Today we’d like to introduce you to Earl H. Gray IV.
Earl, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I’m a self-taught hacker. I am not the type of hacker you hear about in the news – I’m just a person who solves problems and I’m not afraid to solve them in un-conventional ways.
Being a hacker isn’t always about computers and for me it’s never about breaking the law. It’s about finding the best solution to a problem and being able to look at something and find multiple purposes for it. In some cases, the purposes for things don’t align with the originally designed ones.
I’m not afraid to be alone in my efforts as most other people do things the traditional way – but funding has always been an issue for me, so over the years I have needed to do the same things that the larger companies do without costing us anything. And to do this without breaking the law requires a LOT of hacking!
I graduated college in 2000 with 100k in debt and was hired at a small startup who wanted to get into website hosting business. At the time there was no Go Daddy and I was tasked with building web and email hosting from the ground up.
I didn’t take any classes on this in college but I played with a personal website so I kinda knew what I was doing… This was my first hacking task – to create something out of nothing with whatever vendor they gave me to use. Thankfully, I was successful in this endeavor or else none of the below would have happened.
I was living with my Mom and literally every penny that I made went to pay my debt down. I created an excel sheet that projected the balances of each loan into the future and helped me make decisions on what to pay first. I always kept the amount the same but as a loan was paid off I put the amount being paid to that loan to the next one in line. I organized them by APR so I paid off the ones that were higher first
The business I was working at seemed to grow a lot and they hired more people but I stayed focused on the servers, hosting, and I did all the customer support – I automated their billing with some hacks pieced together and all seemed well until the twin towers fell. 🙁
That day my boss gathered us in the conference room and said that we could take the day off but it would be counted as a vacation day. One of my co-workers just had walked out crying because her twin sister was supposed to be working in those towers that day. Later she found out that she didn’t go to work that day.
Almost immediately the business stopped growing. By the beginning of 2003 I was the only person left working there besides the 4 bosses. I was still running the whole hosting business and the income just barely paid for my salary.
One Friday, one of the bosses called me into their office and laid me off. They indicated that they were going in another direction – they wanted to sell Long Distance phone service – remember when we used to pay for that… They offered me a job in their sales department but I couldn’t see that as much of a future so I took the layoff and left. They escorted me to the door.
As I walked to my car I remembered the other time I saw a boss at the door. It was 4:45 and I was leaving because I usually worked through lunch and I wanted to get out before traffic made my crawl home really long. He looked at his watch and said “you still have 15 minutes left.” I went back to my cubicle, sat and stared at my blank monitor for 15 minutes, then left. I couldn’t do much because it took about 10 minutes to get my computer started then I’d need to shut it down right away.
That day I thought how odd is this – I’ve been working hard since 8:30 – didn’t take a lunch break, ate by my computer and I was told seemingly arbitrarily by someone I hadn’t seen all day that “I had 15 minutes left” – as I drove home after being freed I realized it was more of a mandatory sentence then a place to do work in.
I realized is that driving for hours a day and sitting in a cubicle, then debating do I buy or bring my lunch… that wasn’t for me.
On my 45 minute ride home that night I remember thinking that I was free… It didn’t seem like a bad thing that I was laid off. I didn’t think about finding another job, I just thought that I’m the only one who knew where the “keys” were and just how to run the business that I was just laid off from. I was also the only contact point for the 100+ clients and each one of them knew me by name because who could forget a name like Earl H Gray IV. LOL.
I wondered if I could run the business completely on my own. I called the boss that let me go that Saturday. This was the first time I called someone from work on a weekend and it felt weird. I made him an offer. I offered to run the business on my own and give them a cut of the income. I said that I would be able to grow it and the money paid to them would grow. I suggested we come up with some deal like that and he cut me off and said that if I had 50k I could just buy it but they weren’t interested in anything else.
I got to thinking over the next couple of days and I remembered back to the employment contract and how they told me that there was more coming that they didn’t have ready yet. So I pulled up what I signed and to my surprise there was no “non-solicitation” and no “non-compete” clause in anything that I signed. I think that was the part of the contract that they never got to me to sign.
So I figured I’d give it a go myself.
I remember on May 9th 2003 “there’s no turning back now” as I signed Blue Robin into existence.
Since then many have asked where the name came from – it’s an interesting story I think because it literally came from the ether.
I worked with a designer at the company and he got laid off just before me. He was doing free-lance work at the time and he needed a case study on brand creation and I needed a company name. He interviewed me and asked a few questions – I said that the name should be friendly and welcoming without being presumptuous or specific. So a name like “Friendly Web Hosting Company, Inc.” was out…
At the time I was only thinking web and email hosting, but I knew there would be more that could be offered so I asked that the name be something that can lend itself to anything – like what is a Microsoft?
