When people wonder how Bloomberg was able to outsell established titans such as Dow Jones and Reuters in the early 1990s, I tell them a story about Dan Parke.

I joined Bloomberg in 1990 as a junior reporter and a few years later was given the task of opening news bureaus in Latin America. Dan was my counterpart in sales.

One of the early hires I made was a reporter named Philip Sanders in Santiago, Chile. He had a small apartment. The Bloomberg “office” was in his spare bedroom.

I visited Phil in 1994 to check on how things were going. He used a PC to write and a Bloomberg terminal to check markets and gather other data he relied on to write stories.

While I was there, we went out to do an interview at the Central Bank. When we came back to the office, the Bloomberg terminal was gone.

It turned out that Dan was also in town and had seen a prospect that morning. The person offered to buy a terminal on the condition that Dan install the box that day. Dan obviously didn’t travel with a terminal, which in those days was an actual piece of hardware.

The only option he could think of was to unplug Philip’s monitor and take it.

Now, this obviously wasn’t a good business practice. Not then and not now. Protocol called for Dan to put in a ticket and a machine would be shipped and installed by trained technicians.

Moreover, Bloomberg had been in business for more than a decade so it wasn’t like there weren’t procedures and systems in place.

But Dan had just launched the Latin American sales initiative. It was frontier territory and a long way from the home office. Also, he had aggressive sales targets.

When we returned, Phil and I were not amused. It significantly impacted our ability to write and file the story about our Central Bank interview as well as other pieces.

Something I will never forget was Dan’s reaction when we confronted him. He wasn’t defensive or rude or in any way non-professional. He was more baffled. He was going to lose the sale if he didn’t install that box. “What else could I do?” his expression seemed to say.

Dan was part of a group of salespeople that included Stuart Bell, Dana Neuman, Ellen O’Dwyer, Curtis McCool, Mark Dailey, Chuck Garcia and others that Mike Bloomberg hired in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were dispatched to London, Tokyo, São Paulo and elsewhere.

Like Dan, nearly all of those early pioneers have moved on. (I also left last year.) But they helped drive explosive growth in the first half of the 1990s. During those same years on the editorial side, the company went from one person covering Latin America (me) to a team of 40.

It’s a reminder about how fast competition can emerge and how dangerous it can be to dismiss the threat from an upstart. At the time, the financial information business was dominated by Reuters and Dow Jones, which owned the Telerate platform.

Bloomberg showed up with a stronger product and people like Dan Parke, who were eager to sell and willing to install on the same day, even if it meant unplugging a colleague.

(Part of a series of lessons I learned from three decades working at Bloomberg)