In Focus

Intuit Was Scott Cook's Original Recipe

NOTE: All this month in the Chicks' Eye View we will be featuring the richest of the rich from the Forbes List of the World's Richest People. Just who are they and how'd they get to be so filthy rich?

Back in April, I wrote an article about Intuit. Its products are so fantastic and vital to my life that I simply cannot imagine trying to manage my family's finances without them. Needless to say, the success of the company has made its founder, Scott Cook, a very rich man. This month, the Chicks thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the wealthiest men (and women!) in America, especially those related to publicly traded companies. Many owe their fat wallets to a need they discovered and then filled with their own ingenuity -- such is the case with Scott Cook.

In 1983, Cook was working at a corporate strategy firm, Bain & Company. While managing consulting assignments in the banking and technology field, he would come home to watch his wife toil over the family finances. Ugh, bill paying. Who enjoys spending hours writing out checks to your creditors then dutifully logging them into the check register? I hated it and, thankfully, so did Mrs. Cook! Thank goodness Mr. Cook was paying attention and loved her enough to ease her load. All Quicken users owe a debt of gratitude for the quest he embarked on, that later became Intuit. Actually, it was sooner rather than later, as Intuit was formed and the fledgling company shipped its first version of Quicken, its financial software, in 1984.

Scott Cook did not form his company alone; Tom Proulx was the co-founder who had the skills to bring Cook's ideas to fruition. When Proulx began moonlighting with Cook in 1983, he was a student at Stanford University and a computer programmer. Prior to working at Bain & Company, Cook had received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Southern California and a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard University. He had also spent years at Proctor & Gamble in various marketing positions, including four years as a brand manager. It was that experience that proved most valuable to the launch of Intuit.

What Cook did was very unique at the time. He took the techniques he had learned with household products giant, P&G and applied them to selling software. Believe it or not, this was considered revolutionary in the tech industry. Specifically, he used in-home testing of products called a "follow me home" program in which Intuit product developers observed consumers using Intuit software. He made sure the product manuals were written in plain English and they used the first TV direct response advertising for a consumer software product. Sure enough, it caught on.

I can certainly attest to the software's user-friendliness. In 1994, when I bought my first computer, the only two things I learned immediately were how to use America Online and Quicken. Both came preloaded onto my computer. Although I had never used software of any kind before, Quicken was easy to understand and apply. I couldn't get over how simple managing our finances had become. Yes, bill paying was a breeze, but I found so many other helpful options as well. For example, my husband and I had fun making bar graphs out of our net worth (that got more fun when we got out of debt!) and pie charts of our expenses. Tracking our cash flow was as easy as a push of a button. Tax time was no longer taxing! Printing one simple tax report would tell my accountant pretty much all he needed to know. For me, Scott Cook's creation was a huge success.

Since that time, Cook and Intuit have not ceased to innovate. Cook served as president and CEO of the company from 1983 to 1994. Following that period, he has served as chairman of the Executive Committee of the board, remaining very active with the company on a full-time basis providing vision, inspiration and strategic leadership. He has assisted Intuit's venture into new technologies and businesses and will continue to do so. Since the introduction of Quicken, the company has moved into other arenas, including financial supplies, small-business accounting software (QuickBooks), tax-preparation software for home PCs (TurboTax), and Internet businesses (Quicken.Com). In addition to Intuit, Cook also sits on the boards of Ebay, Amazon, the Asia Foundatioin, the Intuit Scholarship Foundation and the board of visitors of the Harvard Business School Foundation. Busy guy!