I still had my SouthWare Dealership but we had not sold any new installations for a long time. After the burglary in 1995, Darin and both started learning HTML, making websites and survived doing that for a couple of years.
The name Excelco, was chosen because SouthWare’s full name was the SouthWare Excellence Series and Excelco was short for “excellent company.” Eventually, we sold a few SouthWare installations. Some of these were large enough to allow us to build our resources, to add a source code license for SouthWare and to add employees. I demonstrated SouthWare by using PC Anywhere and even sold large SouthWare installations in Cleveland, Dallas and a couple of remote locations in Arkansas. These proved to be difficult because our clients were entrepreneurs and would not make the changes to their operations that were required for SouthWare to work at all.
I sold a SouthWare installation to a large landscape company in Dallas. Carl M. was the owner. I never trusted him but I needed the sale at the time. I had good reasons not to trust Carl. All his employees hated him. Vendors would not work for him, even for cash. My sales contracts had clauses in them that the Client could not hire my subcontractors. I had a training staff that I called on when needed. Carl hired them directly in spite of my sales agreement with him thereby depriving excelco of billing for the service work. Lessons learned: 1) Never get “boxed in” by a customer who believes you need the money from a sale. 2) Do NOT take on a Client you do not trust!
I hired Charles to work as my primary support person. Charles worked for one of the companies that bought SouthWare and was a really big help as we moved that company onto SouthWare. Charles was a key employee and I incorporated Excelco with plans for Charles to become an equity partner with me. He was good at assisting new clients with migrating from older systems to SouthWare.
We had one large SouthWare installation that needed software development to integrate their huge but archaic billing operation into SouthWare and additional work to accommodate the issue of Y2K date problems. This company had Cobol programmers on their staff but the programmers who were there had made decisions that insured their job security by forcing each billing cycle to require extensive programming just to get the billing done. That also meant there were around 10 days that Accounts Receivable was unable to process invoices and payments. I added Cobol Programmers to my staff in order to do this custom programming work. We had grown to around 18 to 20 employees, many of which were Cobol Programmers. We had billings of around $600,000 in 1998 and nearly $1 mm. in 1999. Our prosperity endured into 2000 and 2001. Occasionally, if I found that a programmer or two got stuck and wasted a lot of time, I would write down the billing for work that was billed but wasted.
We sold a system MG&D. It was a good application but they wanted to make SouthWare look like Windows, a change that was cosmetic and affected “look and feel” rather than the internal working of the software. I let Charles run this project and he considered it to be his own. We billed the customer for this work and ran up a big bill for custom programming. Eventually, MG&D ran out of money to spend on the project and refused to pay for any more work. Charles wanted me to continue to do work for them without any future billing. Charles did not understand that taking write-downs and working for free was not his decision. Charles was always at odds with me over billing for service work. It was his opinion that the service work should be free with each new installation. There was no way I could run Excelco profitably without billing for services.
He quit Excelco and persuaded one of my programmers to go with him. He proceeded to go through my SouthWare client base and to turn each of them against me and Excelco. Had I gotten legal help at this time, I could have stopped Charles with a court order. This was another incidence of me not standing up for myself. It was also another incidence of being too trusting of my employees.
During the time of our prosperity based on the custom programming, I re-invested in building a team rather than taking profit out of the company.
Eventually, Charles messed up Excelco’s reputation enough that SouthWare revoked my dealership. That resulted in the loss of all my investment in time and money associated with my endeavors and nearly 20 years working with SouthWare. My investment in SouthWare source code was totally lost as it had no value without the dealership.