You might be curious about who leads us.

Back in the mid 1980s I was working for a CPA firm in Myrtle Beach, SC. During that time, the partners at the firm decided to move into the 20th century from a technology perspective. The question, however, was who in the firm would take on that task. So, being young and eager to prove myself, I raised my hand and volunteered for the job.

In those days, there weren’t many options in the area of accounting software so we selected a new company called State of the Art.. Little did I know that some 30 years later I would still be working with Sage 100cloud ERP and that State of the Art would evolve into Sage North America. I guess there’s something to be said for consistency.

After working for a few years in both the public and private sectors of accounting and finance (yes, I have been an end-user of Sage 100, so I look at software from a user’s perspective), I decided to jump into the entrepreneurial world. My father had owned his own businesses for many years and he gave me the inspiration to take the risk.

We were quite content for a while helping customers troubleshoot technical issues, write reports, install upgrades, and teaching them how to get the most out of the software. The whole time we were filling out timesheets and billing based on our time because that was just the way it had always been done.

Over the years, we began to notice quite a bit of negativity in the industry, both for our customers and for us. Our customers asked us questions that we couldn’t answer which frustrated us and made us wonder what was wrong. The questions were not technical; rather they were focused on who bears the responsibility for software and on why there are so many unknowns about the price of projects and support. Here are some examples:

• Why should I get a bill every time my software breaks? I didn’t break it. Should I have to pay for something I didn’t break?

• Why is it that every time we have you install an upgrade or write a report, we never know how much it will cost? I don’t care how long it takes you, just get it done.

• I like you guys but I’ve told my employees not to call for support or anything software related unless it is a dire emergency. The problem is that I don’t know if I’ll get a bill for $100 or $10,000. How do I budget for that?

My belief is these are the types of issues that have always driven a wedge between customer and software partners over the years. It creates unnecessary stress on both sides. Since our passion and mission is to help customers use their systems to the greatest effect, it bothered us that customers perceived the software and the software partner to be necessary evils and as unknown costs to be avoided. We knew for an absolute fact that applying our knowledge and experience to our customers’ businesses provided great value. The question was: how do we price that knowledge so our customers can clearly see the value?

Inspiration struck in the form of very forward thinking and encouragement from two people: Ed Kless and Ron Baker. Both Ed and Ron understood that we were looking for ways to eliminate the negative aspects of the customer/software vendor relationship. Their message was incredibly simple and incredibly enlightening: Customers hate billable time, get rid of it! Price everything as a cancellable monthly subscription. So we did and it has been the most positive part of our business since we opened our doors in 1996.

(770) 874-9194

1675 Lakes Parkway
Ste. 101
Lawrenceville, GA 30043