Growing up in the city of Tripolis in the Peloponnese region of southern Greece, Giannopoulos knew that his father’s shoe store business, while able to provide a good life for the family, offered little hope of fulfilling his dream of attending college in America.
As a teen, Giannopoulos dreamed of coming to the United States A good student, he enjoyed watching American movies and playing basketball and was becoming somewhat “Americanized.”
The Greeks had suffered not only through the ravages of World War II, but also through bitter fighting between democratic and communist forces. The nation’s economy began to rebuild with help from the Marshall Plan, and, in the 1950s, Greece saw growth exceeding Europe at large and even rivaling that of post-war Japan. Educational opportunities, however, were still limited.
Giannopoulos was seeking sponsorship—a requirement at the time for international students seeking study in America—when he learned of his great-uncle and that he was coming to Greece to visit. He petitioned his parents to have him stay in their home. “I was an opportunistic kid. I said to my mother, ‘We’re going to have him stay with us, not in a hotel, so I can talk him into a sponsorship.’”
“He arrived, of course, with a suitcase and had these beautiful shirts all in packages and a pair of pants for every day, which in Greece and Europe at the time was unusual. You wore one pair of pants for a week and often the same shirt. He had all these beautiful shirts, and I’m saying to myself, ‘This is my meal ticket to success. He’s filthy rich. It’s unbelievable.’”
Giannopoulos applied to the engineering schools his library research disclosed. Lamar responded, in part based on his sponsorship. After he passed the requisite language tests, Giannopoulos made the trip, arriving in Houston in February 1958.
That is when he discovered that his great-uncle had “zero dollars” to his name. He worked at the Schooner Restaurant in Nederland. He picked up the help from Port Arthur and the adjoining area in the company car. He didn’t own a car, and he lived with other employees in a house behind the restaurant.”
While the situation was not as he had imagined, Giannopoulos did have his sponsor, the restaurant’s owner, Jim Megas. “It was a lot of luck on my part that Mr. Megas decided to support me,” Giannopoulos said. “He was my meal ticket to the States.”
Culture shock continued when Giannopoulos came on campus to register. “When I arrived, everybody was dressed in cowboy things—boots, jeans, hats and chaps,” Giannopoulos said. “I thought, ‘What have I done?’ Then I discovered it was ‘Western Week,’ and I was a little happier about my choice.”
For the first six months, Giannopoulos lived with his greatuncle in the home behind the Schooner, hitchhiked to Lamar to attend morning classes, then worked afternoons and evenings at the restaurant. On weekends, he worked as a night watchman at a steel forging shop. “I didn’t sleep at all,” he said. “I needed the money. I was paid $50 a month, the going rate at the time.”
Getting to school meant riding his thumb. One day, his benefactor was Celeste Kitchen, the registrar at Lamar. As their route and schedule coincided frequently, the two became fast friends. When Giannopoulos posted straight A’s his first semester, she helped him secure a scholarship that included a dorm room. Notice was taken at the Schooner as well, where “all of a sudden, I became known as ‘the smart kid,’” Giannopoulos said.
Later, through his academic performance at Lamar, he landed an opportunity to work during the summer at a refinery, earning $400 a month. “That meant I didn’t have to work so hard during the school year, and I was able to concentrate on my studies.”
As an electrical engineering major, Giannopoulos remembers well the college dean, Lloyd Cherry, and Lyle Bohrer, then assistant professor, as well as the cadre of students with whom he helped establish Lamar’s chapter of Eta Kappa Nu international honor society for electrical engineers.
“My father and my family gave me the work ethic that made me a good student, but that continued with Dr. Cherry and the faculty I met at Lamar,” Giannopoulos said. “It continued too with the other students that I was close to. If you look at the names of that first group of Eta Kappa Nu members, there are some potent individuals. I owe Lamar a lot.”
As graduation neared, Giannopoulos attended a campus job fair and interviewed with recruiters from a number of leading companies—General Electric, Boeing, Collins Radio, Westinghouse—but what interested him most was NASA. Uncertain whether he could work at the agency without U.S. citizenship, Giannopoulos asked the question and was repeatedly assured that it would not be a problem. With acceptance letters in hand, he drove to Virginia, only to learn from the human resources director there that he could not take the job (and that the author of his worthless acceptance letters was no longer employed there). He made the long drive back to Texas.
“At that age, you never give up,” Giannopoulos said. “I started writing letters to all those companies, and Westinghouse was the first that came back with an offer.”
He soon found himself in Pittsburgh, Pa., and became reacquainted with several Lamar graduates who preceded him in landing spots with the $10 billion company. Second only to General Electric, Westinghouse was one of the top 15 American companies in revenue. Giannopoulos entered its demanding training program, soon heading to his first assignment at Westinghouse’s large motors division in Buffalo, N.Y. “It was the dead of winter, and I had never seen so much snow, ever, not even on the top of mountains in Greece,” Giannopoulos said. Instead, sought a position with the company’s division at the forefront of computer systems and the early stages of digital controls. There, he helped in the move from analog controls to digital controls in major applications, including power plants, wastewater treatment plants, nuclear power plants, electric utilities and train controls.
