Building One and Building Two
Building One was primarily the administrative building. Building Two was the production building. There was always this thing of Building Two versus Building One.
–Todd Fischer, IMSAI computer repairman and entrepreneur
Todd Fischer liked to fix things.
When high school ended and many of his classmates went to college or engineering school, Fischer headed to the Air Force recruitment center to enlist. The Air Force, in turn, taught him to repair electronic equipment. Fischer valued the training, but didn’t want to make the Air Force his career. So, when his hitch was up, Fischer went to work for IBM repairing typewriters and keypunch machines. He quit in 1967 after working there only briefly. It wasn’t that Fischer didn’t like the job. But it was the late 1960s, and to this Bay Area boy IBM symbolized faceless bureaucracies and soulless corporate power.
After leaving IBM, Fischer discovered that he could make money from music—not by playing it, but by fixing band equipment. In the late 1960s, he drifted into the San Francisco rock-music scene. This was Fischer’s milieu and he loved it. From 1968 to 1971, Fischer worked with dozens of local rock groups. He worked as a roadie for legendary drummer Buddy Miles and for the rock band Uriah Heep. He traveled around the world with stage acts repairing electronic equipment. He was in heaven.
Eventually, Fischer returned to Earth. Back in the Bay Area he tried running an electronics-repair shop, but couldn’t make a go of it. He was doing repair work in a stereo store when a friend invited him to come to work in the service division of a year-old computer company called IMSAI Manufacturing. “Repair computers? Well, why not?" he thought. After touring with the likes of Buddy Miles the work was a bit of a letdown, but at least Fischer got to fix things.
Fischer would turn out to be a key hire at IMSAI, but his laid-back style was very far from the goal-driven “make a miracle” spirit Millard promoted.
It’s the Goal or Nothing
Meanwhile, IMSAI had grown quickly and showed no signs of decelerating. The company already occupied two buildings on Wicks Boulevard in San Leandro; administration, sales, marketing, and engineering were located in one building, and production and support in the other. Millard had assembled a driven organization, a fact nowhere more apparent than among the sales team in Building One. Telephone salespeople like Bill Lohse came in promptly at 8 A.M. and, after a brief meeting, got on the phones and stayed there, logging every call until lunchtime. Lohse would take an hour off, during which time he compared notes with other sales representatives on how many thousands of dollars of equipment they had sold that morning. Then he’d jump back on the phones again, making calls until the end-of-the-day sales meeting. Lohse learned not to talk in terms of “problems,” but instead to use the buzzwords “challenges” and “opportunities.” Exhortations to “make a miracle” were frequently heard.
Under Millard’s encouragement—some say insistence—the IMSAI executives and sales staff “did the training,” made the miracles happen, and met their goals. IMSAI employees learned to focus on what they wanted to do and then go out and do it. They learned that lesson well, and it intensified their performance in meeting goals and in their relations with coworkers and customers. “Focus on what you want to do and do it” was a powerful message to send to a recent graduate in his or her first serious job. As if things weren’t intense enough, the new hires worked for a rapidly expanding company that could apparently either go bankrupt the next week or grow as big as IBM. This message was delivered under the leadership of a charismatic entrepreneur, a high roller who informed each new employee that he or she could perform miracles—and would perform miracles.
Millard’s exhortations were part of a calculated effort to create an atmosphere that spurred his staff to superhuman achievement. Only those who were driven could thrive in that atmosphere. The intensity created an attitude among IMSAI management of almost manic optimism. They regularly worked well into the night, living and breathing IMSAI and almost losing sight of the sublunary world. Yet from where Bill Lohse stood, eyebrow-deep in work, it was often difficult to focus on anything but what he was already doing. He saw nothing on the horizon but that week’s sales goal.
Meeting sales goals became IMSAI’s raison d’etre and the sales department the company’s heart and soul. No one drove this point home more clearly than Bruce Van Natta. He had held a number of jobs at IMSAI, working in purchasing, programming, engineering, and product planning. One day, to everyone’s surprise, Van Natta walked into the sales director’s office and announced that he himself wanted to be a sales representative. It seemed an odd thing for a cofounder of the company to request, but before long Van Natta was the company’s top agent.
