Chapter 43

August 6, 1978

Tim and Benny were sitting in their office chatting. It was one of those few occasions when it was just the two of them. They had felt a need to sit back and assess what was happening. There was a tendency for everyone to gather at Benny’s house to discuss business, but Benny objected to that. It was his home, his refuge, and he didn’t really want business intruding into it. Tim understood.

Tim said, “It appears that I’m now a general contractor.”

“Don’t you need a license?” Benny asked.

He wanted to keep everything legal and above board. In Oklahoma, everyone involved had to be licensed or a member of a union. Although he wasn’t involved in any of the construction businesses, Benny remembered everyone in that state being license and fee crazy.

“Yes, but that’s the easy part. I just have to pay the fee. I’ll still have to find licensed plumbers, electricians, and HVAC folks; which we’d have to do, anyway.”

“That’s great. You’re in the remodeling business. What are you going to do?”

“I have to hire a bunch of people. There’s no way I can do all of the work everyone wants done, alone; and you guys aren’t going to be able to help much, particularly when school starts up again.”

Tim had been overwhelmed by people who wanted him to remodel their homes. He figured that he was going to do every house on the street. He had to inspect each house and come up with estimates. The thing that shocked him was that most of the people were willing to spend $20,000 to fix up their places. They knew that the houses would sell for twice that in three years.

Tim wanted to put together some specialty crews. One crew would go through a house doing the tear out. Over a two day period, he figured they could strip the exterior of one of the dollar houses. Another crew would be used to put up walls. He figured they could put up an exterior of one of the dollar houses in two days. A third crew would be hired to paint. He could redo the exterior and tear down the interior of a house in one week. Electricians and others could come in and work their magic in a house with nearly total access to the infrastructure.

The problem was, he couldn’t afford to do that. Instead, he was going to have to hire licensed people who were retiring, and have them oversee work performed by less skilled people. He was going to have a single crew of workers, who would do anything that was necessary.

When it came to their own houses, it was a different story. The four of them, working together, would do the work on their own houses, since they didn’t want to spend the money to have others do the work for them. The progress there was a little slower, but they were getting things done. Tim’s house had a certificate of occupancy, but no carpet or linoleum on the floor. The drywall was up and taped. It wasn’t painted, but he was not living in it yet, either.

At the moment, he was working harder on getting all of the other houses he had under contract water tight before winter, than on trying to get his own house finished. Once he had the exteriors done on the contracted houses, he could take his time on their interiors. He could also dedicate a lot more time to his own house.

Sandra’s house was further along, although one of the bedrooms, the master bedroom, was not yet finished. She had wanted different carpet for the master bedroom, and what had been sent over from the store had been the wrong size. It had been the store’s fault, but it would be another two weeks before the replacement carpet would arrive.

She could move in anytime, although she really preferred to do it after she was done with the master bedroom. What was keeping her from moving in was a lack of furniture. She was waiting to locate furniture that she liked. Too many of the pieces that she was able to find were trendy and extremely ugly. She hated the commercial pieces that she could find that were affordable. She might have been young, and a child of the 70s, but she wasn’t one of those ‘groovy’ people.

Her parents were shocked when they finally saw her nearly finished place. They couldn’t believe she owned it outright. There wasn’t even a loan on it. There had been some discussion that they would help furnish the house from a financial perspective, but so far it was still at the discussion phase.

Cathy’s ‘back tax house,’ and the second houses for Tim and Benny, were all sitting there, untouched. They were using those houses for storage at the moment. They looked like hardware stores, with boxes of electric sockets, light switches, nails, screws, and other small items. There were stacks of drywall, plywood, and exterior wood sheeting, too.

Tim had more than enough work to remain busy for a year.

“I’m sorry about not being here to help you more,” Benny said, feeling guilty that he was so busy with school that he couldn’t help Tim get his house done quicker.

“Sorry? Why should you feel sorry? We’re doing exactly what we planned.”

“It’s just that you’re doing all of the work and bringing in most of the money,” Benny said.

“Don’t forget the software business you started up,” Tim pointed out. “It’s bringing in more money than the home repairs. If sales continue growing like they have, we’re going to have a problem figuring out what to do with the money.”

The software business had kind of just happened. It definitely wasn’t planned, at least it wasn’t planned to start this early. Benny had been wandering around the electrical engineering department and discovered that they had a dozen Apple IIs just sitting around. At this point in time, the expectations for computer programs were low. There were still a lot of text based games.

Wondering if he still had his programming skills, Benny sat down and whipped out a dungeon game that he called Dragon Chasers. It only took him about two days, using his memory of a game engine. He wrote it up and sent an ad to a magazine. Sales were slow during the first two months when the game had been advertised for $19.99. Then it was reviewed a month later, and suddenly had gotten an audience. It was like someone flipped a switch and shouted, ‘Let there be Sales,’ and there were sales. He was shipping out copies of the game as fast as they could make the disks.

A couple of days after writing the game, he wrote a basic graphics utility library that utilized the full capabilities of the computer. It allowed developers to deliver much higher quality graphics with very little effort. It wasn’t anything great, but it was better than what was available. He shipped a copy of that out to a number of highly respected Apple Developers with a license that he called TipWare. You were free to use it for personal use. You were free to distribute it to anyone you wanted. If you liked it, you could send in a tip of any amount you felt comfortable sending.

