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Medical Manager Corporation—MMGR

When the smoke cleared, I was to be the chief executive officer (CEO); John Kang, the president; and Rick Karl, the general counsel. Corporate headquarters would be established in Tampa at John Kang’s facilities, and Rick Karl and I would work out of the Alachua offices. The company would trade on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol MMGR.

As we headed toward the end of 1996, the cadre of lawyers and bankers was finishing up all the paperwork to merge the companies together and simultaneously do the IPO. I remember that this was an interesting time for me in my relationship with my dad. My father had been a stockbroker most of his life, and he had been working at Merrill Lynch for more than thirty years. His only son had dropped out of graduate school in business to live in the woods and meditate. I never left the woods, yet all of a sudden I was in my dad’s world. He kept telling me that he just couldn’t believe that Morgan Stanley, one of the premiere brokerage houses in the world, was interested in my company. He was also surprised to find out that Merrill Lynch’s health-care analyst was closely monitoring our upcoming transaction. My dad was very interested that my company was going public, and we talked to each other more during this time than we had for the previous twenty years put together. It makes sense—we now had something in common to talk about.

I was humbled by this opportunity to get closer to my father. I saw it as just another miraculous thing that had happened as I surrendered to the flow of life. It wasn’t too much later when my dad died. But you can be sure he enjoyed being able to give his son his lifetime-learned advice about becoming a public company, the health-care sector, and Wall Street in general.

Despite the amazing sequence of events that led up to this point, nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. A week or so before the IPO, I received a list of action items from my New York attorney. One by one I worked through the list, signing required documents and locating required paperwork. The final item was due the next day, so I rushed down to my bank to access my safety deposit box. I rarely had reason to touch this box I had rented back in 1971 to store my only possession—the deed for my original ten acres.

Once I was left alone with the storage box, I began looking for the document my attorney had requested. There wasn’t much in the box, but what was there had the effect of a time machine. I came across the original deed on my property—how much had happened since then. No one in their right mind could have imagined the flow of events that unfolded since I decided to drop out and live in the woods. My trip back in time was interrupted when I came upon the document I was looking for. I pulled out the trifolded piece of paper and opened it up. It was the Personalized Programming stock certificate sent to me when I incorporated the company fifteen years earlier. When I had originally dropped the certificate in my deposit box, it was pretty much worthless to anyone but me. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. The most savvy investors in the world were valuing this piece of paper at over a hundred million dollars.

My mouth went dry, and tears welled up in my eyes. I had given everything up, and it kept coming back tenfold. When I had decided to let go and devote my life to serving what was unfolding in front of me, I was earning less than five thousand dollars a year. When Built with Love came together, it grew from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands in revenue. When Personalized Programming came together, it quickly grew to millions and then more than ten million in sales and royalties. Now I was dealing with a hundred-million-dollar asset. It wasn’t the money that moved me; it was the invisible hand of life that blew me away. I stood there in the bank and offered that piece of paper back to the universe from whence it had come. I vowed to serve the company I had watched life build, brick by brick, and to use the money entrusted to me in a way that would help others. I took a deep breath, closed the deposit box, and prepared to ship the stock certificate up to New York.