'You think I can fly or not?' (Tom Cox and Prescott Little of Cox-Little & Co.) (Economic Almanac)

• Author: Nelson, Luann

After 15 years in marketing with IBM, Tom Cox wanted out. What Prescott Little wanted, after 15 years of working for other people, was to run his own company. A chance encounter at a political meeting put them in business together.

"We talked about politics and talked a little bit about what he was doing and Pass the tuna salad,' " Cox says. "I just made a quick assessment that, assuming he and I could communicate, he would make a good partner for me - that he would complement what I needed to have complemented."

Prescott Little - a man not given to snap judgments - got the same idea. In May 1985, they sat down together at Art's Barbecue House in Charlotte, and Little proposed that they buy a small-business unit of Broadway & Seymour Inc., a computer consultant.

"I had very few doubts they had the ability to pull it off," says CEO Olin Broadway. He knew of Little both as executive vice president of Computer Systems Inc. and as a Coopers & Lybrand consultant. Three years earlier, he had tried to hire Cox.

Fortune seemed to be smiling on their enterprise.

But it took about six months to arrange financing, complete the purchase and get the doors open. "When people asked you how it's going, the answer is always great, wonderful,' even though you don't know where your next dollar's coming from," Cox says. Had it not been for one small detail he had overlooked before, he admits, he might not have stuck it out.

"It was taking forever," he says. "Then, I found out that he and I were born on the same day in 1946, and that was the sign. ... I just said to myself, somebody's trying to tell me something. You don't just walk away from that one."

They still haven't walked away from it. "What date do you think our business year would start on?" Cox asks gleefully. The founders' birthday - June 1.

Like all dreams that come true, Cox-Little & Co.'s story is a blend of serendipity and striving - a little bit of myth and a lot of reality. In many ways, it was the classic entrepreneurial fantasy of the 1980s: the desire of the company man to break free, to run his own show and make his own way in the world. It was part of "the great migration," as Kenan Institute Director Rollie Tillman calls it, of people who were "fed up with big companies, fed up with bureaucracy, who see an opportunity to improve or put a little twist or spin on a service or an activity."

Tillman, ever the proselytizer of private enterprise, adds: "They see the reward to entrepreneurship as unlimited."

It was a dream Prescott Little jr. had been pressing toward since the early '70s. The son of a former Pontiac dealer, Little stumbled into the computer business the summer before his junior year at Duke. His family had just moved from Alexandria, Va., to Greensboro, where his father started a company that provided services to other auto dealerships. "I had to figure out some way to earn money," Little says. "I didn't know a soul."

Burlington Industries - where he hoped to get work - wasn't hiring. Little waited until after 5 p.m. one day and knocked on the personnel manager's door. "The guy was nice enough to sit down and talk to me. He says, Well, what do you want to do?' The previous year, I had driven a forklift, and I was just looking for something that paid a dollar or two an hour." Little said he was open to anything and told the man he was a math major. "Oh, you want to go into computers," responded the personnel manager.

"That became my career," Little...