Richard Bosco
I founded GlobalComm in 1996 because I was tired of watching technology fail people who were trying to do real work. The pattern was the same everywhere. A vendor showed up, talked about a stack, sold a platform, and disappeared. Six months later the technology was in the way of the operation it was supposed to support.
I came up in the cable television business. My father was in it, so I was around it from the age of five. By 1984 I was in Dallas selling turnkey private cable systems to apartment complexes and hotels. Dallas was one of the last major cities in the country without cable. The franchise had been held up in court for years on corruption allegations, and the apartment owners needed someone to deliver the service that the city could not. That was the opening.
When scrambling came in and the economics of the customer-owned model stopped working, my customers asked me to run the systems for them. I did not want to be a cable operator. I made them an offer I thought they would refuse. They took it, and I ended up with twenty-year exclusive rights on a hundred thousand subscribers.
Now I had a hundred thousand bills to send out every month, and no way to do it manually. I drove down to Radio Shack and bought a TRS-80 with Xenix, a database called Profile that later became filePro, and an OkiData printer. I built the billing system myself because nothing off the shelf fit the way the business actually ran. The stack later moved to SCO UNIX. That was the first time I built technology to fit an operation instead of the other way around. It is the principle I have been running on ever since.
The portfolio got tested early. The savings and loan crisis put most of the apartment properties I had contracts with into foreclosure. My contracts were executory, which meant the banks could have voided them when they took the properties. But I had structured the contracts with easement language that predated the banks' UCC-1 filings, which made my rights take priority. I kept every contract. The internet bust came next. Then the 2007 recession, which closed Integra Hospital Management on us and left a significant client loss to absorb. Three recessions, three survivals. You learn what is structural and what is not.
Thirty years after starting GlobalComm, we still have our first customer. That tells me more than anything else does.
Richard Bosco, Founder