5 minute read
Donor Spotlight
Tom and Martha Collins
PERI Free Enterprise Lecture Series Sponsors
MTSU alumnus Tom Collins (’64) has accomplished a lot more than most people. He’s succeeded as a certified public accountant, a business executive, a pioneer entrepreneur in the information technology industry, and now a writer of mystery novels—despite realizing later in life that he had undiagnosed dyslexia.
The first in his extended family to earn a degree, Collins was introduced to then-named Middle Tennessee State College when he won a state high school speech and drama competition on campus with a dramatic reading from Macbeth. The Memphis native started out majoring in Political Science; met and married his wife, Martha; changed over to General Business; and found accounting through Elwin W. “Wink” Midgett, MTSU’s first business department head.
MTSU “certainly became the basis for everything that I did,” Collins said. “Mr. Midgett was extremely important to me in my career. I think that I probably would not have even gone into the accounting arena if it had not been for him.”
Now the Collinses, who live in Franklin, give back to the University as generous supporters of MTSU’s Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), housed jointly in the Jones College of Business and the Honors College. Founded in 2016, PERI engages students with faculty in research that will further the understanding of free market business and economic principles, as well as their impact on regional, national, and international financial conditions and the well-being of society.
“We certainly feel like that really there’s a lack of understanding of the free market system, and so we felt like anything that we could do to promote that would be doing our part,” Tom Collins said.
Added Martha Reed Collins (’63): “We wanted to support anything the University or PERI could do to broaden the understanding of capitalism and conservative thinking.”
The couple previously donated to a scholarship fund in Midgett’s name, and Tom Collins has served as an MTSU Foundation trustee. He also recently mentored Jones College of Business graduate students.
“I was pretty impressed with the programs they had, particularly the ones where they actually went on site with businesses and worked up analyses to what they thought the business could do to improve its operations and so forth,” he said. “I think the real value is bringing that to the region and the area.
In his day, however, MTSU didn’t yet boast its acclaimed Master of Accountancy program, which now is separately accredited by AACSB. With little accounting under his belt, he and Martha moved on to the University of Alabama, where Midgett got him into the accounting master’s program. Collins tutored athletes during the Crimson Tide’s championship reign but didn’t attend a single football game during his year in Tuscaloosa.
Martha, who majored in English at MTSU, has been a godsend, helping edit all his work for both his business and writing careers. In addition to taking care of their two children and now grandchildren and “granddogs,” she once co-managed the Cheekwood Botanical Garden gift shop and is looking for her latest remodeling project—probably a vacation home in Florida.
“If I hadn’t had Martha to get all the letters in the right order for me, I’m not sure I would have made it through the next phase when we went on to Alabama,” said Tom, who just thought he couldn’t spell until later learning dyslexia runs in his family. “We made a good team in that respect.
“As Martha could tell you, sometimes I just read things by the first letter—which can lead to some very comical [text].”
Since his retirement, Collins has written seven books in the Mark Rollins series of mystery adventures that feature an extechnology entrepreneur turned amateur sleuth. (“You write what you know,” he says.) Middle Tennessee and Nashville are often the setting, and the main character in his newest book (Beyond Visual Range, 2020) received flight training in MTSU’s Aerospace program.
“I jokingly say that after I retired, Martha started saying, ‘Don’t you have something to do?’ ” he said. “But I guess I have always written in spite of a handicap that I do have when it comes to spelling. And I’ve done an awful lot of traveling on an airplane, and the routine was to get to the airport, pick up a paperback book, get on the airplane, and read it while traveling. I read enough of them that I thought I could do it.”
After a stint with national CPA firm Price Waterhouse, Collins became part of a group that started one of the first service bureaus using large IBM 360/65 computers after a Department of Justice consent decree with IBM in the late 1960s.
“For the first time, computers could be purchased, and they could be used to provide services to the people,” he said. “It was an absolute new opportunity—one that did not exist, an industry that didn’t exist.”
When an insurance holding company bought that firm, Collins served as executive vice president and chief financial officer of subsidiary NLT Computer Services Corp., which became one of the top 50 information technology companies in the nation. He and four associates then purchased and took the company public as Endata.
Named one of the top 100 Global Technology Leaders by London-based CityTech and given the Lifetime Achievement Award by Law Technology News, Collins is most proud of his last big venture in the business world, Juris Inc. “From a professional standpoint, in a certain sense, Juris was the last one. But by that time, I felt like I had learned all of the wrong things to do, so I didn’t make the same mistakes again.”
As desktop computers entered the market, he purchased the division from Endata in 1986 and transformed it from a turnkey computer vendor to the leading U.S. provider of financial and business information systems for multipartner law firms.
In 2007, Collins sold Juris to information tech giant LexisNexis. Following the advice he gives to mentees—build the next generation of your business as the previous one begins to decline—Collins had kept his company on the curve as technology changed rapidly, while Juris competitors failed to make the transition.
“You have to understand that business that’s succeeding long term requires constant innovation,” Collins tells students.
And he’s already thinking about the next chapter and the next novel.
