Solo Entrepreneur Focused on Autonomy as Key Success Driver: Hank Luhring, Founder of IssueTrak (Part 1)

Hank tells the story of a solo entrepreneur who bootstrapped his product startup with services over a longer, slower period, while maintaining a high quality lifestyle. Success is personal. Autonomy and quality of life matter more to certain entrepreneurs than the flawed “Go Big and Go Home” mantra that VCs preach.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Hank Luhring: I was born in Norfolk, Virginia back in 1952. I was raised in a neighborhood where just about everybody had their own businesses. They weren’t fabulously wealthy, but they were all doing their own thing. This gave me the thought that someday I would have my own business as well.

Sramana Mitra: What path did you follow to that?

Hank Luhring: I went to college at the Old Dominion University and majored in Psychology. But I took a lot of computer science classes. I got the opportunity to work with a pretty prominent fellow in the field of engineering psychology which was a predecessor of the human-computer interface field. From that, I got the grounding and the idea that you develop systems to fit people instead of having people adapt to systems.

After college, I moved to California and worked for some school districts as a programmer. After a couple of years, I suggested that I become a contractor and not an employee. They said sure. That was the first business I started in my late 20’s. Later, I bought a mini-computer and did data processing for school districts. I did that for about 10 years. In the meantime, my brother Rusty started his own software company as well. His was more financial modeling and I was more into database type work.

After I sold the business, I moved back east and worked for a company up in northern Virginia. Then I moved back to Hampton Roads. I went to work doing their IT work for PCs. This was back when PCs were not prevalent. Most people at this company did not have a PC on their desk. I was brought in to introduce PCs and networking to all these people. That went well.

A colleague moved on to Volvo Penta and wanted to hire me. Again, I arranged to be a contractor. That was in 1992. That was the beginning of the company that became IssueTrak. When I first started the company, I named it Luhring & Associates. My first hire was a programmer I had worked with. That has become a pattern – hiring people I know.

Sramana Mitra: Always. You were doing the same kind of contract work and you were just hiring more people to help you expand the contract software services business?

Hank Luhring: Yes. We would do various projects for companies where they had looked for an application to do a job for them and couldn’t find them and they can’t program. Then they would hire us to write something from scratch. We did this time and time again. We would bill out by the hour. We were basically a services business. That was tough. It was not easy getting the work in because you didn’t have a product you could demonstrate. You had to convince them to work real hard to finish a project. Then it’s done. Now, what do you do? I wasn’t crazy about the ups and downs.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Focused on Autonomy as Key Success Driver: Hank Luhring, Founder of IssueTrak
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