Frustrated, he announced he was going to leave. "Pete," his dumbfounded boss reminded him, "you're at the best-managed company in America." But Groop didn't want to be at the best-managed company in America: "I wanted to go back into sales."

Which he did, as a stockbroker for PaineWebber, where he got plenty of chances to sell, but where he also hoped to be his own boss. "Wrong," he says bitterly. The brokerage business turned out to be "brutal, just brutal," he says. "Two hundred cold calls a day. One hundred a night." Still, he took something from the experience: "I learned about money and about relentlessness." The "relentlessness of selling" is a phrase he still uses.

Writing big checks to his superstar salespeople doesn't bother Groop: "After all, it means I got one too."

After a year on the job, he decided he'd gotten all he was going to get out of selling stocks. In 1988, Groop and his wife returned to the East Coast. It was then, at age 32, that he started a company based in Delaware called Renegade Technologies that would one day turn into Fusion. "I looked at myself as a corporate renegade," remembers Groop. "I hated meetings. Five minutes of content crammed into three days." Then he lifts an expressive eyebrow: "You wonder why Dilbert became so popular?"

Renegade Technologies was a one-man band. "I had the whole country," Groop recalls. "It was so frickin' hard. I literally went the whole first year without any cash." By this point, he had borrowed money from his dad and sold his own house, putting the equity into the business and moving his family into a rental. "My wife was six months pregnant with our third child," he says.

Nothing was going right--and then suddenly everything went right. In a very real sense, Groop's life--and the future of his company--turned on a dime, a dime that fell out of the pockets of his old friends at HP. Top brass had decided that they wanted to establish an "alternate channels of distribution program" for their medical systems products. What that meant was that HP was willing, even eager, to go outside its own sales force if it could find ways of moving stagnant product lines. An old boss at HP remembered the hard-charging Groop and called him up. Would he be interested?

The problem, as the bosses at HP saw it, was that small-ticket medical systems--defibrillators that only cost $10,000, for example--tended to get lost in the rush of their regular salespeople to move bigger-ticket items. "What kind of an idiot was going to spend his time trying to sell $10,000 defibrillators when he could concentrate on selling a half-million-dollar trauma care system?" is how Groop puts it. To make matters worse, some of HP's competitors were selling only defibrillators. "Who do you think is going to win that competition?" he asks.

Into this breach stepped Peter Groop, ex-HP manager and now full-time entrepreneur. Summit Instruments--"HP hated the name Renegade Technologies," Groop explains, "so I had to change it"--would take on these small-ticket lines and be paid a straight commission for sales. That first year "was just a disaster," he remembers. "Getting up to speed was strictly on my nickel." It would take two more years before Summit turned a profit. Come 1996, though, he "was starting to do really well--and also starting to get really scared." The reason: He'd put all his eggs in one basket, a basket labeled HP (which has since sold its medical systems unit). His company was, Groop realized all too clearly, "vulnerable to the Fateful Friday Phone Call."

With that harrowing thought in mind, he began "searching for another elephant." Once again, fate intervened, and once again it came in the form of a friend from his HP days. Fabled GE CEO Jack Welch had also become enamored with finding alternate channels of distribution. And the man who was brought in to run GE Healthcare's new program turned out to be an old friend of Groop's from HP.

"We basically do not lose people who are performers. But turnover is high among the nonperformers."

Not long afterward, Groop found himself seated across a table from three GE vice presidents, all of whom wanted to know "just what makes you think you can bring this off?" Groop's reply: "Look, we've already done this with HP. I know we can do it." Groop focused on the next step, telling the assembled VPs that "the real talent is finding people who can work seamlessly with your own sales force." For this to succeed, Groop told the GE execs, "the two sales forces have to look like one sales force." The meeting lasted one hour. At the end of the day, Groop had a deal. "There are only so many hours in the day," says Larry Siebs, a general manager with GE Healthcare, "and having Fusion aboard as a partner has allowed our own guys to spend more time doing what they do best."

With HP, the task had been to sell $10,000 defibrillators. For GE, it would be $80,000 mammography units. As Groop explains: "The average GE Healthcare rep has a $10 million-a-year sales goal. Now, how much time are they going to spend on selling $80,000 mammography units when they can get $1 million for a CT unit or $2 million for an MRI unit? They're only interested in pumping big iron."