So he took all of this down and apparently came up with several names. He was at a party and he asked if everyone could vote. I wasn’t there but he had apparently written down “Blue Bird” and was about to say that and for some reason said “Blue Robin” instead. Almost instantly everyone said they liked that the best… so he wrote it down…
When he presented them to me I was drawn to Blue Robin as well – he didn’t tell me the story until afterwards – but once I settled on the name we went into creating the logo and that’s when he told me this story. We’ve had the same logo since and it was the best $500 I have ever spent.
So there it was, a company existed and there were many people that I knew of that needed hosting – so I started calling them. This is how I met my business partner, Hadi.
I called the firm Hadi was working for and explained the situation that I was laid off but I set up a new company and immediately they were my third client. I kept their pricing the same and the move was seamless since I had all the keys. I had already connected with a college friend and we built another better setup that cost less to maintain.
We got to talking and it seemed as if Hadi shared the same sentiments about customer support that I did and the services that his firm was offering were so synergistic to web and email hosting that it made sense to talk about the larger picture.
In the meantime I had switched over about 1/3 of the clients to Blue Robin and I got a cease and desist letter in the mail from the old company. I looked again frantically at the employment contract and found no evidence that they had a position so I kept going. I then received a large manila envelope with lots of crazy looking legal documents in it. I think they were suing me… Oh Joy.
They had doctored up part of a contract that indicated that there was a non-solicitation clause but it was not executed by me nor was it part of a whole contract executed by me – it was just a random page without context. But it was scary for me. I was 25, not a penny in my name, still about 40k in debt from College – no job, living at home, starting a new business, and now I’m getting sued.
I called a law firm because that’s what you do, right? In hind sight, I had picked the most expensive around… I was now paying lawyers from whatever little money Blue Robin was making and it wasn’t looking great as a future business opportunity. I needed to work a part-time job at another start up doing customer support just to pay the legal fees. The thing that struck me is that the old company needed to hire lawyers to draft the lawsuit so they too were paying a bunch of money.
Before engaging the lawyers, I tried one last time to call and make my same offer. I told them I have no money now, but if they worked with me to transition the business they would receive more money then a lump sum. They told me not to contact them anymore and call their lawyers instead.
When I took that news back to my lawyers they said the same – apparently this was a thing now – I can only talk to lawyers…
At the exact same time as this was going on Hadi and I were going out on joint sales calls together. Hadi was promoting the place he worked and they did things like Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click management and post card campaigns – all the normal marketing things too like business cards, etc (no vista print back then.)
Hadi and I got to talking and decided to meet after a sales call and talk about the larger picture. We met at a Dunkin Donuts and talked at length. Both he and I felt that technology companies spoke over their clients, were really stuffy, VERY expensive, and hard to deal with from a client perspective.
Hadi and I both had the same goal – to run a company that was easy to deal with and build on a solid foundation of kindness. I had been told by my old bosses that this was NOT possible but here Hadi and I were talking about doing it for real.
I let Hadi in on my story about the law suit and to my surprise he told me one of his own… Hadi had been working with his firm to approach my old company and buy the web hosting base. I sat and listened as Hadi told me that there were 500 clients and they are going through the due diligence. He also said that as he approached one of my old bosses he asked what would happen to the clients they have and my old boss said, “they’ll all leave eventually we guess.” Until then, they were happy collecting the money and not delivering any services.
They still had my voicemail up and were not returning any of the calls placed to me. Eventually it got full and people started complaining about me to them.
Hadi said he was excited to be in front of 500 monthly paying clients, but I immediately stopped him and said that at their best (before 2001) they were up to 120 clients but now they only had about 60 since I had taken 30 or so since I left and they had lost the rest because I could tell.
I went on to explain how I was literally the only person who knew how to do this stuff. They had laid off everyone else and I was doing everything for them. I was the only one that knew the passwords and they never expressed interest in how I was doing things so it was unlikely that they grew the business in a month up to 500 clients. (later I realized that they were talking about domains not clients – it was back when people squatted on domains so each client would have 10 or 20 domains each…)
We both chuckled and then realized that we both wanted the same thing. Hadi and I shook hands on the most important deal of my life. Hadi on the “sales” front and me on the “technology” side – we both soon realized that we could do pretty much anything we wanted to do. Hadi tells me that once he has a “foot in the door” with a client he can up-sell them to other things they may need.
