We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Peter Tracy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Peter below.

Peter, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Everyone has crazy stuff happen to them, but often small business owners and creatives, artists and others who are doing something off the beaten path are often hit with things (positive or negative) that are so out there, so unpredictable and unexpected. Can you share a crazy story from your journey?

Originally from WPB, Florida and after my military 4 years I spent many years starting companies. I started as a salesman for 3M Company selling copy machines. One of contacts was a bank manager who was tired of having a team feed microfilm machines to film every check (no computers in 1962) so I began filming for the bank and started a company called MicroSystems in Bridgeport Ct.
Sold the company for slightly more than I owed in payables.
Dabbled in several other non-profitable ventures until I landed on a gold-mine.
In 1995 a company told me about how they purchased copies of every patent issued every week from the patent office- (each 8-10 pages) on microfilm. But they still had to send hundreds of reps to Washington to search patents by key words cause the microfilm was disorganized and not searchable..
So I thought I’d try microfiche which was a little easier to index so I called the U.S. Patent Office and asked how much to buy all the patents every week and the aid said “$120,000 per year.” When I said (painfully), I don’t have $120,000 she said “well why don’t you buy the tapes.?” I said “What tapes” and she replied, “We type every word of every patent (several million/yr ) and you can buy 52 tapes a year (every week) for just $5,000/yr.
I ordered a years subscription, found a software vendor whose software I could use, and 6 months later, my new company MicroPatent LLC, was offering every page of every weekly issued patent just one week after issued. Within one year I had a staff of 30, an office in England and Connecticut, and 1000 customers paying thousands per year for weekly CD-ROMS of U.S. Patents,
We were creating thousands of CD-ROMS every week but we couldn’t have our logo nor the patent numbers on them so companies could search the right CD. I called the CD-ROM duplicator companies and asked if I could put a label on each Cd and they said: “No, it’ll throw them out of sync.” But there was no way we were going to write 8 digit patent numbers on 1000 CD’s. So…I pulled out a piece of pressure sensitive paper, cut in a circle the size of a CD, stuck it on a CD and “Presto” it didn’t effect the data whatsoever. So we started sending our clients CD-ROMs every week with our labels identifying what was on the CD’s along with the MicroPatent logo.
Several musicians saw the labels and asked to buy some so we sold a plastic bag of 30 labels (two to a sheet) included the software, and called it.. NEATO, LLC.
In 1995, Thomson International offered to purchase MicroPatent for $9 Million but did not want NEATO, LLC because it wasn’t “Computer Related.”
I moved upstairs with the NEATO team and began to hustle NEATO labelling system for CD’s.
Fellowes Company who was selling paper shredders to stores around the world started selling NEATO labels and did so well that two years later they purchased NEATO,LLC for $23 Million.
I had always sang and played guitar so I started spending lots of volunteer time at Senior Centers and Hospice facilities and soon began presenting my music on websites: [email protected] was/is my main site, petertracylive is my site on YouTube, HalloweenElvis.com is a site covering a play I wrote and performed-in in 2003 and and RocknRollChild.com is a one-hour documentary on the 50’s/60’s birth of Rock N Roll. I currently have over 3 million views and am planning on licensing the play to a British music publisher.
So, I guess this could be an inspirational story for entrepreneurs not to give up. If you hang in there long enough you’ll find a reward and then you’ll be able to sing your heart out.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

My business founder in my first successful venture (MicroPatent, LLC) was also a publisher headquartered in Cambridge, England named Sir Charles Chadwick-Healey. He sold the weekly MicroPatent US Patent information throughout Europe.
Charles was an attendee at a talk I gave at a “New Business Ventures” seminar. He became my (European) partner. Charles had a sales staff selling University Microfilms and educational collections.
He was a minority partner and hs company performed remarkably well throughout Europe.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Right after I started MicrPatent, LLC I, along with several employees, attended a “Patent Information Seminar” in Washington where 20 or so vendors had booths introducing their products. Some sold copy machines, the ” new-fangled Computers” lots of services, etc.

This was my first show introducing MicroPatent and I was experiencing lots of problems with loading, reading and printing from these new computers. A local attorney pointed out that the problem was with our CD-Drive incompatibility and offered his tech aid to help. The tech aid came back the next morning gave us a new machine (we thought) and the attending patent attorneys spent hours searching different search criteria and started ordering our CD-ROM weekly prescriptions.
At the end of the conference I asked him how he did it and he told me. “You see Peter, there wasn’t a lot that we could do in just hours to find a better CD-ROM drive so I put the entire weeks patents (2500 x’s 8 pages) on a hard-drive, hooked up the cd-rom drive so it looked like it was running, and the attorneys could key-word search for anything they were interested in. Now I suggest you “GET A BETTER CD-ROM DRIVE”
Which I did, after I bought him and his helper a super dinner.

Contact Info:

• Website: petertracy.com, HalloweenElvis.com, RocknRollchild.com, phtlive.com
• Facebook: petertracy
• Youtube: petertracylive

Image Credits

Peter Tracy, petertracy.com