Eric Crown
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Eric Crown is the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Tempe's Insight Enterprises, an IT solutions company with $3 billion in revenue (2004). He graduated from Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business in 1984 with a degree in Computer Information Systems.
The success of this business is phenomenal and set apart from most other successful business growth by its sheer speed of growth. Crown founded the business with his brother Tim Crown using a business plan that he made as his senior project at the WP Carey School (then the ASU School of Business). Early publicity told the story of how he received a "B" for the project, because As were reserved only for projects that were viable in the real business world. Eric's plan was to do direct selling of computer components by telephone, without having the inventory on hand, yet, and then to buy it and ship it as directly as possible to the buyer. The first attempt was a gamble in that Eric and Tim used about $2000 on their credit cards for one single advertisement in a computer parts magazine, and they advertised a hard drive for a price less than what they could buy it for, gambling that the price would fall in the 20 days or so it would take to publish the issue. The prices fell, and their gambit paid off making "Hard Drives International" famous for having the lowest prices on hard drives, a strategy they were able to scale up until they changed the name of the company to Insight Enterprises and went public in 1996 with revenues already near the billion dollar a year range.
Eric Crown was known at Insight Direct (c. 1990-1995) for wearing simple loafer shoes with no socks. The removal of ties as a requirement (and in some cases, a forbidding of ties) is a modern trend attributed by historians to the rise of internet-based (or dot-com) companies in the 1990s, where many workers did not feel the need for fashion to appear in front of clients since appearances came from the websites rather than face-to-face meetings. There was also a sentiment of independence (a kind of general liberalism) and a new way of doing things. Large teams of sales-by-telephone salespeople were also increasing at this time, and many of the men were required to wear ties because of a perception that they improved attitudes, morale, and sales. Casual Fridays became a very popular tradition during this time, in which employees were not required to wear ties on Fridays, and then--increasingly--on other announced special days. Some employers extended casual days to Thursdays, and even Wednesdays, and still others required ties only on Mondays (to start out the week). Eric Crown, CEO of Insight Direct, which was beginning to see substantial sales via their website along with their over $1B a year in phone sales, announced one morning (1995) that none of its 800 male telephone salespeople would any longer be required to wear ties. After studying sales patterns for casual days, they made the announcement by having each tie cut in half with scissors by the receptionist as the employees made their way through the lobby and security-pass door.
At his speech at the WP Carey School of Business graduation 20 years after his graduation, 3 beach balls were being batted around the gigantic Wells Fargo Arena by the graduates. For the solemnity of the ceremony the security guards apparently took this quite seriously, and were observed to catch one ball at a time and march it out of the arena's main exit, until there was only one left. It went way up into the air and closer and closer to the stage where Eric Crown was sitting with dignitaries of the college waiting to speak. It landed right in his lap. Did he non-chalantly tuck it under his chair? No! He stood right up, and served it back to the crowd like a volley-ball. In his speech he recommended, "Don't get all As. I got pretty much straight Bs. Bs are good. Drink beer. Keep the ideas flowing."
Eric Crown has told a group of his employees at lunch (1998) that he subscribes to about 200 magazines, almost none of them about computers and the IT industry, and reads them "pretty much cover-to-cover".
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