Founders at Work.pdf

Ron Gruner 441
So we did that and everything was fine, and then he calls back about an hour
later. I thought to myself, “Oh my God! He has talked to an attorney. This
whole thing is going to get blown off the tracks.” And he said, “You know, I was
talking to my wife and she would really like a pager. Could you do the same
thing for her?” I said, “Sure.” The long and short of it is, we met a very decent
person. He dealt with us fairly. We bought him $500 or $600 worth of subscriptions
for his pager. We got the number literally within hours because AT&T
expedited it for us, and everything worked out. But that was probably the
scariest incident we had in these 15 years.
Livingston: Were you a hero with the client?
Gruner: Yes, we were, but we didn’t fall on the sword too much on that. We
basically told them that we got it worked out. I don’t think I even told them we
used a private investigator. We absorbed all the costs. Turns out, there were two
people involved: a client plus a very large stock transfer agent that was working
with the client. Of course, the transfer agent really felt good about that, so they
threw a lot more business in our direction at that point.
One of our take-aways from that was that you can almost always take a negative
situation and turn it to your advantage if you work hard at it. We took
something that was a very negative potential situation and made some real
friends. Anytime we had a client situation that blew up—and those happen in
the business, things go wrong—we would always say, “How do we take this and
turn this into a big opportunity, where the client comes back even more loyal
than they were before?”
Livingston: Shareholder.com was doing a lot of new stuff for the industry at the
time. Do you remember any things that your clients wanted or asked for that
surprised you?
Gruner: Having been in the computer business, particularly the highperformance,
engineering and scientific aspect of it, that’s populated by a lot of
early adopters that want the very latest technology, even if it doesn’t quite work.
Financial people and investor relations people, and legal people in general, are
very conservative. So we had to do a lot of missionary work to have them feel
comfortable with the technology.
The kinds of things that clients would ask us for were, “How can you make
this easier to use? How can you simplify it? How can you make this such that
my administrative assistant can manage the system?” One of the things we did
early on was to try to make as much of the system self-administrative as possible.
They could go into a private, password-protected site and manage aspects
of their telephone system as well as their website.
As Regulation FD and Sarbanes-Oxley came in and became real factors, the
thing they would come to us for was direction on interpretation. At the time, we
had 500 to 700 clients, and they’d want to know, “What are other companies
doing?”