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VeriFone: My Memories of the First Ten Years by Dick Draper

VeriFone was an early player in the market for credit card point-of-sale readers. Today, we totally take these devices for granted, but in the 1980s they radically reshaped retailing--reducing fraud, making consumer transactions faster and more reliable, and simplifying various back-end banking, finance and database management tasks.

This book covers VeriFone's early, rapid-growth era, told from the perspective of an entrepreneur who took a big chance: he bought the sales concession to sell and distribute VeriFone devices across a huge multistate territory in the midwestern USA, building it from nothing into a significant business venture.

VeriFone: My Memories of the First Ten Years would make several really good MBA business cases studies, all of them more useful than anything I read during my MBA program. You'll see how an entrepreneur bootstraps a business with no outside funding, handles huge customers unexpectedly, and manages the structure of a rapidly growing outsourced sales organization. You'll see creative techniques for limiting organizational bloat, motivating staff, and keeping employee turnover low. You'll see how a few sentences of legal language in a business contract end up being worth significant future value years later when VeriFone does its IPO. You'll see how a serial entrepreneur navigates a mix of business hits and misses, struggling with cash flow issues--and then have a proverbial "overnight success" that took some twenty years to achieve.

Full disclosure: Author-entrepreneur Dick Draper happens to be my uncle on my wife's side, but even a totally impartial observer would agree he's an interesting dude who's had a fascinating life. This book is a really good read. 

Notes:
1) There's an intriguing example of a principal/agent problem that emerges in this book: Imagine a company with a superior product that's ready right now to go to market... except that company doesn't have an in-house sales organization that can scale up quickly enough to sell the product nationally. Time is of the essence here, so it's logical, more efficient and far faster to contract out the sales function to partners who can scale your sales and distribution while you maintain your edge versus the competition working on the next generation of your product.

This arrangement can work well. Sometimes it works beautifully. And sometimes it works until it doesn't. Gradually, Draper's sales company and VeriFone begin to diverge in interests as Draper's company begins penetrating huge national customers like Sears/Discover and others which don't conform to the company's originally divided-up sales territories. Another example: what happens when you win lots of new customers who request specific product configurations that the home company can't quite fulfill in a timely manner? (In Draper's case, his team made many of these tweaks and config changes themselves in quite creative ways.) Or for another example: What if you believe VeriFone is making a strategic or tactical misstep because you have genuine ground-level feedback from real customers, but you can't get management to see it and adjust? And so on. 

Worse, there's the classic principal/agent risk example where a company that once outsourced sales (or any other business function for that matter!) later decides to bring it back in-house when it meets their needs to do so... and thus the gravy train suddenly ends for the outsourcing firm. Draper's company fortunately had a long-term contract, but this can be a serious existential risk if you run a company on the receiving end of this kind of decision.

2) VeriFone gets a new CEO, a screamer: Hatim Tyabji. He loved meetings, loved the occasional "ritual sacrifice" of an exec, etc. This guy is somehow still around in the world of listed public companies, but he appears to be now doing mostly board-level work. 

3) See the growing problems/growing pains companies have: meetings, makework, paperwork etc. As Draper's company grows, running it gets more complicated... long gone are the days where he sells out of the trunk of a K-Car: now he has to manage the business structure, hire, manage and motivate the different personalities in his organization, etc.

4) Make sure you have a contract. A particularly important piece of wisdom for readers in this book. 

5) Note also the contract Draper and his lawyer worked out with VeriFone had a very savvy clause in it, reserving the right to take up to 10% of commission revenues in stock. A few phrases in a contract end up being worth a tremendous windfall years later. 

6) Going through the IPO deal process, after which VeriFone then shifts into a "meet/beat numbers" mentality. Yet another growth stage--and yet another form of principal/agent risk, interestingly. The stock IPOs at 16, goes to 24, and after their first "missed" quarter, drops to 6. [VeriFone is now private, it was acquired a few years ago by a PE firm.]

7) Also interesting to see some of the other products Draper tries to sell through his organization as the VeriFone contract winds down: there are some hits, some misses, but nothing again on the scale of VeriFone. You only really have to hit it once, but after that you have the extra resources to try some other ventures. And there's a lot less existential risk in doing so, even if none of them work out. 

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