Chapter 1
Learning to Be an Entrepreneur

It is a mystery to me why I was drawn to the business world. My father was a longtime engineer and administrator for the city of Montreal and my mother a part-time social worker working at a children's agency. Both my parents were extremely liberal, socially conscious activists. My brother became a university professor and my sister is a health researcher, so I am the black sheep of the family. Although I consider myself a liberal and certainly lean far left on the American political spectrum, I always joke that my family considers me to be the Republican in the family.

I had what I consider to be a normal childhood full of friends and sports. I was smart and did well in school, but was never an overachiever. Once I left high school and started CEGEP (Quebec's equivalent of junior college), my priorities became friends and skiing, in that order, with academics relegated to whatever time was left. I did just enough work and attended just enough classes to get by. A career in business never occurred to me, as I thought I was more likely to become a professional hockey player or full-time ski instructor than anything else.

At CEGEP I had thoughts of being an engineer, perhaps because my father was one, but I was turned down by McGill's engineering school, the school that all my friends were going to go to. My second choice at McGill was physics, although I have no idea why. I think I might have been sitting in a physics class at CEGEP when I was filling out the form. At McGill, I quickly dropped that major when I failed my first physics class. I had done very well in a COBOL computer science class at CEGEP, programming on punch cards the year before they were completely phased out. I also had fooled around with a RadioShack CoCo computer at home, so comp sci seemed interesting, although at the time McGill only offered it in conjunction with a math degree.

Although I graduated from McGill, I never really felt I got anything out of higher education and for a time wondered why I wasted my time. Later in my career, once while in Montreal in 1988 and once while in Miami in 1991, I regretted not getting an MBA and tried to get one. I was heavily involved, if only as a witness, in the process of starting up a company, and I felt that there was a lot that I still had to learn. Twice, when my workload was low, I enrolled in an MBA program, but both times I lasted less than one semester. Eventually, work got busy again and the allure of solving problems in real life outweighed my desire for the degree.

I remain convinced, though, that an MBA would have been a good idea. Years later, at ZOLL, I got the chance to work with a number of Harvard MBAs who proved to me that there was in fact some basic knowledge that could be a great foundation for personal experience.

The Quebec Department of Transportation

My path to becoming an entrepreneur started in an unusual way: I got a job working for the government. I was a first-year student of math and computer science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Each year, like most students in Quebec, I filled out an application to land a provincially funded summer job. Very few students were selected each year, but as luck would have it, in 1984 my name was drawn and I got a job working for the transportation department in the software division. Back in the mid-80s, they were doing relatively cutting-edge work using mapping software to simulate traffic patterns.

The job itself was unremarkable, other than it was where I met Martin Nathanson, my direct supervisor. After working for Martin for some time, he confided in me that he was starting his own company, TransControl Systems. TransControl was creating a computer-aided dispatch software system for the courier industry. Martin offered me a job and I became employee #1.

TransControl

The computer-aided dispatch system TransControl developed was called CUSTOM 2000. Martin had signed up a Montreal-based courier company called Dicom to be TransControl's beta test site, but the business didn't progress much beyond this first customer. Although we attended some trade shows, tried to install the system at Dicom's Toronto office, and sold and installed a system in Amsterdam, TransControl was never able to develop a business model and get things off the ground.

Although CUSTOM 2000 never gained acceptance, it was far ahead of its time. Many of the features we created, such as turn-by-turn directions through a road network, are features that are still considered cutting-edge in dispatch systems today.

Martin had come up with the name CUSTOM 2000, which stood for the ridiculous "Commercial Urban Simulator for Transport Optimization and Management." When Diane Stewart joined TransControl as marketing director, she laughed at the name. Her comment was that it should stand for "a Couple of Useless Systems Technicians Orchestrated This Mess."

While at TransControl I was a programmer, but I really got to observe the pitfalls involved in being a startup company. We got some things right, but mostly I felt like the experience was a lesson in what not to do. Unfortunately, Martin was a technologist enamored with the technology and not a very good businessman.

In 1987, TransControl hooked up with John Shermyen, who was starting a company called Digital Wireless (DWC), later to be called Automated Dispatch Services (ADS) and now known as LogistiCare.

John and his partner Jim Smith were trying to start a company that would buy up and consolidate other ambulance companies. This idea was also ahead of its time and would catch on five or so years later, when companies like AMR, Rural/Metro, and MedTrans would very successfully launch a consolidation trend. John was interested in TransControl because he wanted to adapt the computer-aided dispatch system we had created for couriers to ambulances.

Initially, TransControl and DWC had a joint-venture arrangement. Eventually, in November of 1989, John got $1 million in funding from venture capitalists and bought out Martin's share for $70,000. The $1 million was to fund the creation of a dispatch center in Miami. Around that time, I had become quite disillusioned with TransControl. The work we had done was not yielding customers and although we had grown to a dozen employees, finances were very tight and interest in our product was minimal.

As part of the funding deal, DWC changed its name to Automated Dispatch Services (ADS), which was a better reflection of their business.

In a story typical of TransControl, we had one customer in Montreal and another in Toronto when, somehow, we managed to sell a system in Amsterdam. With only two local customers under our belt, we became convinced that this was a great international product and started attending trade shows in London. We went to an enormous amount of work to have our GIS guy, Tommy Marinos (who was self-taught and straight out of school), digitize the complex London street network by hand, which was an impossible task. This and many other similar experiences at both TransControl and ADS taught me one of the most important lessons in business: the importance of focus.

DWC/ADS

In December 1989, John Shermyen flew me down to Miami, where he had landed a contract with Medicar Ambulance to do all of their dispatching. While it wasn't the consolidation concept that he had originally conceived of, it was still a pretty novel idea, as Medicar would pay ADS on a pay-per-run basis to staff a call center to answer calls and dispatch ambulances. It is still a mystery to me why an ambulance company would want to outsource one of the most important components of their business, but the deal was a testament to John's incredible sales ability.

At the core of the Miami center was EMTrack, the computer-aided dispatch software that had been adapted from the courier system created by TransControl. Adapting the courier version of EMTrack was challenging, and there were a lot of issues that made the product difficult to use in the ambulance environment. EMTrack never really worked well until it was completely rewritten in a project we called Rev II.

I enjoyed Miami. Each year, thousands of snowbirds from Canada descend on the Florida beaches in an effort to escape the brutally cold Montreal winters. While the idea of the beautiful weather had always appealed to me, I had this image of Florida as a place with neon-lit palm trees and tacky tourist shops littered all over the place. I was wrong about that. Florida is a state with beautiful landscapes, parks, beaches, friendly people, great food, and a deep history. John did a great job of welcoming me, finding an apartment for me on Miami Beach, and taking me out on the town.

In a crazy side story very typical of my time in Miami, my apartment belonged to the father of the owner of Medicar, who used it as a getaway to shack up with young Russian women he helped to immigrate into the US. I never knew for sure, but rumor had it that they spent time as prostitutes in exchange for this help.

I thought I was in Miami to help resolve some software issues. Never in a million years did I think they were going to make me a job offer. Jim Smith was the one who did it. I think he couldn't stand how long John took to get to the point. As soon as he saw me, Jim said, "So, do you want to come down here to work full...