I have worked on cool projects and colossal failures of all shapes and sizes. While I can claim neither all the fame nor all the blame, I committed to and contributed to each. I worked with some amazing people who taught me a lot (intentionally or not), and I am forever grateful to those who helped me learn and grow.
Below are more I’s than optometrists see in a year. Most companies ran very lean operations, making me an army of one in many areas. The projects below are neither chronological nor mutually exclusive. I frequently worked with/for several companies simultaneously. If you want something done, give it to a busy person.
@ Elmore Companies
PEO TRANSITION. TWICE IN TWO YEARS.
(What is a PEO? Find out here.) Expensive compared to what we were doing in-house (~$350/year/employee in-house, ~$700/year/employee outsourced), but definitely worth it as we were woefully understaffed for proper payroll and HR oversight. For twice the cost, we got ten times the resources and subject-matter expertise. Transitioning to a PEO meant a complete overhaul of employee benefits for half a dozen companies, a complete payroll system change, and some annoying tax form issues. Even better: we did it again less than two years later. My favorite provider as of 2017: HCC.
On the benefits side: we needed a solution to get away from our partially-self-funded insurance plan, as the PPACA and other legislation was driving risk much higher (in fact, this drove the change more than anything else). We also needed better legal oversight to handle the growing complexity of state laws. Moving to a PEO fixed all that – although it did introduce other challenges. Communication bites the hand that feeds it.
PRIVATE MEDICAL INSURANCE PLAN MANAGEMENT HIGHLIGHTS:
PLAN ADMINISTRATION. My employer sponsored a partially-self-funded medical insurance plan, which we maintained for more than 20 years. During that period, multiple spinoffs, acquisitions, and startup companies joined the plan. Eligible participants swelled from fewer than 100 to many hundreds of people.
As the plan grew, administrative duties increasingly fell to me until I became the de facto plan administrator. For a period of roughly ten years, I oversaw plan performance, managed vendor and advisor relations, and set plan premiums and options while satisfying the plan sponsor’s wishes and obeying legal limitations.
MILLION DOLLAR CUSHION. Regulatory changes and an increasing participant count exposed the sponsoring companies to increased financial risk. To mitigate the risk, the companies targeted building the plan’s bank account balance from an average of ~$300,000 to a new goal of $1,000,000.
I reached the $1,000,000-cushion goal within five years, eventually attaining a steady balance of more than $1.2 million. Balance increases came from gradually raising plan premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. An ever-expanding participant count accelerated the impact of premium increases such that I was able to keep annual employee cost inflation near or below national trends while holding the line on employer contributions.
PLAN SHUTDOWN. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, aka ACA, aka “Obamacare”) effectively killed the sponsored plan. Sponsor risk became too great under the PPACA, prompting a search for fully-funded plan options and eventually leading to the first of two PEO transitions.
Shutting down our “in-house” medical plan took more than a year, thanks mostly to regulatory requirements and statutes. We returned remaining plan assets to the participating companies over a period of 15 months, partially offsetting increased administrative expenses from the PEO transition.
SHARED SERVICES TEAM DEVELOPMENT.
My teams had informally been doing side work for small, related companies almost since inception. Several of those companies were growing well, but none had reached the tipping point where it could afford a dedicated accounting, IT support, or HR team. My teams stepped in, expanding our services to include other related companies.
I introduced an at-cost inter-company billing process to share the expenses. As related companies grew large enough, they split off their own accounting and IT teams – several times taking one or more of my employees into their new dedicated teams. The arrangement served the companies very well, though it was sometimes a thankless task that hurt morale on my teams. I detail a bit of the good and bad of inter-company billing in a separate post. HR was the last shared service, which was later moved to…say it with me…a PEO.
@ Gant Travel (ganttravel.com)
90%+ GROWTH IN 5 YEARS. While I was CFO (and sometimes CTO, CIO, and many other letter combinations potentially unsuitable for publication), we grew sales volume at Gant Travel by 20% year over year, three years running. Ticket counts more than doubled. Sales, Revenue, and NOI all grew by nearly or just over 100%. I won’t spill the beans here on Gant’s revenue or NOI, but total sales grew from $100M in 2011 to $191M in 2016. Sales were ~$80M when I started there in 1991 and stayed near that level until 2012 when we began a concerted effort to grow.
