Sue,

I thought you might find this interesting; I wrote it in response to a friend of mine who was lamenting missed opportunities.  Following is my response.

Dave

Well, I have missed a whole bunch of opportunities; I have also made a bunch of what turned out to be inopportune investments!  Want some of the stock certificates?

My biggest error, however, was not taking a particular job.  In 1980 or 1981, while I was the Vice President of Marketing Research and Information at SeaFirst (Parent of Seattle First National Bank), I got a call from a headhunter who was looking for somebody to become the Director of Marketing Research for a high-tech consumer services company.  This company was in a very fast growth phase and had grown from around 20 employees in 1978-9 to over 150 when they contacted me, and were expecting to double that within a year or so.  They didn’t have a market research department, but instead were using outside consultants, an approach which they realized was quickly becoming untenable.  Their search ended up finding me; after an initial conversation I told the headhunter that I wasn’t interested as I was on a fast track, I was in a job which was graded as a Senior Vice President with a bunch of really great perks (car, country club membership, etc.), and I was on a first name basis with every Senior Manager at SeaFirst, including the CEO and Chairman; I actually had season tickets to Seattle’s best theater on the same night he did, and we sat very closely together.  At breaks between acts and before the start of the play, we typically had a drink together with our dates and he had taken to calling me up to his office to discuss business matters a couple of times a month.  This was the type of relationship which many of my peers would have killed for, and it had just fallen into my lap.

As a result the headhunter thanked me for my time, and went away.  Six months later, he called me up again and said their continued, now national search, had resulted in my emerging as the favorite candidate for the job.  He told me the company had continued to grow rapidly and their projects were to double and perhaps triple within another year and they needed me to set up what was rapidly becoming a very complex set of consumer market research information needs for which they felt I was uniquely qualified.  They raised the tentative offer to me to that of Senior Director, reporting to the Director of Sales and Marketing who in turn reported directly to the CEO, and literally doubled the original financial offer, an amount which was nearly double my then salary at SeaFirst.  In the end I turned it down once again as my prospects at SeaFirst included nearly as large a money raise at my annual review which was only a couple of months away and my expected promotion to Senior VP included attractive perks which the other company didn’t make, given their employment standards philosophy.  Besides, SeaFirst was the 15th largest Bank Holding Company in the US which over 10,000 employees, we were extremely profitable, and this rapidly growing company was only a tiny fraction of our size and financial strength, and could have easily flamed out.  Given all that, particularly when coupled with the fact that I was 7 years into a stock plan in which I would be fully vested on my 10th anniversary of employment, I elected to stay put.  Within a year, SeaFirst was insolvent and I had moved on to another company; my suitor, on the other hand, continued to grow at an accelerating rate.  It’s name is Microsoft.

Talk about a sad story.