Building The Small Business CRM Solution: CircleDog CEO Charlie Crystle (Part 2)

SM: You say you see opportunities where others do not, but you also have the guts to pursue them.

CC: I suppose that is true. Success or failure, you have to try. I think that entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic. We see a better place and love solving problems. SM: What happened after you got fired?

CC: I don’t remember the sequence of things, but I tried really hard to get a record deal. I saved up money and flew to Holland. I could not get anybody in New York to listen to me, so I flew there. On my way I stopped in England to try to meet up with my ex-fiancée. I had actually lived there for a year prior, and I never went and registered my paperwork with the police. When I tried to get back into England, they rejected me.

I had my passport and $600 with me. I did not have a return ticket, and I had resumes with me, and they were convinced I was coming back to try and live there again. They sent me back after about six hours of interrogation. I had a shaved head at the time, and they were having a lot of problems with skinheads. It may have been related to that as well. About three weeks later I flew back directly to Holland. I signed a deal. We toured Europe the following year. We started in England, and this time they let me in but I had to get prior permission.

 SM: So you realized your dream of being in a band?
 
CC: It was very frustrating. Our management was the same as the management for Garbage. In the summer of 1993 we recorded with them. They had lined us up to open up for Peter Gabriel and Sting on a six-week tour through Germany and France. The record was not there yet because the record company had not distributed it yet. Accordingly, we could not afford to go. We were not able to pay to be on the road.
 
That is the problem with signing a deal with a very small company. We spent the next year trying to get a deal with someone else, and RCA wanted to sign us. The record company asked for $500,000 to buy out the contract. RCA said we were good, but not that good. We lost them.
 
I broke up the band a week later because I was so mad. I took a job at a computer store as a manager. I was left to run the store without any training. I then trained myself on computer repairs and upgrades. I probably read every last page of materials you can imagine.
 
SM: Were you back in Pennsylvania?
 
CC: Yes. Two months later I still had not been paid. I closed the shop and went and started my own, which was the beginning of ChiliSoft. It was one of these things where I try to look back and figure out the lessons learned. When I was at the computer store I recognized there was a market, and that I could get paid if I just did it myself.
 
SM: Your idea at that point was to do the same thing you were doing for other people on your own?
 
CC: Exactly. I just wanted to build computers, teach people how to use software, and those types of things. This was back in 1994.
 
SM: How did you finance that store?
 
CC: I sold the idea to my parents. They gave me $25,000 to get it going. We paid ourselves a salary of $25,000 each. I had a partner who left two years later. We made it work through services. The PC business is ever contracting and the margins are always changing. You had to give your customers a good product with decent margins that let you get by. The real revenue was in the services. We were learning on the fly. We were self-taught on everything.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building The Small Business CRM Solution: CircleDog CEO Charlie Crystle
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