Did I do it all? Not even close. Did I play a big part? Oh yeah. Do I know the secret sauce? You betcha. Could I help your company make it happen? Let’s talk.
Self-Aggrandizing Sidebar: While sales volume grew almost 100%, my accounting department grew only 50% in the same time: from three FTE’s to four-and-a-half FTE’s. What can I say? I find awesome people and give them the tools they need to continue growing.
INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION. Incorporating in a foreign country may sound like a simple thing, but starting with zero knowledge made it a daunting challenge. The corporate structure was a bit complex, involving a Canadian ULC owned by a U.S. LLC owned by a U.S. S-Corp, all as a CYA with the CRA. Or something like that.
Incorporating in Canada also made us a direct competitor to a business partner, setting up a rather uncomfortable conversation as we broke off that relationship. Fortunately, they chose not to crush us like a cockroach.
MULTIPLE ACQUISITIONS. The early 90’s were a blur of activity, with Gant acquiring three Chicago-area competitors in just a few years (a fourth happened just before I hired in). I was the accounting (and later IT) geek team member for each of them, spending a few days each week on site for weeks on end as we transitioned all accounting and IT functions into our HQ in Bloomington, Indiana. Many years later (around 2010), we acquired the travel department of a large M&I company, which quickly led to…
LARGE GROUPS: 10,000+ TRAVELERS IN JANUARY & FEBRUARY. Drinking from the firehose at its finest! Gant handled large group movements for several organizations under multi-year contracts. It is a monumental task to coordinate the movements of 10,000+ people in multiple waves to just a few destinations, all happening during the absolute worst travel months of the year.
Contracting, reservations, changes, and travel all happened in a space of three to five months. Travel was always in January and February, and always bound for warm climates where everyone else wanted to go. Weather interruptions were virtually guaranteed, and space was extremely limited.
My roles were data and reporting, bespoke data processing development, billing, and contract review. Contract review is no joke! I (yes I, and I alone) avoided $50k+ in annual audit expenses by striking just a few paragraphs in a 30-page contract. The client put that clause back in the next year, and I took it out again.
My favorite sub-projects:
Designing and building a program to print 6,000+ itineraries. I used ColdFusion to parse incoming emails and save PDF attachments with a specific name format to facilitate later pre-sorted printing. One week before travel, the program printed all the itineraries in collated groups for delivery to the client, per their requirements.
Reconciling a 12,000 item, $4.5 million credit card bill. One of our clients needed help with credit card reconciliation at the end of the first year of the project. I handled most of it through Excel VBA programming, finally resorting to manual processing for the worst data. Southwest Airlines ticketing data, in particular, sometimes bore no resemblance to our back office system data. Contracting note for other years: any services not explicitly included are excluded.
Designing and building a one-line-per-traveler combination arrival and departure manifest, complete with links to reprint itineraries. Our online reporting system (iBank) could not create a report matching client requirements, but it *could* produce source files with the basic data. My end process, using Excel VBA, partially automated the process of combining dozens of daily files into just a couple of Excel files, in the format the client requested. I built the process well enough to hand its daily operation off to bookkeeping.
The heavy lifters on Groups in those years were JoAnne Little, Jeri Papa, Marian Kerpan, and Donna Schmidt, plus dozens of agents who earned the title “super hero” many times over. Their devotion, creativity, energy, and sheer force of will were beyond imagination. Their devotion to client service is a force of nature.
PCI DSS CERTIFICATION. During my tenure as CIO, PCI DSS became a new hurdle to jump. Along with my Network Admin, Denise Knell, I addressed deficiencies in encryption, site and data security, and network security on the road to certifying our compliance. [Sorry – no LinkedIn link for Denise. I would have included her email, but death by Spam isn’t pretty.]
