Sam Saab — Results CRM

The thing that we're doing right now is with our new portal for small business, we're going around and talking to some of the small business owners that I know and kind of getting their story, their background story.

Yours is a very interesting story because you're in a technology space.

You've been in a technology space for quite a while. 29 years?

You know, you have a product that's widely used, well known, and yet you maintain that as it's a family business.

Sure is.

And so let's kick this off and why don't you tell me a little bit about how results got started.

Right.

We started actually in 1985, at around that time, if you remember, that was considered the PCU revolution.

This is where the IBM PCs were starting to become popular.

Some of the smaller businesses would bring one PC in and basically try to see if they can have control over their data instead of being dependent on the mainframe systems and being able to request information from the larger systems.

Also, some of the smaller organizations, especially in the Washington, TDC, in metropolitan area where we are.

There's a lot of associations, it's a lot of small, non-profit organizations.

These entities have a lot of work around mailing lists.

They need technology, but they could not afford mainframes because they were just basically doing everything manually in cards and lists.

So in the beginning of the 1985, we started as a small consulting firm that is helping those small businesses figure out how to leverage the technology of the IBM PCs and some of the software that was available at that time.

Whereas to run the consulting business and was just me at that time, one person, I needed to be able to take care of the clients and still be able to get my invoices out in a timely fashion over my appointments or, and there weren't many software applications for small businesses running on PCs at that time.

So the first version of the results CRM that was done in 1985 was actually to empower us to do what we were teaching others to do and return to do commercial product in 1986.

That's really neat.

So it was 1988, so it was a year.

Within a year we made it a commercial product.

Wow, that's really swift.

Yeah, and actually what helped us there, Bob, was that there was an account that was an insurance company that actually liked the capabilities that we built in from a list management perspective and they basically brought it in-house and that accelerated our development because instead of just we can, in evening hours, when I was able to sit behind the computer and program and build the system, we were now doing custom development effectively for that entity to build the software the way they needed it and so that accelerated its maturity and being able to be put out there as a commercial release.

When you started in the consulting space, what was your background in programming before that happened?

Actually, I went to engineering school and so in engineering we had to learn Fortran at that time as a programming language and funny enough it was cards being fed to the mainframes to basically write to an application that way and get the answers back.

So that was the first exposure that I had for programming and it turned out that it was good at it, enjoyed doing it, actually it was the helper of the class.

So it was just something that I found out that I have as compared to specifically taught IT or being in college for IT.

I'm an Electrical Engineering Engineer by Education.

You got your education, you weren't born in the US, you're an American success story in that sense.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you came here and built your business?

Yeah, I appreciate that.

I'm originally Lebanese.

I was born in 1948, left Lebanon when I was 19 years old.

I was one of the fortunate few that after the four years of the Civil War, from my perspective the war was going to stop any minute and my parents and my family felt otherwise.

They felt that things are going to continue to worse and turn out, unfortunately, they were right.

Those Civil War continued for another 24 years.

The fortunate part for me at that time is my sister was doing her masters in the US and had the opportunity to bring me to the US as a student and went to San Francisco State University and finished my engineering degree over there.

It's great.

Where did you meet Maya?

Actually, Maya and I met at a grassroots organization, one of the organizations that was doing computer work for and they have a national conference.

It's an organization called the American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

I used to do IT work and manage the information, the data for the conference and she and her family were volunteers that will come in and help in setting up the conference in the convention.

And that's how we...

We caught each other's eyes.

That's great.

That's great.

And since that time, you guys got married and were you guys married when you started the business?

No, actually.

We were there.

It was a going concern and you brought in management.

Actually, Maya remembers it a little differently because we would be sitting at having dinner with our friends and everybody is having a conversation and Sam is designing his next module and he's spaced out trying to go through the programming of what the next module interface is going to look like.

So it was just one of those things and then we continued to manage the company and work together at growing the business.

Well, that's a good point.

When you go...

In 1986, when you started and then you brought Maya in, this is something that a lot of small business struggle with, is the first employee.

What was the first person that you hired and...

That's a great question.

Believe it or not, it took me seven years to be convinced to hire my first employee, a first real employee.

We had a lot of subcontractors.

We have a lot of entities we partnered with to deliver solutions.

But for me as a consultant, I was always holding back because I felt that it's not fair to the clients because it was more of a personal relationship.

To put them in a position where they're going to, all of a sudden, get the notice that someone is going to replace me and come and work on the account for them because they just got hired by DPS Consulting, wasn't able to company at that time.

And so I was always the consultant, so I was always the main entities with subcontractors.

And then Maya made the point is that there's a glass ceiling you're going to head from a growth potential for the company that is not fair for your clients to be the only entity.

And so you're holding back from them this ability to work with other team members.

