After I launched my first business venture selling software to bill medical insurance companies and failing at it, I was eager to launch my second venture after dusting myself off and picking myself up off the ground. It took me a minute to re-up, get situated, save money at a job, and then launch my second venture. I never believe in sitting around waiting on a miracle to happen and waiting on funding to start my ventures. I always look for business opportunities where I know a tremendous amount about the subject matter and that can be launched with the tools that I possess within my knowledge and experience.
After the first business failure, I went to work at Shared Medical Systems in downtown Oakland, California. I worked their as a software developer developing Clinical Data Systems for their line of hospital information systems software that was eventually sold to Siemens. As usual, because I am blessed to be at big corporations, I always look around to see where there is a niche within these corporate walls. There is always a niche and always something that a corporation isn’t doing or doesn’t have the time to focus on because they are too huge.
One day, while looking around on the corporate intranet, I found a document showing that they were billing out me and others as a software integration onsite resource for $250 per hour. I almost passed out because they were paying me a salary of about $35 per hour. You see my point, right? They were profiting $215 per hour on top of paying me to do the actual work. Therein lay the niche.
Instead of getting mad and angry at the corporation, I played it cool. I sat back and like Nate Dogg sang, I laid low. Since I was already being deployed at client locations in Northern California at hospitals, I had already built relationships with key staff at these hospitals. I developed friendships with these people and developed a really good working relationship with a woman at Marin General Hospital who had told me over coffee in Sausalito that Marin General Hospital was going to get rid of using the company I worked at due to the high fees of integration at $250 per hour.
I asked her if she would sign a contract with my company, Spinks Engineering, LLC that I had registered to do business in downtown Oakland if I charged her lower fees. I told her that I would charge her $100 per hour to do the exact same work as the big corporation. She agreed to it and I signed a contract between her hospital and my company for a year worth of technical and software integration support.
