For several years Healy experimented with only the most elementary applications, using an early Digital Equipment Corp. computer running a DOS competitor called CP/M that together set him back about $1,500. They didn't do much for his business, but Healy blamed the primitive state of the technology. If he waited long enough, he believed, something really useful would appear on the scene.
Then, in 1982, Healy fell in love. He was wandering the floor of a trade show in Boston--looking around and asking a lot of questions but not seriously expecting to buy--when he spied two terminals connected to a single box "with the biggest hole I had ever seen in a computer." The man demonstrating the system told Healy that the hole was a tape backup. "That caught my interest," he recalls. "No floppies?" The vendor, a local consultant who had developed some business software for small companies, explained that with that type of system, multiple users could access the same database from different machines. "I looked at that thing and said, 'I can have one Rolodex with a tape backup!" says Healy. "'How much does it cost?"
The hardware was from a company called Onyx; the operating system was called Oasis. Healy--whose financial status had recently improved, thanks in large part to the success of the machine shop--bought the whole shebang, including three terminals, two printers, and a basic version of the consultant's business software, for less than $20,000. Then he taught himself COBOL and, working closely with the consultant, set about customizing the software. "I studied what I did--every damn thing from the time I came in in the morning--and I studied what all my employees did," says Healy. "And then I laid it all down on a giant piece of paper and said, 'This is what I do. This is what the software has to do." Much of the customization was ordinary stuff: adding and subtracting reports, changing screens. The most formidable task was creating algorithms to cope with the industry's complicated method for labeling parts. By the time Healy and the consultant were done, they had rewritten more than a quarter of the code; in the years since, they've continued to modify the program.
When John Healy plunked down his money for the Onyx-Oasis system, he was making an investment in change. But change was something he would come to abhor, over the next decade, as it threatened both his family and his computers.
The trouble began shortly after Healy bought the new system and enlisted his daughter, who was then 14, to populate its customer database. Lisa, a budding computer prodigy who already knew COBOL, would spend hours plugging in data, as well as answering phones, taking orders, and doing other chores around the business. But in August 1982, Lisa was bitten by a mosquito and contracted eastern equine encephalitis. She lapsed into a coma and was rushed to Children's Hospital in Boston, where doctors barely managed to save her life. Both John and Susan lived at the hospital for two months, emerging only when Tom had a football accident that put him, too, in intensive care.
Finally, Lisa came home, but she remained severely disabled. Unable to afford round-the-clock care, the couple--harried businesspeople by day--became nurses by night, trading shifts and subsisting on three or four hours of sleep. "We were exhausted; we hated everybody," says Healy. "So much of business is personal, and we were becoming monsters."
Their final breakdown was precipitated by a mundane event: a customer's coming in to return a battery. "This guy was as tall as me and twice the size--just a big hulk of a human being," says Healy. "I hear someone yelling, 'John! John!' And I come running downstairs, and there's little pint-sized Susan preparing to go for the guy's neck. I said right then and there, 'We're closing."
That was the end of July 1985. Healy had three businesses and 28 employees; by the end of August he had zero businesses and 3 employees. (The employees stayed on so that Healy could qualify for his much-needed health insurance.) "I imploded," he says. Half a million dollars worth of inventory went into his garage, carted there by dozens of old friends who turned out to help with the dissolution. "I didn't want to have an auction," says Healy. "I just wanted to do it as quickly as I possibly could."
Then he and Susan started shopping for a small work space they could rent cheaply. The idea was to do a little wholesale business and go home at 5 o'clock. The place they chose, a drab brick building in a nondescript industrial park, is tough to find, impossible to stumble across. The sign at the entrance to the park announces every tenant but Healy; the door to the shop is unmarked. Coventry Spares Ltd. does no traditional advertising; it isn't even listed in the phone book. Healy likes it that way. In fact he is making a business strategy out of not being seen.
Coventry sells spare parts--more than 17,000 kinds, from fenders to main shafts--to vintage-motorcycle dealers. About 85% of its inventory comes from Britain, and most of it goes into bikes made between the end of the Second World War and the introduction of Honda's four-cylinder 750cc model, in 1969. (The most modern motorcycle for which the business sells parts was built in 1982.) Healy says that dealers buy from him instead of buying direct for two reasons. First, he offers a heavy-duty warranty, which his British suppliers don't. Second, the British manufacturers operate in a high-profile way meant to attract consumers--the dealers' customers. "I do the opposite of everything the Brits do," says Healy. "Because I hide, my dealers have more confidence in me. I have no business cards because I don't want to make the faux pas of going to a motorcycle rally and having my dealers see me handing out cards to their customers."
Healy's man-behind-the-curtain policy has paid off. Coventry did around $100,000 in sales its first year; in 1996 it grossed over $1.3 million and controlled 15% to 20% of the market. But through all that growth and turmoil, one thing has changed very little: the company's computers. After several years of nursing along his Onyx, buying used parts from people converting to newer systems, Healy finally replaced it in 1986 with an IBM 286. That change in hardware necessitated a change in the operating system, so Healy substituted SCO Xenix (an early version of Unix) for the Oasis system. But he continued using the very same business software he'd purchased and begun customizing back in 1982. "I hate change in operating systems, change in everything," says Healy. "You get the damn thing stable. It works. Leave it alone."