So that was our argument against it and eventually after seven years she won and we brought in our first employee.

And that really was the starting point for growing the company.

How, when you did bring in an employee, what was their role?

The role was also a consultant, but here's different businesses might not have as much of a challenge bringing in the first employee.

There are some other factors and decisions you need to make.

Something is a little bit more challenging because typically as a consultant you're an advisor, there's a trust value that you're bringing to the entity that you're taking care of.

So what we did to not create that kind of a shift where the customer is that the new consultant that came on was actually only assigned new accounts.

Some other businesses might not have that kind of a direct dependency on that relationship.

And so it might be easier to add team members in that case while they're adding value and delivering more services for the organization as a whole without that consultant dependency that was so important to our relationship with our clients.

The other factor from when individuals are going through the first step of bringing in the entity is to make sure that the entity being brought in, you don't rush that decision because the entity is going to end up representing you, whether you're there or not.

Yeah, I mean you're, I mean at that point in time the brand is you.

Absolutely.

Exactly.

By you making a recommendation into that, into that contract that this person is going to be able to represent you, well, you've had a hope that they, that they can, you know, live up to your name.

That's right.

Measure up.

How nerve-wracking was that first year with a new employee?

It is actually very, very challenging because the biggest challenge is that you can't be there with them.

So the reality is that you only, if, end up knowing or finding out by either calling the client directly within a week or two and see that they're happy or react to a complement or a complaint, right?

Because you're not able to be side by side with them or in some opportunities, we can go and have the meeting together, even the introduction meeting or maybe a project status update.

So you can see the chemistry of how the, the information there and you just listen into the conversation.

Yes, it is nerve-wracking, but it is a part of the growth that you cannot avoid.

And the longer you avoid it like I did for seven years, you know, the question is always is, what would have happened, what would have happened and how quick or what would have happened if I've allowed growth within the organization to grow at the beginning of the revolution, not seven years into the PC revolution?

Well, it's, I mean, everybody goes through those, those kind of, you know, second-guessing themselves.

You know, once you brought that person in, what did it enable you to, to go after that you hadn't been able to go after before?

Every time there was an opportunity to go to the business or a new project to be taken on, it was a challenge to say, how can I fit this with the rest of the things that are going on, my existing accounts that I'm handling, responsibilities on projects to be delivered, the family life, because you've got to balance that too, right, because that's the priority in a way that you're doing all of this to, to give stability and, and a future, the company is allowing you to also have a better life with your family.

And so you're going to keep all of those things in sync.

The addition of a resource at the level of operation that I was measuring myself at allowed me to be not have the burden and the headaches of all my client base on my own shoulder.

You can basically, in a way, distribute that over across multiple individuals.

Also once you're successful with the first employee, it is very easy and very rapid to bring in the second one, because you have already put in place the processes that made you comfortable that you're able to hand off responsibilities.

And now we can do more.

I had more time and I'm able to focus on aspects of it, not just billable hours and delivery of consulting services, but being able to step back and say, how can we do more?

How can we bring in the second person?

How can we bring in the third person?

How can we be more efficient in our income and expenditures so that we have a larger profit margin every single month moving forward?

So it was a great way of being able to step back and do what you need to do as a boss, as an owner of a business, not just as a consultant that's bringing the money in.

And once you were able to do that, I think you mentioned to me previously that right around that time, like seven years, it was 86 to 93, right around 93, you did a big deal with Sharp, didn't you?

We sure did.

Actually, Sharp was one of our biggest accounts on the CRM.

At that time, Sharp was bringing in laptops to the market, just a step back.

Sharp is a pretty significant organization, right?

At that point, Sharp was well-known for their copiers, but Sharp was also trying to bring in additional lines of business.

One of the biggest lines for them was laptops, and laptops were kind of a wow.

Look at those exciting PC technology.

What if you can get that on the road?

Here's the problem for them.

They didn't have any software, business software that they could demonstrate on.

We were fortunate enough to have our product results CRM picked by the sales force of Sharp at that time to be the product they want to use for selling.

So we were a natural fit.

When we went to the conference, they said, can we show your software at their laptops so people can see what they can do with the laptop, and it was a fantastic win-win, because not only can we show them that they can use the laptop, but we're not showing them a great software that their own staff were using to sell, and they can use on those laptops.

So it was a fantastic, this is a first example of a true partnership that there wasn't money changing hands, but a good idea that says, look, we can help each other out.

You can show my software at your laptop, and now your laptop can show software that is usable by businesses.

What a great fit.

That's fantastic.

So from that point, you know that results is established as a product.

What have you done to grow the business from there, and what would you have done differently?

So here's one decision point that we made in 2000, though was in my mind a very important decision.

In 2000, we made the decision to separate out the consulting company from a software company.

