Starting Over

He is the myth personified: he's founded nine companies, he's rich, and he's ready to do it again

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We're sorry; the 800 number you have dialed has been disconnected. There is no further information available." That's all that remains of Quest Communications Corp., a Vienna, Va.-based company that had an intriguing idea: interactive trivia games. You'd call a toll-free number, listen to a series of multiple-choice trivia questions, and answer them by punching buttons on your telephone. Get enough right and you'd win $100. At $2 a game, Quest thought it would make millions. Instead, undercapitalization caused it to suspended operations within a year.

So why is Quest's chairman smiling?

And smiling he is, as he picks up a visitor at Dulles International Airport on a clear winter workday in Virginia. Dressed in a ski jacket, corduroy pants, and running shoes, the 45-year-old chairman doesn't look like a man whose company had a negative net worth of $700,000 when it shut down. He looks like he's on top of the world.

What he's going to do, the chairman says as he pulls away from the airport and quickly brings the sports car up to 85 miles per hour, is take Quest's phone technology and create a separate company. The new business -- what do you think, he asks, of the name Phone Shopping Systems? -- will use that equipment to take orders for companies that sell merchandise by phone. Two companies, makers of the MultiTrym diet plan and Craftmatic adjustable beds, have tested the idea and liked it. "Do you know how much merchandise people ordered by phone last year?" the chairman asks with a smile. "More than $100 billion." No wonder he isn't dejected by Quest's failure. It's led him to another -- and, he is sure, better -- idea. But then, the chairman always has another idea.

You've heard the apocryphal stories about entrepreneurs who repeatedly start companies that they sell two or three years later for millions. Well maybe they're not so apocryphal after all. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you William F. von Meister.

Phone Shopping Systems Inc., which is scheduled for a May 1 public offering that would not von Meister $3.4 million, is his ninth company. And as the Quest example shows, not all have been winners.

But enough of them have succeeded so that von Meister can live very well, thank you.

He pulls the modified BMW M635 ("I never liked the engine it came with, so I had them put a racing engine in") into the driveway and gives a tour of his house in Great Falls, Va. The Ferrari Boxer sits under a canvas cover in the garage. The tennis court, complete with lights and a machine to blow off the leaves from the heavily wooded lot, is immaculate, and the obligatory heated swimming pool can be covered with the push of a button.

To have all this, von Meister says later as he sips coffee from a Pac Man mug, you can't be an employee. "Nobody will pay you enough. You have to do it out of capital gains."

It was a decision he came to early. The son of wealthy parents -- his father commercially developed the offset printing process still used by many magazines -- von Meister grew up in the horse country of New Jersey and toyed with the idea of entering the foreign service after attending Georgetown University. "When I found out the starting salary was $7,000 a year, I forgot about it." Instead, he got married, moved to Europe, and raced cars. That lasted seven years, until his parents and wife suggested -- in no uncertain terms -- it was time to settle down. After he earned an M.B.A. from American University they thought he might join the Fortune 500, but it was not meant to be. A chance encounter with a family friend turned him into an entrepreneur, and he has never looked back.

The friend, a Western Union Telegraph Co. executive, was complaining about problems the company was having scrapping its old Air Force communications systems. It was switching from vacuum tubes to transistors, and needed someone to haul the old stuff away. Junk dealers wanted hundreds of thousands to do it.

"Could I take a look at the sites?" asked von Meister, then 29.

"Sure," came the reply.

When he did, von Meister realized "the old equipment had tremendous salvage value. You had copper in the communications wires, the vacuum tubes could be sold for 10? apiece, and so forth." He offered Western Union $750 for everything. "Since I was the only one willing to pay them, I got it." Eighteen months later, the old equipment was gone, and von Meister had $250,000 in his pocket.

Was it that simple? "Just about," he says. "The opportunity came about because of the way Western Union phrased their problem. They said, 'How do we get rid of this old system?' Since the equipment had long been written off, they weren't looking to make any money. They just wanted the stuff gone, so they called people who would haul it away and bury it. I knew the stuff had value. I didn't know how much, so I called around and found out what people were paying for things like vacuum tubes and copper wire. Once I did, I worked out the deal with local people who specialized in salvage. They'd cart the stuff, and we'd split the profits."

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