Morris gained experience as a sales representative for Fisher Scientific. He also served as the associate director of technology transfer for the Southern Technology Applications Center for technology entrepreneurs, sponsored by NASA.
His first entrepreneurial venture, in 1986, was pHish Doctor. He borrowed $10,000 to create the company, which sold pH sensors for home aquariums. That project was successful enough to help him start his next company.
Morris worked with Robert Byrne, Luis Garcia-Rubio, and Roy Walters from the University of Central Florida, on the development of a fiber-optic pH sensor for use in seawater. 
In 1989, they co-founded Ocean Optics, Inc. with the help of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.
A miniature spectrometer that they had developed as part of the fiber-optic project became the company's core product.
They introduced the first miniature fiber-optic spectrometer, the S1000, in 1992. It was capable of measuring wavelengths in the visible range.
The company focused its mission around being agile, understanding customers' desires and creating applications to meet customer demand,  "enabling any measurement involving absorbance, transmission, reflection, or emission of light." The company was bought by Halma in 2004.
After the sale of Ocean Optics Morris went on to found SpectrEcology, which specializes in engineering and support services for applications that use optical sensing.