Searching for New
Horizons
Retirement, boredom
led entrepreneur Michael Newman to pursue his goals in education
By Anne Straub
Brevard Technical Journal
Fortunately for Michael Newman, his business ventures have proven more successful than his retirement.
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“I didn’t like not doing anything,” said Newman, 56. “I renovated a house. When that was done, I got bored.”
Taking on the Melbourne franchise location for the company was an easy transition. Newman was one of the original franchisees for New Horizons Computer Learning Centers, which recently passed IBM to become the world’s largest independent information technology training company.
The company looked a lot different when Newman got involved in 1992. He had recently left his post as president of an oil and gas trucking company and was looking to start his own business.
“I liked working for other people, but I really wanted to be the boss,” he said.
He wrote down a list of seven or eight traits that he wanted his next career to have and carried it in his wallet. He’d refer to the list every three months or so. It included characteristics like incorporating teaching, which he had enjoyed as a graduate student; having something to do with computers, an industry he enjoyed but had been away from for a while; and employing and serving a white-collar segment.
He didn’t particularly have the list in mind when he went to a franchising trade show and the New Horizons’ booth caught his eye. “The founder was manning the booth and he was very dynamic,” Newman remembered. “I liked his story. I liked what the company was trying to do. The only thing that bothered me was that he’d only sold four.”
The founder had started the business 10 years earlier in California and was franchising as a way to exit the company. Newman decided the value of getting in at the beginning outweighed the risk of the venture. He bought the franchise for the Dallas market, becoming the company’s fifth franchisee.
He went on to open all of New Horizons’ Texas outlets, eventually buying the franchises for Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. He also operated two markets in San Francisco.
The career change proved a perfect fit for the requirements he had laid out earlier. “I remember looking back, and I could tick them all off,” Newman said of the items on his list. “It proves if you write your goals down, whether you think of them consciously or not, you’ll end up achieving them.”
Looking ahead, the information technology training industry is expected to continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace than in past years. International Data Corp. forecasts 2.5 percent annual growth from 2001 to 2006, driven by lower-than-expected corporate profits. That translates to less money spent on training, an industry IDC estimates at $8.7 billion a year.
Most of New Horizons’ business in Melbourne – about 75 percent – comes from corporate employers who are paying for their employees to be trained. The rest are individuals.
The forecast growth is a slowdown from the 8 to 12 percent annual jumps seen over the past 10 years as companies invested in training while the information technology industry boomed. But most of the current slowdown in growth is behind the industry, after drops in 2001 and 2002 and a flat 2003, said Cushing Anderson, an analyst for IDC.
The big 10 percent jumps have faded as companies that had operated with little technology added computer systems and then achieved a baseline of training, Anderson said. Also, software programs have become easier to use.
Training centers market their services by maintaining that a trained staff is more productive and profitable than an untrained staff. “That’s the mantra that the training vendors need to continually harp on,” Anderson said. New Horizons has an advantage in landing larger deals, he noted, because of the company’s worldwide network of training centers. New Horizons includes 180 centers in the United States and another 120 internationally.
New Horizons offers customized classes and provides a variety of teaching methods. Students can attend a classroom or take a class over the web. Web training can be at set times with a live class that offers interaction, or students can log into a web site and take the courses on their own schedules. Each mode offers the same content, and students can mix modes for different segments to suit their needs.
“Just about any software that’s available, we train on,” Newman said.
The Texas native grew up in his home state, Louisiana and Mississippi as the family moved for his father’s job with the oil rigs. Planning a career in engineering, Newman attended Northeast Louisiana University (now part Louisiana State University), then earned a master’s in mathematics at Clemson University in South Carolina.
His first job was also the first time he lived in Florida. Newman worked for the city of Jacksonville, designing its first computer-aided dispatching system for emergency calls. He then went to Washington, D.C., to work as a management consultant for Deloitte & Touche. He rose to one level shy of partner within four years, and decided it was time to turn entrepreneur.
“I really wanted to be out on my own and not be partnered with a big company,” he said. He returned to his oil field roots and bought a trucking company. He later sold it to a public company and stayed on as president until he made the move to New Horizons.
Newman, a father of four and grandfather of two, now lives in Indialantic. His memberships include serving on the board of overseers for the School of Management at Florida Institute of Technology.
“He has the zeal of a salesperson,” said Tim Hollingsworth, dean of the school. “He’s really excited about what he does and he understands the business.”
On the web: www.newhorizons.com.
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