I was rummaging through some boxes the other day and came across an old software manual from Powerhouse Systems, a startup I co-founded back in my early twenties.
I was the tech guy on the team, and worked with a gifted salesman who later served as the best man at our wedding when Gloria and I got married. Back then, "sales tools" consisted of manual Rolodexes and basic software programs like Packrat or Goldmine. Together, our team built a system to manage prospects, contacts, leads, and opportunities right on a laptop. The real innovation was the system's ability to "phone home" using a dial-up modem to upload sales reports so a manager could easily see an integrated view of the entire team and the sales pipeline.
Realistically, we were just a bit too far ahead of our time. The eventual winners of the software boom certainly weren't building on top of what we did, and when our company ended up being sold, the founders didn't walk away with anything. It was a tough tech-sector lesson, but it gave me a lot of grit, dust-off-your-boots determination, and a job at a Geographic Information Systems company. If you've been following my posts, you already know what happened next.
While we didn't launch a global software empire, that experience taught me how to look at a slow, outdated process and try to build a better way. Right now, our state government is too often running on the political equivalent of those old dialup modems and manual Rolodexes, always reacting to yesterday's problems instead of proactively planning for tomorrow's growth.
We don't need politicians who are content to just manage an old, slow bureaucracy. We need a practical, forward-looking approach that looks at our state's infrastructure and tax systems and sets them up to handle the future. Let's bring that proactive mindset to Helena.
That's Montana common sense.
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