Uneasy Rider

John Healy, CEO of Coventry Spares Ltd., realized that the year 2000 bug would paralyze his antiquated computer system. Here's how he brought his motorcycle-parts company up to speed.

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Case Study

John Healy never thought the year 2000 bug would infect his motorcycle-parts business. He was dead wrong

John Healy approached his PC warily, as though it were an animal that might bite him. Placing his fingers tentatively on the keyboard, he prepared to perform a simple calculation with the software he was using to manage his business, Coventry Spares Ltd., in Holliston, Mass. A few weeks earlier, his sister-in-law had nearly been stranded at the airport in Jacksonville, Fla., because the computers at the rental-car agency had choked on her driver's-license expiration date--July 15, 2000. Healy needed to prove to himself that his systems were safe.

He began by creating a purchase order for motorcycle pistons and dating it for the end of December 1999; he set the receivable date for the beginning of January 2000. Then Healy punched a key and waited for the software to tell him how many days the order would be outstanding. Instead of numbers, the system came back with a series of question marks.

With growing trepidation, Healy swung over to a machine running a subscriber database for the magazine he publishes, Vintage Bike. But that program wasn't having any of it either. "The message came back, 'Not valid date," recalls Healy. "It brought me to my knees."

Like most small-business owners, John Healy had always entertained an "it-couldn't-happen-here" attitude toward the year 2000 problem, a nasty programming quirk that--at the turn of the century--is supposed to cause computers worldwide to freeze up, mangle calculations, and do various other interesting and terrible things because they can't distinguish the double zeros of 2000 from those of 1900. "I'd heard about this year 2000 thing, but I'd always thought it was a bunch of crap," Healy says. "Computers were supposed to bring us into the future, so they must have been built to last. The programmers couldn't have been this stupid."

But apparently they had been. At least that's what the computers at the $1.3-million distributor of vintage-motorcycle parts were telling Healy, the company's founder and president. He was particularly concerned about Coventry's business system, a highly customized affair that runs, among other things, the company's payroll, ordering, inventory control, and product lookup. "It handles the 85% of the business that makes me money," says Healy. "If I didn't fix this by the year 2000, I couldn't do anything. I'd be a dead duck in the water."

John Healy's quandary has a lot to do with the way his business--and his business systems--have evolved. He calls himself "computer driven," but that doesn't mean he's stocked his offices with state-of-the-art equipment. Instead he depends on a hodgepodge of graying machines that he's accumulated over the years and kept alive through ingenuity and stubbornness. The other mainstay of his business is his family: his wife, Susan; his daughter, Lisa; and his two sons, Tom and David. They all have played crucial roles in the company's development. Trace the history of Healy's information systems and his family, and you trace the history of Coventry Spares Ltd.

Six-foot-three with white hair, watery blue eyes, and a thick thatch of mustache, the 58-year-old entrepreneur looks more like a retired sergeant major than someone who spends his weekends watching motorcycle racers dust up a track. But bikes have been Healy's life since 1959, when, as a junior at Boston University, he took a part-time job at a local dealer of Triumph motorcycles.

It was money that lured him back to that business several years after graduation. Healy had been trying to support his wife and two young children on a teacher's salary--$3,000 a year--not easy to do, even in the early 1960s. Then Triumph decided to open a second franchise in the Boston area. Healy's former boss, Pete Andrews, offered to help his young friend buy the new business "so at least he'd know who his competitor was," explains Healy.

With $6,000 from Andrews and a small stake of their own, John and Susan launched Triumph of Wellesley, in Wellesley, Mass., on April Fools' Day 1966. Neither had run a business before, but John was an ace mechanic and Susan was good with the books. "Pretty soon, we had money sticking out of every pocket," says Healy. "The bikes sold like candy. If you failed in the business back then, you had no skill at all."

Those were glory years at Triumph of Wellesley: "Woodstock in four walls," Healy calls it. The Wild One, released in 1954, had conferred cult status on motorcycles: anyone who rode or worked with them was cool by definition. Employees sported the same long hair and beads as their customers; Bob Dylan and other celebrities dropped in occasionally. And the business flourished: in 1969 John and Susan opened a machine shop in Ashland, Mass., and two years later they launched an accessories store in Boston. With the new stores, the number of employees climbed from 3 to 18.

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Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

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