This was an unheard of thing in the emerging software industry. This was before shareware and open source had been launched. Everyone was trying to earn a buck for their program. If I had a program that went beep and your program needed a beep, then you were going to pay, and pay well to get a beep. This idea of using a product without concern for paying for it was a bolt out of the blue. The idea of running a business solely on tips was crazy. What kind of business model was it? If you like it tip or don’t tip. Nobody is going to be knocking on your door claiming a copyright violation if you don’t tip.

Tips started coming in.

Benny went back to the computer and put together a nice little set of file utilities. He shipped a couple of them out under the TipWare license. He didn’t give much thought to them. He had the math, he had the programming skills, and he had the experience having purchased similar items in his past. He also had experience with not being able to pay for software packages for personal use because they were extremely expensive.

So ... there he was, a small little programming company with a game, a graphics library, and a file utility. He and Tim didn’t think much of it, but it had started growing. Cathy and Sandra were spending a significant amount of time in the office opening envelopes and stacking up checks and cash.

“You’re working and I’m not,” Benny said as they sat on Tim’s living room couch.

“You’re bringing in money from writing software, which I happen to know you detest doing. I’m bringing in money working on houses; which I like, more or less. We’re covering every bill that’s coming in. We’re making money. What’s there to complain about?”

“I don’t detest writing software. I detest writing business crap for other people to get wealthy on. I just want to make sure that I’m doing my share.”

“Cathy was telling me last week that Two Guys Working is now worth $180,000. She doesn’t even know about the $47,000 in stock money. When you look at our personal wealth, which includes our new houses, we’re each worth about $130,000. That’s not bad.”

“That’s true.”

“We’re still just beginning. When the silver takes off, we’re going to be millionaires.”

Benny asked, “Are we going to bring them in on it?”

“I’m not sure they have enough cash to spare right now.”

“Okay.”

Tim was silent. “You know, I feel a little guilty.”

“About what?”

“They’ve been working beside us on just about everything we’ve done, but we haven’t brought them into the company.”

“Don’t feel guilty about that.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve paid them very good money the whole time they’ve been working with us. They’re walking away every weekend we paint curbs with twice what we take out. We’ve given them the chance to invest in the houses we’ve flipped. They’ve earned good money on those investments. They’ve bought brand new cars with what we’ve been paying them.

“Let’s not forget that they share ownership of a house worth $40,000 that they bought for $30,000. We helped fix it up without charging them a cent for our labor. That’s okay because they’ve helped us fix up our places without getting paid.

“They each own a dollar house which we are fixing up with them. They’ve made a lot of money and they’ve got plenty of assets as a result. They are a couple and, as such, they are an economic team. As a team, they are doing damned good.

“You and I are an economic team. We’ve pooled our resources and reinvested nearly everything we made. We bought old used vehicles and fixed them so that we could drive them without having to worry about them breaking. We started up our businesses before we ever hooked up with them and we’ve grown our businesses. We’ve spent very little money on ourselves. We’ve restored cars which are now worth considerably more than we put into them. We’ve bought houses, just like they did. Admittedly, two of our houses are gimmies.”

“I know you’re right. It’s just that the silver thing is a big deal. They’d never forgive us if we didn’t include them.”

Benny said, “So we tell them about it. We give them the chance to put in what they can spare. Personally, I was going to suggest that we put in as much money as we can. Another $10,000 could get us an extra $200,000.”

“Who knows how long we’d have to wait to get it.”

Tim got up and went over to Cathy’s desk. He rummaged around until he found their ledger. He opened it to the last page with an entry and read through it.

“Your software is making money like mad from what the books say. In the past two weeks, you’ve had $6,000 deposited in the TipJar account. At least, that’s how much she transferred out and put into the main corporate account.”

“Really?”

What Benny didn’t know was that people weren’t contributing a dollar at a time. People were actually contributing five and ten dollars at time for the graphics and file utilities. People were looking at how much his programs would have cost them and knew they were getting a bargain even by donating ten dollars. The graphics library was pulling in contributions of fifty and a hundred dollars from people who were writing games for the Apple II.

“Yes. Right now we are sitting on a pot load of cash. We could probably add another $15,000 to the silver money and never even miss it.”

“I didn’t realize we were doing so well.”

“We are.”

“So let’s do it. We’ll put another $15,000 into the fund. We’ll talk to the girls and see what they can contribute.”

“That’s a plan.”

“So do you want to take the lead on that?”

“I was about to suggest that we ask Cathy to do it, but that’s kind of putting the cart before the horse.”

“I would say so,” Benny said with a grin.

“At least it won’t be too difficult to deal with the injection of new money.”

Working with Robert they formally joined in the investment corporation in which there were 500 shares. Each share was now worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $375. Tim and Benny each owned 125 shares. The way it was set up was that they could add more shares to the investment account based on new money invested. For each investment of the current share price the number of shares would go up by one. Thus, if they were to buy $15,000 worth of shares at $375 a share, they would get 40 shares and the investment account would now have 540 shares. If they were to cash out a share, then the number of shares would decrease by one and they would get $375 ... less brokerage commission.