World Gym Houston
(Part 1 of 4)

In life, all of us go through great moments of conquest, love and fulfillment; and also painful periods of growth.  We  learn from painful experiences or we may be doomed to repeat them, withdraw from trying again or become bitter .  Most of us also try to treat others like we want to be treated.  We all know that selfishness, envy and greed has always got in the way of the more positive attributes of humanity.  

In 1989, I got my first big contract job with World Gym Houston (WG) and Performance Research Institute (PRI).  My prior experience was sub-contracting.  WG is a national chain of fitness health clubs.  The Houston franchise was owned by a family out of Michigan where one of the sons, Dan, lived here in Houston to manage the franchise.   I was brought in to fix their monthly membership billing system.  PRI was a company setup in Clear Lake, Texas to sell fitness programs and vitamins nationally. 

During my first month, I increased WG's income from $45K to $60K a month.  The task was fairly simple after rewriting the billing modules and fixing the database.  Strangely enough, the system they were using was written by a University Of Houston Computer Science Professor!  The data input screen did not have checks to verify many entries.  American Express credit cards were coded as AX, AM, AI while the billing modules only recognized AX.  Simple fixes to the data make the big difference.  The problems I found where fundamental in nature which a Computer Science PhD should have known!

I got to meet the Professor in the transition process.  He was a nice older man.  He didn't make any excuses to me on the problems and seemed to be embarrassed by it.  I told him I was a graduate of his University's program.

I ended up staying with WG for 6 months before Dan decided the data was in such bad shape that he needed to send all the information to a collection agency to perform the billing.  Even after I cleaned up the program and obvious problems in the data, the remaining data needed to be verified by someone calling to get new credit cards numbers, new expiration dates, new billing address and new checking / saving account numbers.  As you might imagine, health clubs cater to the young people in society whose very nature tend to move from one apartment to another, cancel credit cards / max them out and close / re-open checking accounts.

PRI was a very fun project.  Before going there, the owners of the company spent two million dollars setting up the company where the management from California flew in weekly to run the company and the computing personnel came in from Arkansas.   Before I came aboard on my contract, the owners discovered the California managers were double billing the owners to set up the exact same company in Los Angeles.  When I came aboard, I was stunned to find a very problematic computer software system running on a Novell network with Commodore computers.  As some of you might know/remember the Commodore computer was not 100% IBM PC compliant.   After finishing the project I left to moved on to other contracts where PRI eventually closed down some 6 months after I left.

Two years after leaving these contracts I got a call from Dewayne B of World Gym asking me if I was available.  This is part 2 of my experience with WG.  Click here to read the rest of the story.