DISTRIBUTED WORKFORCE / FROM ZERO TO 85% HOME-BASED. At its peak during my tenure, Gant operated ten offices around the world. Many offices were on-sites for a single large customer. As technology and connectivity improved in the 1990’s, we began to experiment with home-based positions.
Early successes with one-off home-based positions laid the groundwork to respond when our largest on-site host started looking for ways to cut costs and reclaim office space. Gant responded by moving 25% of its workforce to home-based positions, returning crucial office space to the site hosts. We accelerated the process after 2010, reaching 85% home- and remote-based positions before my departure in early 2017.
My roles in the overall project came in waves. I was the geek who set up the original home-based employees in the mid-1990’s. I traveled to their homes around the U.S. to ensure everything connected properly, then supported them remotely thereafter. Some years later, I was part of the planning and evaluation team preparing for the mass-migration to home-based agents. The final wave, between 2012 and 2017, saw my accounting and IT teams become distributed as well.
An example of the scope of our distribution: by 2016, I had a Controller in Germany, a Senior Accountant in Denver, a Bookkeeper in southern Indiana, and cloud-based file storage to support their coordination with me in Bloomington, Indiana. Daily and Weekly video “huddles” kept us in touch.
COMPANY-WIDE VIDEO CONFERENCING. At Gant, we were often challenged with keeping first our Executive Team and then 80+ home-based employees “connected.” Phone calls and emails are effective in their own ways, but there is no substitute for seeing people and their reactions in real-time. While in-person meetings are absolutely best for building and maintaining relationships, video conferencing is the next-best thing, and a lot cheaper as well.
The Executive Team (no two of whom were closer than 3 hours by car for several years) led the way in video conferencing by meeting weekly to review strategic plans and progress. We augmented our weekly video conferences with quarterly in-person marathon meetings. Once well established, we rolled out the video “huddle” to management, who then introduced the same method among their teams.
We had some initial pushback from people who had grown accustomed to working at home in their jammies, and we allowed for the occasional bad-hair-day exemption from appearing on-camera. For the most part, it was a fantastic success and a huge step up from phone calls and emails. I completely and wholeheartedly endorse the practice, and it is surprisingly cheap to set up.
OFFSHORING BOOKKEEPING. I am not certain this was the best idea for accounting functions, but we outsourced some just the same. It was a smart move for scalability and redundancy, but not terribly cost-effective. The provider we chose needed one-and-a-half FTE’s to take over what our lone in-house bookkeeper did in about 20 hours per week.
MULTIPLE BACK OFFICE SYSTEM (BOS) CONVERSIONS. Travel Agencies use proprietary back-office/accounting systems, mostly due to ancient complexities of reconciling sales (IMHBAO: they should all be replaced with a new paradigm). I worked with and managed transitions through four such systems: ABS, TDS, TS2000, and GlobalWare. Through acquisitions, I also transitioned data and processes from TRAMS and something that ran on OS/2 (the name of which I have successfully forgotten). I spent most of my time on the back-end, getting into the databases and mucking around with reporting and data management. Good times.
DATABASE & REPORTING DEVELOPMENT & MIGRATION. I found one of my passions when I took over reporting duties: attention to detail. It drove me nuts to see reports with negative savings numbers and other logical errors.
I worked with the agents and managers to develop data cleansing processes ensuring all data and reports adhered to logical rules. Eventually, I hired a developer and built those concepts into a web-based, self-serve system called BOVINE. At the same time, I took reporting and database systems through DOS and Windows versions before moving to iBank; a cloud-based reporting system written by Gant’s sister company Cornerstone Information Systems. We slaughtered BOVINE when we adopted DOMO in 2015, but kept iBank. I am convinced one good system is all you need, if fully leveraged.
NETWORKING & EMAIL EVOLUTION & CLOUD MIGRATION. *Many* years ago, in the days of dial-up, I helped create the first network and Internet connection for Gant’s CHQ. Within a year, with some help from Greg Travis and his good friend Linux, we had set up Gant’s first company-wide email system via an on-demand dial-up network, with local token ring architecture connecting agent desktops (‘broken ring’ was usually more accurate).
