How I got here

I have been self-employed since 1984. Not really by choice. Let me explain.

In 1971 I was diagnosed as insulin-dependent diabetic. I was 13 years old. The disease has made many of my choices for me. While still completing high school I read an interesting novel about an old infirm man married to a delightful young wife. The novel was set on the coast of Florida. What inspired me the most was how this old gent managed his "empire" from his sick bed using computers. (I read the book in 1973. The first personal computer - Apple - appeared in 1977.)

I had overheard a doctor telling my mother that my body was like an apple -- shiny on the outside, but with a worm inside. My adolescent brain interpreted this to mean that I probably wouldn't have a long, healthy life.

Anyway, in the book the old gent eventually dies when a hurricane sweeps away the sand underneath the apartment block, and the architect saves the old man's wife.

I took away one core thought that has guided almost everything I have done since: No matter how ill I am I can work through computers. And then the Internet arrived!

I knew that I would probably end up working for myself when I couldn't get a job. It's not that I was stupid. I qualified medical School, completed the first year, and dropped out during the second year after a motor car accident. But at the time, 1977, most large companies in South Africa refused to take diabetics onto their books because they felt we were medically expensive -- bad for their medical funds. I eventually found a job at the bank.

By 1982 I realised that my ambitions to head the bank were somewhat more ambitious than theirs for me, and I joined a mining company. They had an IBM S/34 Minicomputer lurking in a dark room on the 11th floor and I fell in love with it the first time I saw it.

By 1984, after a few years programming, I realised that the only way I was going to be happy was if I was working for myself. It wasn't so much that I had this great yearning to be free, but rather that nobody in his right mind would pay me the kind of money I wanted to earn.

I started a consulting/programming venture, working for a clutch of IBM S/34 (and the new S/36) users. My first client wanted to link some PCs on the Orange River to their office in Cape Town. Nobody knew quite how to do this, so I called a firm in Seattle, WA, USA (Emerald Technologies) and they freighted out a piece of kit that solved the problem. Before I knew it , we were the experts in this field.

In 1992 the firm closed, with me hanging on kicking and screaming. I needed a new income stream fast. After messing around trying to get back into the same field I gave up and started to sell life assurance to small business owners.

(I was still diabetic, and no life assurance firm wanted to touch me because I would mess up their medical aids, so I acted as an independent. In hindsight, this allowed me space and options most agents could only dream of.)

I began to ask every single small business owner I could find what they were doing that was so right, and what it was that I had done that was so bad that I had gone out of business. Turns out nobody was doing anything different than I had. But all that I spoke to assured me that failure (in the sense of losing ones home, furniture, and dignity as I had) was just not an option.

Around this time I read Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited. His statistics of small business failures were pretty sobering. Only 20% survive the first 5 years, and a mere 4% survive the first decade!

It didn't come as much of a surprise when the folk I had been selling assurance to started to close their businesses. Since I was the only person they knew stupid enough to talk about business failure at every turn, I soon became the Western Cape's leading consultant on the subject.

It was dreadful business model though. We small business owners live in utter denial until the blade falls. Most of the folk had no money left to pay for help. I spent more time counselling than consultant. (A consultant is a paid counsellor.)

It's Sunday evening, most recent Carruthers family member is shrieking because of the indignity of cleaning her aftermath, and Dad needs to intervene. I will continue the saga later. (Not too much more to go.)