The Last Company Man

John MacEachron gave Xerox a proprietary product for an affluent and eager market. Xerox gave it back

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John D. MacEachron, 45 years old, didn't want to be an entrepreneur. He never sat behind a lemonade stand when he was growing up in Ithaca, N.Y. Never had a newspaper route. Never sold class rings in college. "None of that," he says, "ever had an appeal." And it didn't become any more attractive once he was done with school.

After earning an M.B.A. from Cornell University, MacEachron interviewed only with big companies and commercial banks. He picked Xerox Corp., where in 21 years he held 17 jobs, in everything from training to finance, and by all accounts he did them well. Steadily he marched up the corporate ladder, the paychecks getting larger at every rung. By last spring he was making close to $70,000 in salary and had developed a bit of a reputation. "Yeah, MacEachron, he's the guy who saved us $100,000 a year in computer charges, right?"

Right. And his most notable achievement, ironically, is the reason that John D. MacEachron -- the perfect "man in the gray flannel suit" -- is now president and sole employee of The Advantage Group Inc., in Westport, Conn., instead of bucking for a Xerox corner office in Stamford, a few miles to the southwest. The quintessential company man is now on his own.

The story of how that happened goes far toward explaining why you see a lot less gray flannel than you used to. And it is one example of what "corporate downsizing" might mean in practice rather than theory.

In MacEachron's case, the process began shortly after he became assistant controller for Xerox's real estate division back in 1983. His new job required keeping track of the 750 properties that Xerox owned or leased worldwide. It wasn't easy. There were rooms full of files, and you'd have to slog through a 50- or 60-page document to find out if you could subdivide or sublet a property. MacEachron's predecessors had tried to computerize the information, but the results were a sort of good news/bad news joke. The good news? The information was easier to come by. He bad news? It was costing $100,000 a year in computer time-sharing costs just to get at it.

One day MacEachron stared long and hard at a new Xerox product -- the company's first personal computer. As he examined the machine, he got an idea. "It could store about 10 megabytes of information," MacEachron recalls. "That was about the space our software guys had told me the real estate information would take up. We were in business. It just makes more sense to put the information on a disk that could go in a PC on your desk than to continually look through files or rack up those time-sharing charges."

So MacEachron managed development of a program that not only would list Xerox's real estate holdings but also would provide more than 250 separate pieces of information about each property -- including its size, cost of upkeep, and fair market value. And he made sure the information could be put together any way he wanted -- for example, it takes just a few keystrokes to get a list of the locations for every Xerox sales office. Suddenly, his life was much simpler.

That might have been the end of it -- and MacEachron might still be at Xerox -- if it weren't for a couple of chance conversations at real estate conventions. "Other real estate managers would ask, 'How in heck are you keeping track of all your properties?' When I told them about the program, they'd say, 'Gee, that sounds pretty good. I'd be interested in buying a copy if it's for sale."

MacEachron had never thought about selling his program. He had only created LeaseAd, as he calls his creation, to make his life easier. But if he could make Xerox a couple of dollars, why not? National Gypsum Co. bought a copy for about $1,500. So did Hewlett-Packard Co. In mid-1985, MacEachron found himself spending part of his day running a tiny business within Xerox.

At this point, if MacEachron were a different man, he might have left Xerox and started his own company using LeaseAd as his base. After all, he had what every entrepreneur prays for: a proprietary product designed for a market that is not only affluent, but eager to buy. But MacEachron was a company man, not an entrepreneur. He's loyal, and Xerox was his life. "I just didn't see where I could ethically take the product outside. I had developed it on company time." Still, LeaseAd represented a potentially huge opportunity. In a long closed-door meeting with his boss, he asked to sell LeaseAd full-time, for Xerox.

MacEachron thought he had made a compelling argument. There were, he figured, at least 500 large companies that needed LeaseAd. And at up to $7,500 a pop -- LeaseAd's current cost -- that could mean as much as $3.75 million in revenues for Xerox and much of that in profit, since the development costs had already been paid and Xerox's sales force could handle the marketing. Sure, $3.75 million wasn't much to a company that had earned $475 million on $9 billion in revenues that year. But wasn't Xerox's top management -- who had watched net income drop 21% since 1981 -- constantly talking about how the company had to become "intrapreneurial" to survive? Surely, this might help -- if only a little.

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