Make people No. 1 focus

Eric J. Ruff entered the entrepreneurial world at the tender age of 13.

A son of Howard Ruff, whose business successes were legendary during the 1970s and 1980s, Eric assumed that the entrepreneurial birthright was his. So he took some health-care products that his father was marketing successfully and went out to make his fortune selling the products door-to-door.

Within an hour he returned home devastated, demoralized and utterly defeated.

"It was brutal," Eric remembers now, chuckling. "Not only did I not make a single sale, but some of the people I approached were actually rude to me. That did it for me. I quit after only an hour out pounding the pavement. I figured I didn't have it in me to be an entrepreneur, that Dad's genes had somehow eluded me, and I resigned myself to become an accountant."

He was well on his way toward becoming exactly that when the computer bug bit. Hard.

"When the personal computer came out I read everything I could get on the subject," he said. "Something about computers just grabbed me, and everything I read just made me more interested in them."

Somehow, Eric's love affair with the computer rekindled the flame of entrepreneurialism. Suddenly he was driven to step out from behind the accounting desk to create and market computer software.

Well, OK. "Driven" isn't exactly the right word.

"I was obsessed," Eric admits. "Consumed. Possessed. It was getting to the point where nothing else mattered in my life. In my little world, there was just me and the computer, and it was a wonderful world."

Eventually his obsessive approach cost Eric his home, his family and his business.

"My life revolved around computers," Eric said. "My addiction was so complete that I dreaded death because I didn't think there would be computers in Heaven."

Thankfully, death wasn't required to teach him otherwise. Time and experience taught him that "the only thing that really matters is people."

He decided to rebuild his life around that same philosophy, both personally and professionally.