The Harder You Work, the Luckier You Get by Joe Ricketts

Author:Joe Ricketts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

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While Dave’s team continued to struggle with the new computer system, and lost revenue continued to add up, we also felt increasing strain on the human side of our operations. The more trades and the more clearing we did, the greater the pressure on our employees and our management team to take on more responsibilities. If you stayed with Ameritrade, you would quickly find yourself doing more work and a wider variety of tasks than you had ever imagined. There were opportunities to work with new technologies and manage operations that no one else would have given to young, blue-collar employees with limited formal education. For some employees, this represented a life-changing opportunity that inspired dedication and loyalty.

Cathy Smith, for example, who took care of our computer at night with her Rottweiler at her feet, had come to us in 1978 when she was twenty-two. A high school graduate who had worked as a busgirl and at an insurance company, helping to print customer policies, she was our thirteenth hire. We needed her to input data as a teletype operator, but unfortunately, Cathy’s fingers were slow. A teletype operator she was not. In a more conventional company, she would have been let go, but David Kellogg, who back in 1978 was still developing our first computer system, had noticed that although she had no formal computer training, she was mechanically inclined. She asked a lot of questions and took a lot of notes. Although she lacked the formal terminology she might have picked up in a college class, when Dave explained, she understood.

Half the challenge with the computer system in those years was keeping the hardware running. You could leave a computer slowly working on a big calculation and discover a few hours later that it had stopped. Cathy had an ear for when the bearings were going out on the big platter-size disk drives. She had an eye for when the number of pages printing out for a report didn’t make sense for the job that had been programmed. I don’t know how many times Cathy saved our bacon—she would drop in on weekends to make sure the system was running properly and that it would be up in the morning. It got to the point that she could call the tech people on the phone, describe the sounds the computer was making as it malfunctioned, and they could diagnose the problem and send a technician over with all the parts necessary for the repair. Cathy Smith worked from midnight to eight in the morning, or longer when needed, and we relied on her.

Another example, perhaps the most dramatic, was Carol Jeppeson. Hired back in 1975 to serve as a receptionist when we first launched the company, almost within hours she began to help with the recordkeeping for our trades. She took over our clearing operation in the 1970s, as I’ve described, because she was very bright, she understood the details, and she brought dedication and integrity to that complicated work.

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