Jeff had to go back to corporate work. He went back to Sprint (work badges picture). This was a very depressing time. The last 3-4 years of Jeff’s life had been spent working countless hours to fund the development of AWARE!, he found an investor, and it was all over in the blink of an eye. There was one interesting point to this total failure of Integritech and AWARE!, though… the AWARE! application utilized Crystal Reports to do the reports. Jeff had become exposed to the tool Crystal Reports (version 5 at that time)… and so began another direction in Jeff’s life.

Back at Sprint, Jeff is working 3rd shift again (3 day work weeks – 12 hours), and to make extra money, Jeff picked up a Crystal Reports consulting project in downtown Dallas. He got really good with Crystal Reports during this project, and he got sparked to an entreprenurial idea, too, by his co-workers on the project. Jeff was working with three other (Visual Basic) programmers, and talking with them about reporting, he noticed their extreme distain in doing anything reporting related. It was as if it was beneath them to create reports… by golly, they were programmers, not low level report writers! Jeff immediately thought, wow, if programmers hate doing reporting, then there’s a market for really good report developers. Around that same time, the Internet was starting to become THE INTERNET. Jeff registered the domain Crystal-Reports.Com. This decision would eventually change Jeff’s life forever.