Robin Macdonald

I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1940, and was brought up by my parents in the small town of Thurso, the most northerly town on the mainland of Scotland. I was sent away to boarding school in Edinburgh when I was 12, and graduated from Edinburgh University with a B.Sc degree. My first job was with IBM(UK)Ltd as a Field Engineer which meant fixing customer's computers and all manner of punched card machines. In those days you could see transistors and the three little wires coming out of them. After doing this for three years I moved into management and five years after I started I was put in charge of all IBM's Field engineers in Scotland. After a few years as Executive Manager I was moved to Paris to work in IBM's European HQ with responsibilities for all Services Revenue in the Nordic countries. This meant visiting these countries every few weeks to keep an eye on their progress. I took early retirement in 1991 when I had just turned 51. By this time I had married and I decided to learn QuickBooks, a bookkeeping application that is used by numerous small businesses.Two years later Intuit, the owners of QuickBooks decided to offer training and certification of people like myself as "Certifed ProAdvisors". The application has a "Help" menu which gives details of "QuickBooks experts" within a given range of miles from the customer's location. All I needed to do was sit back and wait for the phone to ring. I treated this job as a hobby doing an average of about 200 billable hours of work a year, enough to pay for all our expensive vacations. It also keeps the brain fairly active and to supplement my offers I taught myself Visual Basic for Applications in particular for Excel. Most of my programs were only about 600-800 lines of code. But my QuickBooks clients could export QuickBooks reports into my programs in Excel and have it manipulate their data to give meaningful information that they otherwise couldn't get.