Hadi explained that his current company lost interest in the deal because the due diligence had been stalled while they were waiting for financial details (probably because my old boss realized that 500 clients paying monthly fees doesn’t add up to $3000 of income monthly especially when the average bill was about $30 a month.)
We got to talking about websites and marketing programs and web applications and it was immediately obvious to me that this was the right thing to do. I felt it. I shook hands and gave 1 share less than half of the business to Hadi. He came on board with funding and we BOTH turned to the lawsuit together.
I got more details in the mail shortly thereafter and apparently they were now suing me (not Blue Robin) for breaking up the deal with Hadi’s old company which was funny because they didn’t need me to muck that up – they did a fine job themselves.
Hadi and I shifted the lawsuit towards an acquisition deal since that’s what everyone wanted. We were able to pen a deal that sold the rights to the client roster outright and included a letter introducing Blue Robin so it would make transition much easier. The total cost for this was 30k and Blue Robin immediately had $3000 a month in income.
The funny thing is that we paid the lawyers 15k to broker this and at the end the total bill was 5k less than what my boss demanded the weekend I was laid off, and they took the 30k and probably paid a good chunk to their lawyers so they most likely got much less than they would have if we brokered a deal the Saturday I was laid off, so small victories, right…
Now we were 45k in the hole but had income and Hadi set to start up-selling.
Fast forward a few years and we had full blown in house applications that we were selling. We were an ASP (Application Service Provider) – we built, sold, managed, configured, hosted, and supported our home grown CRM (before SalesForce was on the market,) our own email marketing engine the Digital Dispatch (before Constant Contact was on the market,) and I personally built our first CMS before Joomla and WordPress had a digital footprint.
We were doing well and had paid off the debt. We were both working full time for Blue Robin and getting paid a little from Blue Robin. Ironically, we had no money for marketing but through our clients (most of which we still have to date) we grew – the family grew and grew and 1 client at a time and eventually we had big years but to grow we needed to borrow and to borrow we needed to beg because no bank would talk to us so we accumulated some debt to family and friends but it was ok to manage.
It seemed that no matter what we did to show we were a successful company to invest in, no bank wanted to give us money to grow. So we kept at a small growth rate and then we made our first big mistake. We borrowed from family / friends and my retirement fund to hired people and paid them 6 figure salaries… We hired them on the promise that they’d bring in new clients to pay for themselves and although we paid their salaries for a full year they delivered only two new clients. Those clients were large so we still thought it was ok until both of those contracts started falling apart and both of the folks we hired were hard to find.
You see, we are now and always were a virtual company. Blue Robin doesn’t care where you are (within reason), so long as you are available during business hours for a client and you are doing what needs to be done to move business forward.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was one day when we were supposed to be meeting with our largest customer and our CTO was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t on IM and we kept leaving him messages. He called into the call about 15 minutes late and was very distracted. Hadi, myself and he stayed on the line afterwards and he informed us that he was having a pint in Ireland with his Dad… What… Seriously… Hadi and I are borrowing from family and friends to fund his Irish beer?
We had to let them go and me coming from where I came from I looked back at the employment contract I drafted and had them sign before we made any decisions. There were iron clad “non-solicitation” “non-compete” clauses in both agreements and there was also a section for them to list out prior accomplishments that remain theirs before they joined Blue Robin. Neither of them filled in anything there and it was a “work for hire” contract so we felt that we were covered and we let them both go. They threatened to take the two clients with them and it became a fight, of course… why wouldn’t it…
The CTO claimed that the solution we were co-developing with our largest client was his “brain child” and the product he came up with and it belonged to him. We reminded him of the contract he signed and he didn’t seem to care. He called the client and attempted to sway them to go with his services and not Blue Robin.
Hadi and I also called the client and we apologized profusely and explained the situation and asked what the client wanted to do. He quietly took the story in and said quite profoundly, “I’d rather go with a company then a person.” So that became our first REAL success story. We were able to finish the joint product developed by us and marketed by our partner company. It became clear to Hadi and myself that this was a future business we should get into. Co-developing products and sharing in the revenue.