Around that time, Bill Millard set a sales goal of $1 million for the month. Two days before the end of that month, Van Natta checked the sales figures. They totaled $680,000, and no potential customers were left to call on. Van Natta would never say that it was impossible to make the goal; one didn’t talk that way at IMSAI. But he thought as much when he headed home that night.
Van Natta’s wife, Mary, was IMSAI’s sales coordinator, and she, too, knew what the sales figures were. Her birthday was approaching, and she wasn’t sure she could enjoy it in the wake of the failure to reach their goal. When Van Natta asked his wife what she wanted for her birthday, she could think of only one thing. “I want the goal,” she told him. Van Natta reminded her that with just two sales days left in the month, and their having called on everybody they could possibly contact, they would be lucky to ring up another dime that month. And $680,000 was a long way from a million bucks.
Mary Van Natta insisted that she still wanted to make the sales goal her birthday present. Bruce Van Natta said okay and did some mental calculations. He was one of a dozen or so people on the sales team, and he accounted for about 30 to 40 percent of sales. If only he could convince the firm’s biggest customer to place a 90-day order instead of a 30-day order, or if only he could renegotiate a few other sales orders. It all just seemed impossible.
For the next two days, Van Natta and the rest of the sales team labored feverishly to close the $320,000 gap. At ten minutes before 5 P.M. on the last day of the month, Van Natta dragged himself over to Mary’s desk and added his latest sales to the current total. It came to $990,000. It was amazing—virtually a million dollars, and surely a miracle by any reasonable standard. But it was almost five o’clock and time to quit for the day.
What, and fail? No way, Mary said. It’s the goal or nothing. There would be no falling short by even $10,000. Bruce Van Natta went back to the phone and called a dealer he knew. He asked the dealer to take $10,000 worth of equipment that Van Natta knew he didn’t really want as a personal favor. The dealer reluctantly agreed. They made their goal with literally minutes to spare.
A Company with Two Cultures
Building Two was where reality came in. Selling a million dollars’ worth of computers and building a million dollars’ worth of computers are two different things, and the production people had trouble keeping up with the orders. After one spring month when the company actually shipped a million dollars’ worth of machines, the production crew threw a party in Building Two to celebrate. Operations manager Joe Parsialli brought in beer, and pizza was ordered for everyone. Nancy Freitas, a production technician, and Todd Fischer, who by then was supervisor of production testing, both got tipsy on just a beer or two.
Freitas noticed that they weren’t the only ones feeling the effects of the alcohol. After working long hours for weeks on end, getting drunk on just a couple of beers wasn’t surprising. A lot of overtime was expected of everyone. The production team usually arrived to work around 6 A.M. and stayed until at least 8 P.M. They were tired and feeling frazzled, and it wasn’t just the hours that were fatiguing them. It was also the constant push and emotional strain. Fischer recalled that after working 12 to 14 hours straight they would sometimes sit in a bar and drink just to stop their hands from shaking.
When things weren’t so crazed, the group definitely knew how to have fun together, Fischer discovered. There were other musicians on the team, and sometimes they jammed together. Sometimes, when the pressure eased up a bit, a bunch of them would head out back to throw a Frisbee around. They went out for lunch together, sometimes as many as 20 or 30 of them at a time.
Fischer valued the camaraderie, and he noted some other differences between the people in IMSAI’s two buildings. Those in Building One were definitely cliquish, whereas those in Building Two were relatively laid back. Building Two employed a few musicians and some dope-smokers, but not many est graduates. IMSAI was definitely split into two factions, and it seemed that neither could relate to the other. The people in the production department worked together to get the job done, whereas those in Building One competed aggressively against each other.
Millard believed that competitiveness never handicapped a salesperson. In fact, he did all he could to encourage competition. And probably no one at IMSAI, in Building One or Building Two, was more aggressively competitive than the company’s director of marketing, Seymour Rubinstein.