He worked in the division about five years as an engineer, then development engineer at the forefront of software and hardware development. “We started incorporating oursolutions into nuclear power plants, making sure everything went well, both from a control perspective and a start-stop perspective,” Giannopoulos said. From 1965 to 1980, he traveled around the world, supporting Westinghouse control applications in the U.S. as well as France, Sweden, India, Australia and Hong Kong. “It was a fun time for our division and for me personally,” Giannopoulos said.
At one point, Giannopoulos was the highestranking foreigner at Westinghouse Electric, by then a $17 billion company. It wasn’t an easy climb. “There was a lot of discrimination in the 1960s and ’70s for anybody who was different,” Giannopoulos said. “To have progressed to that level, to be one of the Top 100 executives in the company and to attend the top echelon of meetings in Naples, Fla.—I attribute that to Lamar and to the exposure I got there,” Giannopoulos said.
In late 1989, during the post-Reagan-years’ military drawdown, he was asked to accept a new assignment—helping Westinghouse find ways to transform technologies developed for the defense sector into commercial applications. He accepted the job and made the move from Pittsburgh to Baltimore to serve as vice president of three divisions in the defense group, with the goal of taking its commercial applications revenue from zero to $500 million by 1995.
One entity now under his purview was MICROS Systems Inc., a Columbia, Md.-based $15 million to $18 million publicly traded company. At the time, Westinghouse owned 30 percent of the company and did not have a controlling interest. The majority of its product was “substantially basic cash registers, and it was losing money.”
“I thought, ‘This is a cash register company. What does it have to do with commercializing technologies?’ My boss said, ‘I don’t care, just do something with it.’ That was my entry into MICROS Systems,” Giannopoulos said.
Westinghouse acquired the additional 37 percent that was available, giving it the ability to put members on the board of directors. Giannopoulos added his chief accountant and one of three division managers to the board, “and we started looking to see how we could grow the company.”
In March 1993, the chief executive officer of MICROS died suddenly, and Giannopoulos stepped into an active role as CEO. Later, Westinghouse brought in a new outside CEO but then decided to sell the company in 1995. Giannopoulos negotiated to leave Westinghouse to become president and chief executive officer of MICROS, bringing with him a few key individuals.
From 1993 to 1995, Giannopoulos had grown the company’s revenues to between $50 million and $55 million and put in place a strategic plan “that got us where we are today—almost a $1 billion company.” The company has grown from 100 to 4,800 employees and now has more than 80 wholly or majority-owned subsidiaries and branch offices and 115 distributors in 45 countries. “The success belongs to everybody here,” Giannopoulos said.
Stock prices in the early 1990s were 20 cents to 50 cents, and, before the recent drop in the markets, had reached $280 to $300 equivalent allowing for the splits, Giannopoulos said. The company’s market value had grown from $100 million to $3.5 billion. “If you had invested $100,000 in 1990, in June of this year it would have been worth $64 million,” Giannopoulos said.
“We just announced second-quarter numbers that were very profitable,” he said. “We beat our numbers from a year ago—that’s unheard of in today’s environment. Our shareholders are still very happy. Even in today’s market, we continue to produce for them.”
“We have good customers; we hustle; and we continue to do rollouts that we had planned,” Giannopoulos said.
Today, MICROS is the global leader in the restaurant industry, with more than 310,000 installations worldwide. MICROS provides restaurant information systems with hardware and software for point-of-sale and operations, including back-office applications like inventory, labor and financial management. MICROS’s restaurant clients include HMS Host, Ruby Tuesday’s, Burger King, Auntie Anne’s, Whitbread, the Wynn Casino and Resort, Hilton Hotels and more.
“The heartwarming thing to me is going to the airport at Istanbul, Turkey, and seeing MICROS equipment all over the place, seeing MICROS equipment in Alpine villages in Austria, in train stations, gift shops, sports arenas, ballparks, theme parks and the majority of the global hotel chains,” Giannopoulos said.
MICROS’ strategy sought to expand into the hotel arena in the mid-1990s, buying a small German company and growing it from $15 million to $300 million in revenues. MICROS-Fidelio International has become the industry standard with more than 25,000 installations worldwide. Its enterprise solutions include multi-property, fully integrated hotel systems encompassing property management, sales and catering, central reservations, revenue management and more. Clients include InterContinental Hotels Group, Shangri-La Hotels, Best Western, Four Seasons, Fairmont Hotels, Le Meridien Hotels, MGM Mirage and Travelodge.
MICROS most recently expanded into the retail sector and already has MICROS-Retail solutions in 33,000 stores in 10 countries. The company’s analytic solutions process data at a corporate level for an additional 60,000 stores. MICROS’ retail customers include Aeropostale, Barney’s New York, Bed Bath & Beyond, Staples, Starbucks Coffee, Talbots and Timberland.
“We’ve become a major player in the three industries: restaurants, hotels and retail,” Giannopoulos said.
“I called the Schooner a few months ago and talked with Maria Megas, the granddaughter of Mr. Megas. She said, ‘We use your equipment and love your equipment,’” Giannopoulos said. “That’s heartwarming.” A recent graduate of Southern Methodist University, she is now a sales executive with MICROS at its Houston office.
It seems the ship of opportunity still sets sail from the Schooner.
