Roy Wiprud:
CLASS OF 1975
Pasco High SchoolClass of 1975
Pasco, WA
Roy's Story
Watched the movie "Dazed and Confused" the other day, and other than the Freshman Initiation scenes, I was amazed at how close that was to junior and senior years... however I do think our senior kegger out on Guy Sullivan's land was better... great night that I will never forget the parts I remember.
After High School, decided to work and party rather than go to college. Moved in with Bob Bradford at the duck pond apartments at Edison and Clearwater in Kennewick in November '75 and never looked back.
Worked at Bridge Pumps and Tri-City Honda (a personal dream fulfilled) before settling into a pretty good job as a Senior Material Coordinator out in the area at J A Jones, which then morphed into Kaiser Engineers. Stayed there for about 10 years. Met and married my first (and probably only) wife Chris Blevins while working there.
After Kaiser took over (and I inherited quite possibly the worst manager in the world), I got bored with that job, but found it hard to move up without a degree... things had changed and experience didn't count as much for the jobs I wanted. So with the support of Chris and the help of Sallie Mae, I quit in Sept. '89 to go to CBC... the object was to get an AA ASAP, then go back to work on the BA.
I finished at CBC in a year and that was right when WSU Tri-Cities was born. As no jobs were forthcoming, we decided to bite the bullet and I went for my BA in business (actually Accounting, but even though I took all the required courses, because the degree wasn't offered at the branch campus, I had to settle for General Business). Because I had spent a lot of time in the work world by then and I was going full time without having to work, I was able to graduate with my BA and a GPA of 3.98 in December '91. On the day of the finals, I was offered a job as a Purchasing Agent at Battelle... needless to say, that was one of the happiest days of my life!
I loved working at the Lab. In three years, I went from PA to Sr. PA, to Team Lead, and then Manager for the new "Purchasing Card" program they were instituting. This allowed the scientists and other users to buy things directly using a special credit card rather than writing a Purchase Requisition and having the Procurement Dept. buy it. It was my job to get the program into shape for the rollout and implement the rules required to keep a bunch of scientists and engineers i...Expand for more
n line. I was fortunate that the IT Dept. there build a kind of enterprise-wide Quicken, which not only allowed the cardholders to reconcile their accounts online, but also allowed me to keep track of what they were buying... more to come on that.
The program was a huge success. We anticipated about 100 cardholders and we ended up with 700 in the span of a year. We won awards from the Federal Lab Consortium and from American Express... actually spoke at a couple of nationwide conferences they held on how to run a successful program. Problem was, the reason our program was so successful was the software we wrote, it really drove the use and allowed us to pass DOE audits no problem.
Everyplace I went people asked me where they could buy this software. Well, things kind of fell into place, as Battelle had just created an "Entreprenurial Leave of Absence" program, which worked like an educational one, except it was to start a business. So the developers of the SW and myself started up a firm in late '95 to sell it and further develop it, called "Credit Card Solutions, Inc." (CCSi). After a slow start, it really took off... within three years we had over 50 high profile clients, such as the Jet Propulsion Lab, CalTech, NASA, University of Illinois, Lockheed Martin, Fluor, etc. Over time we had 10 employees and were developing a we version of the software when we developed some cash flow issues when the floor fell out of the dot.com market. We weren't really a dot.com, but we were stuck in the backwash. I ended up leaving the company in 2001 due to a dispute over how the product should be marketed, but retained my stock. When I left the firm was worth about $5M, when it finally sold in 2006, they only got $250K for it and hadn't added a single customer since I left... hell of a way to make your point.
Anyway, in the years since I left the company, I finished my MBA, so I are edukated now. Unfortunately, I also ended up getting separated and divorced from Chris as we both decided we wanted different things from life and I didn't want to hold her back... we're still good friends, but I miss her and what we had. Work as a Sr. PA at Boise Paper now and enjoy it, a bit stressful sometimes, but that's the price you pay for even being employed right now. I wish I could say I was independently wealthy, but that's not the case yet... working on it though!
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