The company, the product has been a success, highly used in many places, and we wanted to create an organization that would be the one responsible for the software, so no one would look at it and say, what is a consulting company doing, supporting and selling commercial software?

And so we made a decision, and at that time, we acquired the name Result Software.

So we separated out DPS consulting, which still exists, and now is focused on larger consulting accounts.

So we have, for example, an account with the US Navy that we've had for about 14 years right now.

We do development for their mobilization software, and we have a result software that's responsible for a totally different set of entities, which is small businesses, using outlook, using QuickBooks, so there was an important decision from separating companies to focus the growth of each company based on the set goals for each company.

And that's a difficult thing too for a lot of business owners, is the ability to recognize that you've, you know, the thing that you've created as a whole, as actually two parts that could function, you know, function better on their own.

Absolutely.

And there are tough decisions because tactically, it is not only is it a matter of deciding how do you separate them because they have always been one entity, but also making sure that you establish the right goals for each organization, the reality is that the goals are set differently, the operations are done differently, the workflow within the organization is different, and so you have to take those steps to keep the company and the team focused on working properly.

That's good advice.

Result CRM is a desktop product, okay, and now there's been all this noise about the cloud and what is your strategy going forward on, you know, keeping the software relevant and moving into this next phase?

Absolutely.

Great question.

And I'm going to add to that conversation virtual offices because in my mind, that's the reality of how we today work.

Yes, we were a desktop product for a long time and we continue to feel compelled to leave the desktop unit in place because our major customer base is a QuickBooks user. 80% plus of the QuickBooks client base, 4.2 million, according to the numbers from into it, are desktop users.

That's the majority of the QuickBooks users.

So what we have done then is we have kept a product that integrates with the desktop product to be able to work together.

So we have then moved forward to look at the future and allow those companies to operate from anywhere at any time and allow their staff to work from anywhere at any time that they're productive.

Then we're applying the same technologies that would work for the QuickBooks desktop to the results of CRM desktop.

And that is sometimes what's called application hosting.

You're basically taking those two desktop-like products instead of just putting them physically your office or just on your PC or desktop or laptop.

You're going to put them at a center that you can access and your staff can access it at any time so they can get to the data.

There's one other thing that we've done within the desktop product.

So we allow the desktop product to continue to grow as a desktop product but we created a parallel product called Results Mobile and that parallel product is a web-based product.

We created a hybrid solution that you can use a desktop product in your office in house we call it or hosted at places like Skyline and Unity Data, data centers that are well known to be able to work well with the QuickBooks environment and connect the CRM to it.

But we also created this online pure web product that can be accessed from any device at any time and that's how we've taken care of the fact that we're a desktop product instead of it being a dinosaur, it's not.

You build this web component to it, you make either component work with the same data and now it becomes choice.

You've addressed the cloud for the time being for the moment.

That's right.

What do you think are the next steps for results?

What do you see?

I'm not going to say five years in the future because that's when it'll be installed on your flying car.

But in 18 months time.

We already started implementing that.

We're actually in the testing phases of that and we're starting to put our clients.

There's a new technology that's called Cloud Paging.

Cloud Paging is a technology to take their desktop software and instead of it having to be sitting on a platform where you need to log in to access it on somebody's data center.

Now there's technology out there that allows that software to be streamed or pushed directly to your PC, whatever you're working.

The idea that it becomes the full future set of your desktop functionality becomes available to you from any device that you want to work with because we're going to stream it and push it to your desk.

When you want it, you push a button, it will come to your machine and you're going to use it with your data that's already hosted and sitting in the cloud.

So you're leveraging the cloud.

We call it the cloud connect by the way as a term we refer into it because we're saying the cloud is your tool to connect everything together.

Okay.

Well, one final question.

So as a small business owner and a technologist, if there was somebody out there that's thinking about, you know, gee, I have this idea or I have this talent.

What would be your advice to them today in starting a business?

Know what you like to do.

Know what you love to do.

Know what your passion is about doing.

Don't do it because there's money in it because it's going to take a long time to get there.

Just have a goal and know that you love what you do because that passion is going to help you build it properly and it's going to help you sell it properly.

Just having something that might make you money and going after that in my mind is the most challenging way of starting a business because the chances of failure become much higher and your ability to sustain yourself through the difficult times are going to become much more challenging because the passion is not going to keep you going.

If you believe in what you're doing, if you have the passion for it and willing to do the hard work behind it, then people will follow you because they're going to live off that passion that you're bringing in and they're going to see the value that you see and what you're giving and what you're delivering.

It's easier to follow somebody that believes in what they're doing, yeah, sure.

Well Sam, thank you very much for today.

It was a wonderful seeing you again, Bob, and thank you very much for the great questions.

All right.