Over many years we evolved connections, network software (Novell Netware, Microsoft), email software (MS Mail, Novell, Exchange), and eventually pushed out to hosted Office 365. Keeping everything stable for over 20 years with never more than a day of email downtime? Priceless.
WEBSITE & INTRANET DEVELOPMENT. I designed and built the first several iterations of Gant’s website, added an Intranet site, toyed with a local Wiki, added ColdFusion programming, built a site for Gant’s largest client, and added extended capabilities through talented employees and creative partners. It was a great creative outlet. When I transitioned out of IT, we pushed development to a web host and external programmers.
CONVERSION TO HOSTED VoIP. We did multiple phone system conversions at Gant. The first was changing the main call center from PBX to VoIP, though still in-house. JoAnne Little did most of the heavy lifting with that one, while I helped with system evaluation, logistics, and IT resource allocation. A later move changed everything to a hosted solution with WestIP.
The second conversion was my project involving phone systems for Gant’s corporate headquarters as well as two “sister” companies in Bloomington, Indiana. Lessons learned from the call center changes helped this project go more smoothly. When the Bloomington office of Gant later migrated to WestIP, Gant finally had a single, hosted phone system. That system was later transitioned to RingCentral under a new CIO.
DUAL-MONITOR DEPLOYMENT. This may sound more like a gecko than a dragon, but dual monitors make a huge impact on productivity and accuracy. I was an early adopter of multiple-monitor setups. The advantages were immediately obvious to me, and I began to implement my vision for universal adoption. Dual monitors became standard equipment for accounting and IT as soon as I was able to push it forward.
In 2012, we pushed the concept out to the entire company. A few employees rebelled for a short time, but most embraced it enthusiastically. My only regret is that we failed to measure accuracy and productivity before and after deployment to calculate ROI. The impact is so great that Randy Pausch included the concept in his infamous Last Lecture, as wisdom to pass on before his death.
AIRLINES CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTANCE SCARE. Some years back, the airlines were threatening to stop accepting credit cards for air tickets – at least through travel agencies. I spent a couple of weeks working with Bob Smyth and Annette Steinbraker brainstorming how we could modify *all* our systems to manage the potential change, and not totally go under from the lack of cash flow. We came up with workable though painful plans. Thankfully, the airlines backed off. The planning experience was worth the lost time.
ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP. Well after we had begun to rely on network file storage, our server hard drive crashed – and we didn’t have a backup system. It cost $7,000 to have a company recover what was probably less than a few hundred megabytes of data. Lesson learned: buy and use a good backup system.
After installing a backup system, we suffered a second crash less than a year later – and that is when we found out that our backups weren’t working correctly. The second lesson was slightly cheaper at $5,000: always TEST your backups.
Third time’s a charm! Unfortunately, you can’t fix stupid. I upgraded a major database mid-day, without first making a safety copy. The process crashed, the file got corrupted, and I had to ask my accounting department to rebuild several days’ worth of data. It wasn’t pretty.
@ USA Hosts (now part of Hosts Global)
BUILT ACCOUNTING TEAM FROM SCRATCH IN TWO WEEKS. When USA Hosts abruptly lost their CFO in 2005, I was asked to step in and take over accounting and IT, and to relocate both functions from Las Vegas to Bloomington as soon as humanly possible. Less than 45 days later, I had a newly-hired accounting team up and running in Bloomington, with all accounting and IT running from my office. My existing IT Team (Denise Knell and Chris Wooton) absorbed the additional USA Hosts-related duties.
We found some terrifying dragons lurking in drawers and file cabinets. The worst one: someone (I don’t know who, but I am certain they were fired, and it no longer matters) had decided that they would conserve cash by writing checks to vendors and then filing them, unsigned, in drawers. If vendors called for a status update, they could be told truthfully (or at least with a straight face) that the company had written a check. We found $300,000 worth of those, which we promptly voided and returned to our AP, with the full support of company leaders and owners. Business should run on sound principles, not clever half-truths.
Through a combination of leadership, cost-cutting, partial reinvestment, honesty, and diplomacy we recovered from a $2M working capital deficit and went on to sell the company assets, profitably, five years later.
