me that I could teach the same classes, even though I hadn't been a systems developer myself.

Greg was still working on Audit Inc. as well, and doing much of that work in Tulas, where another friend of his lived who was helping with the effort. I'd traveled down to Tulsa a couple of times to help out, even though I still had my job with Cullinane. It came about that on one of those trips, Chris Gane came to Tulsa as well; Greg was trying to get him to take a major interest in the fledgling company. Knowing in advance that Chris would be there, Greg sent me a copy of the IST course materials and suggested that I review them and practice how I might go about teaching the materials. Greg thought that I might give an "audition" for Chris, and, if it went well, be offered a consultancy.

That's just what happened. One afternoon, I got in front of Chris and with a projector, white board, and flip charts, did a presentation for Chris of about an hour. I actually pretended that I was teaching one of the sections of the basic course that he offered. It was hard teaching to a class of one, but Greg was there, too.

As it turned out, Chris liked what he saw (a great deal, Greg later told me). I took great pains to point out that my actual experience at developing information systems was not great, but Chris seemed to think that would not be a problem in teaching the material. So he made me an offer. The offer was very attractive. The starting salary (actually a daily fee, since I would technically not be an employee but a consultant) was $150 a day, rising fairly rapidly to $400 a day after about a year. The idea was (Greg's idea, actually) that teaching two five-day seminars a month would provide a good income, and allow two weeks free to work on the Audit, Inc., project.

I liked the idea, of course. At $400 a day, that was $2000 a week, considering that all three of the classes Chris would have me teach were five days long. Even considering that I wouldn't be teaching every single week, it seemed obvious that I would be earning about twice what I was earning at Cullinane. There would be weeks free when Greg and I could work on Audit, Inc., and Chris was fine with that. In fact, as a consultant, the proedure would be that Chris's staff would sell the classes and then offer the work to one of the three or four consultants, who would be free to accept or reject. (I came to discover that all of Chris's consultants also had other jobs, and than none of them were always available.)

I wasn't really sure that Audit Inc. would work out; neither was Greg, really. So this would be an excellent opportunity to give it a try without much risk. I figured that for the first year, I would probably just pull in maybe fifty percent more than at Cullinane, given that we would be refusing some weeks of work to devote the time to Audit Inc.

I thought about the idea a lot. I talked about it with Tony. I did another presentation, using some vacation time, for Trish, at a class she was doing at DEC in Boston. Her initial reaction was not very favorable, but I did a follow-up presentation for her at a later time which was good enough to make her completely forget the first one. I attended a class that Greg taught, again using some vacation time.

By the time that the Cullinane User Week came up in Boca Raton, Florida, in mid-October, I had about made up my mind to leave. But I admit that it was a tough decision. I had worked for Cullinane for five years. I had established a good reputation in the Company. I was familiar with the material (actually, probably the best CULPRIT guy they had). All the people were almost like family, and here I was thinking seriously about leaving "home."

Tony was supportive. He did what I would have done. He listened, and helped me evaluate the pros and cons in my own mind without ever attempting to make a decision for me. Ray Goodwin thought that I was considering leaving because of salary, or the fact that I might be unhappy that Tony had taken over Jim Baker's job and not me. The salary part entered into it, of course, but the latter did not. I had no desire to stop traveling and move to Boston. I had a meeting with John and Ray in Boca Raton. John was very concerned about losing me as a valued resource, and he told me so. I appreciated that.

We decided that the best thing for me to do was to try the IST position, utilizing a month of vacation for the purpose. So I decided to take a month off, from mid-November through the end of the year, and actually teach some IST classes to see whether or not I liked it. Having made some sort of decision, I felt much better, and could then enjoy the User Week.