The other of the two clients that they brought in had quite the opposite story. They didn’t want to talk on the phone and we were called into their office. Hadi nor I had been there before and it was kind of an old-fashioned office. I remember being in a huge corner office sitting on a really uncomfortable leather couch with my paper printouts of contracts and the such. I was dressed in my best attire, khaki pants and a really hot long sleeve button up shirt – yuck…
I remember a tall extremely over-dressed person sitting down in front of us with what I can only assume was a suit that cost more than my car at the time. He said that he is the owner of the company. He was straight from the movies with his perfect attire and very audacious demeanor. He was the king and anyone who thought differently would soon be put to the death. That’s what I thought at least…
Hadi told the story and he said to us – “why would I believe you..”. I was shocked because it’s the first time our credibility had been challenged. Hadi and I always did (and still do) things on the up and up so why was he questioning us? Of course it was the truth – we wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t. Hadi has a saying that he always tells the truth because he has a bad memory and can’t remember lies – so it’s easiest to always tell the truth…
By this time they had paid a 30k bill to us and were on the hook for the next payment of 30k as we had delivered the prototype of their system. We were to share in the revenue as well. The well dressed man looked at us and asked “why do I need you” and it shocked me how rude he was. I thought to myself that I didn’t want to ever set foot in this place again but Hadi somehow got them to start talking about contracts and stuff.
The guy said that he wanted to part ways and wanted his money back. Hadi not having the knack for details quickly said “sure… but you need to give us back what we gave you.” I was dumbfounded and only later I explained to Hadi that he made a 30k promise — he thought it was only 5k at the time…
The guy thought a bit and said “ok, fine, because you haven’t given me anything.” Hadi then went on to say that we did. We wrote up a detailed specification on how they need to build their system exactly and they needed to give that back to us, meaning that they couldn’t build the system at all.
The guy thought again pretty hard this time and said that wouldn’t work. I breathed a sign of relief because we had about $1,300 in the bank at that moment.
The guy proposed that we sever ties and leave all as it is and we will keep the already paid money, stop developing and release what was there for them. In return, they would not contest any payments to Blue Robin thus far and would go away and we’d never have to talk with them again.
The only mistake I made on the contracts was that I put the non-compete / non-solicitation clause at only 1 year, not 3…
EXACTLY 1 year after we fired the CTO he was hired at this company. There is no doubt in my mind that he took our code and documentation and knew we’d not go after him. By this time we had better council and were advised that even if this was 100% true the cost to “go after him” would well outweigh the financial benefits received. So, we moved on.
We created a small application for a client in the medical space called WebMedicPro and once we did the market research we realized that it had legs. We spun that off onto it’s own company and attempted to find investors.
The investment community was so closed to us we found nothing so we tried to boot strap it. We sold our interest in the other co-developed product to fund WebMedicPro. Hadi put his house up for a personal LOC and I dipped again into my retirement. One year I ran WebMedicPro on my personal credit cards – using one to pay the other… It was a true financial mess.
Technologically we were so ahead of the curve – we came out with the first NEMSIS 3.x system which today is the norm but when we came out with it no one was able to do it. We needed funding to take it to the next level and we got to a point where a large ambulance company wanted to deploy our solution and the owner wanted to invest. We grew the solution in terms of stability and reliability until we were approached by a competitor for an acquisition. By this time the original Blue Robin debt of hiring the two “c-level” employees was un-touched and the new debt created by WebMedicPro was compounding so we sold WebMedicPro.
WebMedicPro was the first success story of a fully acquired product of Blue Robin. We still have a wonderful working relationship with the company that bought WebMedicPro and I’m still on as an employee until they can take the reigns themselves. This solidified our concept that this is the right business model for us to grow with.
We still have the web / email hosting that “pays the bills” but to make a splash in the market we have since partnered up with several other start-ups and are attempting to get them off the ground. We are investors in companies that tout the next frontier of the industry that they are in.
Blue Robin is involved with a telemedicine solution that uses commodity hardware to deliver sync’d together streaming vitals / Audio / Video over the air through their patent-pending cloud technology and will revolutionize the remote doctor space once that industry catches up to the need. A potential use case of this technology is that they can deploy a throw-away sensor and use a cell-phone on an Oil Rig and quickly and effectively get a doctor access to vitals and audio / video anywhere the cell signal works. So if someone is stuck a place where traditional wired technology can’t reach, we can get at them.
We also are investors in a company that will provide board certified physicians at any day or night within 15 minutes of a call through their app from a patient anywhere in the world using the above technology to deliver a cohesive travel experience. Potential partners lining up are AARP, AMEX, and other groups of a similar nature.
Most recently we have founded CyberToolWorks. CyberToolWorks has taken the products that I have invented and positioned them together as a whole office IT solution. CyberToolWorks aims to be the IT arm for companies that can’t afford to hire an IT person or are too small to know about technology. We take care of the 0’s and 1’s so our clients can focus on their business.
