It was easy for Colorado entrepreneur Steve Baker to get into business. Getting out nearly cost him his life.
In the 1980s, Baker, now 55, ran a Denver-based startup that developed software for travel agencies. He and his partners sold it to Delta Air Lines in 1983.
Enriched and emboldened by quick success, Baker co-founded called, World Group in 1985. The vision was to build a computer database for travel agents, giving them instant information on resorts and destinations in Colorado, the Caribbean and eventually the world.
In those days, nothing like this existed. The Internet was an obscure tool for government scientists. Nevertheless, Baker created what we might now call a travel website. Travel agents accessed it via ordinary telephone lines.
The business grew rapidly. At its peak, World Group booked as much as $500 million worth of travel arrangements a year. The company had an initial public stock offering in 1986. It then acquired a franchiser of travel agencies, with 230 franchisees nationwide.
In 1987, Baker struck a deal with Kmart to sell World Group travel plans to its customers. Then, Baker began talking to Playboy CEO Christie Hefner about starting a Playboy-themed cruise line and travel club.
Had World Group maintained its trajectory, it might have become one of the world’s largest online travel companies. But as fate would have it, Baker blew up the Internet-like company before there even really was an Internet.
World Group piled up debt as it pioneered its industry.
“It was a plan that required everything to go right,” said Denver investment banker Ed Larkin, who worked on World Group’s IPO.
Everything did not go right.
A franchisee of World Group’s travel agency alleged that Kmart and World Group’s alliance cheated franchisees out of business. The franchisee hit Baker and Kmart with a $1.4 billion lawsuit.
Kmart immediately ended its alliance with World Group, but the suit lingered for years before it was dismissed. Meantime, talks with Playboy ended. Then came Oct. 19, 1987, also known as Black Monday on Wall Street.
World Group ran out of financing.
Baker worked 18-hour days. He helped employees find new jobs. He returned assets to creditors. Eventually, World Group filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Then Baker filed for personal bankruptcy.
“Filing bankruptcy was the hardest thing in the world,” Baker said. “It was like a scarlet letter B.”
He did not know how to break the news to his wife and children. They had a home on Bear Mountain near Evergreen, with horses, dogs, cats and a donkey named Yankee Doodle Donkey because it was born on the Fourth of July.
“You love this place, you love the horses, you love the donkey, but guess what? They are gone. How do you say that?”
He decided his family would be better off if he were dead. He planned a daring suicide that involved jumping from a 1,000-foot cliff. He would make it look like he fell so his family wouldn’t suffer the stigma of a suicide. They would then collect $1 million in life insurance.
“This was my twisted mind,” Baker said. “It wasn’t reality. I was in such a deep, personal abyss at the time.”
The turnaround didn’t come until Baker visited his dying mother. She sensed his trouble but told him she knew he would make the best of it.
“If it’s to be, it’s up to me,” she said, repeating a motto that Baker used to say as a child.
From there, Baker went on to became a consultant, a public speaker and self-published author of the book, “Pushing Water Uphill with a Rake: Memoirs of a Successful Failure.”
Baker spoke last week during a gathering sponsored by a Louisville-based think tank, the DaVinci Institute.
He says people quietly approach him after he speaks. “I don’t know if my business is going to make it,” they say to him. “Now, what do I do?”
Baker now has the answer: “If you’ve got your health and you’ve got people who love you, you get on with it. If I can help one struggling entrepreneur realize that, then it’s all been worth it.”
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-820-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
