20 - Back to the Present

Summary

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.

—Albert Einstein

Recently, Mark was at one of those big box stores (yes, a guy with his net worth still buys in bulk!). After paying, a “receipt checker” was making sure he’d paid for all his items when Mark asked him how his experience was when interacting with the company's time and attendance system.

Taken aback a tad, the man said it was very efficient. In fact, he was impressed with the system's capabilities, which included the ability to request time off and check on accrued vacation days. Seeing his quizzical look, Mark explained that he was the founder of Kronos, the company behind that system.

Before he would let Mark leave, the man asked for permission and took a selfie with Mark, explaining to him that not only would he be sharing the picture … he intended to print a copy to keep beside the store's Kronos time clock.

Both men smiled for the tiny lens within the employee's cell phone, and Mark's face shone with a cool, perhaps ex-hippie-ish glee. After all, he’d spent a decade building a company, and then decades running it, in relative obscurity in comparison to many of the other technopreneurs of his generation. The fact never bothered him. Success was the goal, not fame. Kronos did the dirty work of its customers, now numbered in the tens of thousands and located just about everywhere on the planet where people are hired, scheduled, managed, and paid as employees.

The company he’d founded had changed the business paradigm in a dramatic way. Kronos solutions enabled its customers to focus on their core competencies because Kronos solutions streamlined the day-to-day running of these businesses.

The run-up to global status had been, if not meteoric, steady and consistent, especially when compared to most other technology-driven organizations of the day.

Under a game plan designed for a marathon versus a sprint, Mark focused on continuous improvement and expansion of the Kronos solution set. True, it took over 10 years and many millions of investor dollars before a profit was finally etched into the books in 1988. But once the butterfly had emerged from the cocoon, Kronos stayed airborne.