In This Episode: Company owners aren’t just employers: sometimes they’re mentors who can change lives. My buddy Doc recently told me about his old boss, and his story illustrates what I mean very clearly.

070: Pushing for Better
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Transcript
Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.
Doc is an old friend of one of my old friends, and we’re connected on Facebook. In a post last week, Doc told the story about one of his first employers, and I immediately knew that his boss operated with Uncommon Sense. I asked Doc for some more details so I could round out the story.
Bob Robbins, Doc said, was his first professional mentor after working as a field tech in electronics. “He gave me a chance when I had little to offer beyond enthusiasm and youthful confidence,” Doc says, “and literally zero marketing experience, at that point.” The job at the company he asked for, and got: marketing! Of course!
Bob was an electrical engineer, and had started the company. They made Critical Power Support Systems — large battery-based power backups for, as the name would suggest, critical projects. Bob had good timing for such a business: it was just as big data centers were being built, and they needed the systems; we’re talking the mainframe era. One of their first big clients was American Express. Bob’s company was based in Austin, Texas, and Doc moved there from Dallas.
After he settled in, Doc was asked to give a lecture at the National Computer Conference in Chicago. Bob went along to watch. “My presentation went well, with plenty of lively discussion in the Q&A afterward,” Doc said in his post. “I was asked by a couple of representatives of large international concerns to reach out to them to discuss our product further, so I was quite pleased with myself.”
“Bob’s first comment to me when we finally had some privacy was something along the lines of, ‘I’m going to get you some public speaking training.’” Doc found that “Deflating, to say the least.” He said that the trip had paid off, costing the company about $20,000, but one of the attendees awarded the company a $2 million contract.
“When I was gloating over the sale to Bob,