CyberToolWorks is an extension of Blue Robin – it’s a product-based company taking the best of breed technologies and marrying them seamlessly for our clients.
Blue Robin has turned into more of a technology incubator – the tech side of VC. We have unlimited technical resources and can grow / shrink as is needed to help partners get things up and running. All partner companies share revenue and we grow together.
CyberToolWorks’ flagship product is the “Office Puck” – it’s a small computer that attaches to the back of a monitor and is remotely managed by our engineers. The beauty of the Office Puck is that it comes plug and play ready – there is no need for our clients to go to a store and buy a computer and take it back to the office and hook it up and then install stuff on it and hope it’s protected… We work with each client to create the proper environment and it’s prepped before we arrive onsite. We just plug it in and they are up and running.
CyberToolWorks also does things like cloud hosting, cloud services, traditional MSP (Managed Service Provider) type services like remote backup and office365 hosting. But the best service we offer is to virtualize the IT closet. I can’t tell you how many companies that I have walked into and they open a closet door and say “I have no clue what this stuff is, but do we need it?” Almost always the answer is no. These days if our market place (2-20 users) has any onsite equipment that isn’t redundantly served in the cloud that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
CyberToolWorks gives wings to our clients so they can conduct business anywhere, anytime.
Blue Robin has come full circle now – we now help clients become us. Our non-tethered daily activities provide for the freedom for our family members to do what they need to do and not worry about the rest. Our clients, providers, and employees work together with precision to deliver the best value. And I believe the only reason this all works is because I’m a hacker.
Being a true hacker, I have been able to create the infrastructure with little or no cost and we pass this cost savings on to our clients. We are not a company where the leaders get 6 figure salaries – in fact, at this point, we re-invest EVERY dollar into the business. We are always looking to grow and expand into new markets but at this time our main focus has been to make a success out of our partnered companies. Here’s looking forward to the next steps.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
LOL – smooth – no… anything you can think of has happened to us. I watch Silicon Valley the TV show and I can’t tell you how many situations there mirror my life – it’s really uncanny.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Blue Robin has always been customer focused. Once we gain a customer for one service and we set it up correctly the calls from that customer are more focused on other things we can help with.
I have a saying that “if we build it right, we don’t have to support it.” This mantra is why we spend so much time on preparation and build each client’s infrastructure from the ground up correctly. This gives our clients more focus on their business and allows them to grow and need more of our services.
There is no need to have a 14 page contract for things and all of our services are month to month. We like to keep our clients with service, not force them to pay us because of a contract.
I can’t say this is or isn’t the focus of other companies in our space, but I do believe we are set apart from the rest in our client focus – their problems are our problems, however silly or small they think they are. We take this relationship seriously and our clients become more like family. They call us just to say hi and that’s a huge success in my book.
What were you like growing up?
I was always an inquisitive kid – asking questions, learning things, and almost never doing things the exact way everyone else did.
I remember in 2nd grade there was a really old Mac with a 5 inch floppy drive. I played Number Munchers on that computer once I was done with my work.
I was always finished first because I combined some of my assignments. There were words for the week and Monday they needed to be written out alphabetically, Tuesday they needed to be used in a sentence, Wednesday they needed to be written 3 times each, etc…
I remember specifically writing a few sentences on Monday using all of the words and having them appear alphabetically on the page. My teacher allowed me to turn that in for both day’s work. I then had the full time on Tuesday to play number munchers.
It was things like this that led me to be a “hacker” – truly someone that would question things and present what’s needed in alternative (sometimes better) way and someone who wished to pursue what I felt was important.
October 28th, 1992 I asked Lauren to dance early on. She was a freshman in her costume, dressed up as a baby with eyeliner dots on her face for freckles. I wore my usual “I’m not going to dress up pirate costume.”
I knew I liked Lauren before I asked her to dance, but as soon as we got on the floor something really interesting happened. We didn’t let go. We literally danced there in that exact spot for the entire night, talking and getting to know each other. I was a sophomore and hated school. I couldn’t wait to be a real grown-up – and she was a very studious freshman who had near straight A’s.
We now have 2 fine young ladies as daughters. Very polite and courteous to all and known in the community as over-all good people. I believe this is my best achievement to date – being able to be a part of two human’s entry into such a dark world and making it a little lighter as a result.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.bluerobin.com
- Phone: 7815776004
- Email: earl@bluerobin.com
- Other: http://www.cybertoolworks.com
Image Credit:
The personal photo is of me and my wife at a benefit earlier this year. The other photos are of me and Hadi in 2006.
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