Lessons Learned - A New Blog Series - Episode One: My Backstory

Lessons Learned - A New Blog Series 
Episode One: My Backstory

From time to time, someone will ask me a tough question like, "What's the biggest mistake you've made?"

Or, "What's the toughest decision?"

Or, "What's the most important lesson you learned ...?"

I've decided to make a project of this. And I'll wrap it around how I learned lessons over the years, from launching my first company and moving forward. I'm going to try to present these in some kind of chronological order.

My goals, as always, are to educate and entertain. I hope all business owners, especially those new to IT consulting, will learn from my mistakes (and maybe from my wins). And, as always, I would love to have your feedback in the comments.

If you have specific questions that you think would fit in the series, please send them. I'll try to fit them in the series where they make the most sense.

How to follow this series: 

1. Follow this tag: "Lessons Learned" - the link is

https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/search/label/Lessons%20Learned

2. Be sure to subscribe to this blog. Over on the right-side column, you'll see the Subscribe by Email link. Just remember to white list the first email you get. And if you filter, put them all into one folder so that you can find new installments.

3. Subscribe to my weekly Small Biz Thoughts newsletter. Go to https://smallbizthoughts.com/newsletter/. That will get you some news, some commentary, and links to this and all the content I create.

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My Backstory - the Very Short Version

As with many IT consultants, I did not plan the path I took. I was a "hobbyist" from the early years of personal computing. I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan because they have a very quantitative approach to social science, and political science in particular. 

At UM, I had several jobs involving computers and database management. Back in those days, there were many operating systems to choose from. Without trying much, I learned the Michigan Terminal System (based on IBM S360), DOS (many brands), CP/M, ISIS, SunOS (Unix), and even a bit of Mac OS 1.0. Back in the day, it was common to use multiple systems if you needed to move data from other universities in order to build a local database.

I taught college for many years, but eventually decided to get a non-academic job. I was hired to manage a team of about thirty people, of whom about five were fulltime. The remainder were college students and outsourced IT folks. My team collected and entered a wide variety of information - mostly political in nature - and leaded onto an HP 3000 Mini (some would call this a mainframe). From there, subscribers paid to access the system via modem.

Of course, that meant that I had to learn the MPE/x operating system for the HP 3000. While I was there, we added specialty systems that brought in Novell, BSD Unix, and even a new system called Windows NT. Windows NT was released to the public in 1993 - about ten months into my new job. We had already adopted TCP/IP so we could connect our systems to the Internet (before it was publicly accessible).

So, in a few short years, I learn perhaps the most important things you need to know about computers and running computer operations:

1) Most operating systems do 97% the same thing. They just do it by different means, with slightly different commands. But they all have files and ways to organize them. They all have languages you can learn. And they all fall apart and need maintenance!

2) Everything changes all the time. Many (maybe most) of the operating systems from the 1980s were obsolete by the middle of the 1990's. Entire generations of hardware had come and gone in ten years. And the future was being invented every day.

I was in that job for about three years when I realized I had to quit. But in that time, I had become "dyed in the wool" with computer operations. I had managed a three state computer system with over a million dollars worth of equipment and managed a budget of another million on top of that. I managed dozens of employees, programmers, outsourced personnel, and a team of people I'm still friends with today.

But when it's time to leave, it's time to leave. And no matter how much anxiety, pain, and fear you have, stepping into the world of self-employment is the greatest step you can take. 

I learned a few lessons as I headed for the door. I tell you about them in the next two installments.

:-)