Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless

D Magazine, Jun 01, 2003 by Rogers, Tim

Flip forward a few pages. Deason moves to Dallas and winds up, at age 39, launching Texas' first ATM network. (Trivia buffs: it was called MPact, and it was late 1979.) From Deason's 22nd-floor downtown office, the president and CEO of MTech grows his company 600 percent in less than five years, making it the largest bank-data processor in the country.

Which brings us to the three-day retirement. In 1988, with banks failing all over Texas, MTech's majority owner, MCorp (holding company of once-an-icon Mercantile Bank), begins to slide toward Chapter 11. Reading the tea leaves, Deason puts together a $360 million management buyout of his firm. At the last second, though, Plano-based EDS raises its hand and shouts, "Four hundred and sixty-five million!" MTech is sold to the highest bidder. Deason is furious. He resigns some 90 minutes into his employment with EDS, apparently walking out before anyone can get him to sign a noncompete agreement.

So the Deason canon has him taking $9 million for his share of MTech, more money than the farm boy from Arkansas ever dreamed he'd have. He retires to the golf course. But after three days of retirement, Deason decides it doesn't agree with him, and on a Monday, he dons his best suit, sits in his home office, and begins to work the phones. Five months later, with 18 of his top 22 executives from MTech on board, he launches ACS.

The rest of Deason's business story is jampacked with business process outsourcing and information technology outsourcing and, in general, tycoonery. He installs a ship's telegraph in his office and pushes the control back to "full ahead" every time an employee sneaks in and pulls it back to "slow." He hands out something called "hustle cards." He prohibits staff meetings between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., because those are prime selling hours. He orders the embroidering of baseball caps for employees with the message "1B x 2K," meaning he intends ACS to generate $1 billion in revenue by 2000. When it becomes clear in 1997 that ACS, having gobbled up so many other companies, will reach its goal by 1998, he has new caps made that read "2B x 2K."

"We rarely have to terminate anyone, because our treadmill is going 100 mph," Deason tells more than one publication. "If you're a hustler, you get on and try to go 110. But if you're going 80 or 60, the treadmill throws you off. It's self-policing."

Today, ACS employs more than 40,000 people around the world. Its revenues approach $4 billion.

Three Kings

Robert Holly, a local aircraft broker, met Darwin Deason in 1996-at just the right time, it appears. ACS had gone public two years earlier, and Deason was in the middle of a threeyear buying spree, acquiring the property and toys that he'd worked so hard to afford.

Deason made his first appearance as a boldface name in the society column of the Dallas Morning News in 1994, when he and then-wife Paula debuted their 10th-floor, 14,000-squarefoot penthouse atop 8181 Douglas, just off the Tollway. The following year, Deason bought a $1.16 million property in the golf resort of Rancho Mirage, California. In 1996, he opened an ill-fated restaurant (and plastic surgery showroom) called NorthSouth with his personal trainer, Larry North. The next year, Deason bought the old 3-acre Hamon estate in Bluffview for a bit less than $2 million, then quickly sold it after he couldn't buy the place next door.