World Gym Story
(Part 2 of 4)
My first return meeting with World Gym was a great meeting. I didn't know what to expect when I went to their new Houston franchise corporate headquarters. Dewayne would not tell me what the meeting was going to be about but he said he would pay me for coming to it.
When I arrived at their office, I met Dewayne and he introduced me to Stephanie who was their office manager. They took me to a computer and showed me the software I had written two years before and asked me if I still remembered how to operate it. I told them of course and we then went into a meeting where I found out that Dewayne had come from the billing company located in Little Rock, Arkansas which Dan had sent all of the data two years before to be cleaning up. Dewayne was brought aboard to start a new company called Federal Billing Company, FBC, where Dewayne was a 49% owner and Dan's family owned 51%. Dewayne was also Vice President of the WG locations throughout the Houston area. They wanted to use my software to run it and they wanted me to continue with development of it.
I was working on a full time contract at Amoco Chemical in Alvin, Texas at that time. FBC office was in Clear Lake and I lived in southwest Houston. I told Dewayne my time would be limited but I could meet them during lunch time and after hours and program nights / weekends. They agreed and I began working both contract jobs.
After the first 6 months, Dewayne presented me with a new plan. He offered me a 1/3 stake in a new company that he and Dan wanted to form which would do billing for any membership organization and also sell the software. He also said Dan would be able to present the software to all the other WG franchises. I agreed to the offer and we planned on creating the company at the point the software was fully ready. This is where I made my first big mistake. We never put our agreement on paper. Being only 31 years old, I believed I was the best programmer in the world and when the time came, they would not be able to replace me which was what I thought was my insurance.
At the point I agreed to their proposal, I went off of my billing rate and went to a flat $1,000 per month. I still worked full time for Amoco at a very great contract rate. My family life was good and I was able to work from home in the evening, dialing into FBC as needed. Some nights and Saturdays I went down to FBC.
Over the following year, the program grew and grew in complexity. I added very complicated interfaces between banking companies to send daily ACH batches along with credit card debits. I added collection modules with commissions for the collectors. After a year of using my system, FBC went from $0 per month to $175K per month. (All the old memberships were still being billed in Arkansas). Dewayne and Dan were very pleased with the progress but they still felt the system needed 6 more months before we formed our company.
In the fall of 1992, we finally started the formation of the new company. We hired the salesperson from the billing company in Arkansas and began putting together brochures and looking at offices to lease. Things were looking good but cracks began to form.
All the employees Dewayne hired to work at FBC were young women from the WG health clubs. The women were all between 18 to 26 years old and were gorgeous! Stephanie was one of the few who were married besides me and Dewayne. One day I came into FBC during lunch to meet Stephanie crying. We went into an office and I found out that her husband had just had his second affair on her. I can't tell how beautiful Stephanie was. Stephanie made some subtle advances to me which I never encouraged, she wanted revenge. I became a good friend to her and witnessed to her about Jesus Christ.
At this point, the project was starting to need a full time computer programmer to work on site. I approached Dewayne about this and said I know what FBC is making and you guys can afford to bring me on full time now until we get the new company running. Dewayne said he would approach Dan on it and we would meet on it soon. That meeting never happened.
About month or two before I had approached Dewayne about me coming aboard full time, I brought in a friend, David, from college to handle PC hardware on a contract basis. FBC had around 50 PCs on a Novell network using my software. David was from Singapore and had a company and sometimes sent some of his employees out to do the work.