DEVELOPED CLOUD-BASED CRM. I consider this both a success and a failure. We replaced a distributed ACT! database (which regularly got out of sync) with a web-based custom CRM that we designed and built in-house under my direction. Total development costs ran about $150,000. Conceptually, it was a huge step forward for the company. If I had to do it over, I would have used Salesforce instead – but it likely would have cost twice as much to get it up and running properly.
@ NWS Enterprises (closed)
PIONEERED OUTSOURCE ACCOUNTING & IT MODEL FOR TRAVEL AGENCIES. NWS started as a rescue operation for a travel agency facing a Y2K crisis in 1999, compounded by turnover in their accounting department. We leveraged expertise at Gant Travel to build a new company offering outsource accounting and IT services to travel agencies. While we never quite got enough traction, just creating the model was a major accomplishment. Paul Moran proved that even the best sales efforts can’t overcome reluctant clients.
Over the course of five or six years, we helped half a dozen travel agencies through rough patches. Most left us as they were acquired by other agencies, and we finally closed the company after about ten years. Early on, though, we slew one huge dragon with several heads…
FIRST MULTI-DATABASE MODEL FOR GLOBALWARE. Travelport bought the core technology for GlobalWare as a solution for TS2000’s Y2K problem. They never expected any agency to need more than one GlobalWare database, but we needed two and were moving toward more. Our requirement for multiple databases created two challenges: the ability to run more than one database instance on a network, and the ability for our accounting staff to switch among them.
We solved the multiple instance issue with Travelport’s help by using non-standard names for our databases and creating IP-specific connection strings in our ODBC configurations. The desktop problem was thornier. I created a completely maniacal approach to address the desktop issue, but Travelport found a shortcut fix just before I implemented my mad scientist solution.
The Mad Scientist Solution: Linux + VMWare + GlobalWare installations on multiple virtual PC’s, running on beefed-up desktop PC’s. I was inordinately proud of working out a solution like this, and also very excited to introduce Linux to the travel industry. It would have worked, but been a tad unwieldy. Just before I pulled the trigger, Travelport came up with a fix.
The Travelport Shortcut: Travelport eventually found that just a few lines in the Windows registry controlled GlobalWare’s client-side connection. We created registry snippets for each database and used those to launch each instance as needed from the desktop. It worked like a charm. Too bad. I really wanted to make the Mad Scientist version work.
@ Cornerstone Information Systems (ciswired.com)
EMPLOYEE #2½. Cornerstone spun off from Gant Travel in 1992. Owner and CEO Mat Orrego was employee #1, using contract labor to write a lot of early code (oh, the stories I could tell! Dick Kisters! Wichita!) Mat later bit the bullet and hired Gani Agabin, a developer, as the first full-time employee. I became employee #2½. I sat at a Cornerstone desk and worked on its products and services while also handling database reporting duties for Gant Travel, which was in the same office.
I straddled those two positions for about 18 months until both grew too large to do together. My position at Gant grew into Management, while my work with Cornerstone expanded to include on-site installation and configuration, help desk support, report writing, network management, and so on. I was extremely fortunate and eternally grateful that DG Elmore and Mat Orrego offered me the option of choosing which job to keep. It was an extremely difficult decision, as I loved both jobs and companies. In the end, Cornerstone’s duties had me traveling three of four weeks every month, and I had a new baby at home. Gant won out. The truth is, I would have won either way.
REPORTING LIBRARY CREATION / RE-CREATION. I wrote Cornerstone’s initial reporting library in R&R Report Writer – the same program I used at Gant (and which Mat had introduced). Cornerstone later transitioned to new database technology and simultaneously moved to a more powerful reporting package: Crystal Reports. Frank Young and I together re-wrote the reporting library in Crystal. Sadly, Frank passed away some years ago.
If you’re still reading at this point, I admire your stamina. Can I buy you a drink? Coffee?
The also-rans:
- Several office space planning projects and office moves
- Custom development of cloud-based systems
- Company-wide meeting and event planning
- The GMIR (Global-MIR) – or how-to-get-UK-Galileo-MIR’s-to-populate-reluctant-back-office-systems