If the original system was antiquated, it was the best the company could do on a start-up budget. Once it was finally running, it sufficed. After all, it had only to fire off letters and keep track of them.
But problems quickly began to proliferate. Data-corrupting disk-drive crashes drove home the importance of hardware reliability. Having to cajole a contract programmer to add features and fix bugs initiated Kashou into the mysteries of software and those who wrote it. He was getting a crash course in computers, like it or not, on the front lines of his business.
The company's sales soared, from $170,000 in its first year to a profitable million dollars in revenues in year three. But the rapid growth only exacerbated problems with an inflexible and not always reliable system. Even when the disk wasn't crashing, it lumbered through queries like a weary nag, whirring endlessly before finding the answer to a request. Because the database behind it was little but one huge file, finding information meant navigating an essentially unmarked forest of bits and bytes. Searches took forever. And every report had to be custom designed by the contract programmer. Nothing could be modified or repaired without him.
When the reliability problems became too frequent and too frightening to bear, Kashou persuaded his partners to invest in transferring the software to a PC network. But the contract programmer never did get the old software to run quite right on the new hardware. Screens froze, forcing users to continually reboot. Memory errors corrupted files, scuttling the day's work. A simple data-entry error could stupefy the system and derail the daily batch processing of letters and invoices. Having to restart the system could shut operations down for an entire day. The company was accumulating strikes with important accounts.
The company's second system also lacked badly needed features, such as accounting capabilities. Service reps still had to track commissions and accounts receivable manually. The software couldn't accommodate credit terms and other specially negotiated service and payment plans that salespeople were now regularly extending to customers.
To cope, the back-office troops created a web of spreadsheets and manual tracking methods. The beleaguered controller reconciled revenues manually each week and juggled no fewer than a dozen spreadsheets to come up with financial statements each month. Meanwhile, the company was bringing in new clients at the rate of two a day. By 1991 there were nearly a million debtor records in the cranky system. And the problems were getting worse.
But Kashou kept putting off a system overhaul. It wasn't until 1992, when sales reached $3.2 million, and profits, after generous bonuses, had neared half a million that executive vice-president Brad Jadwin stepped before the company board to plead for an entirely new system. "The snafus were starting to affect us in the marketplace," says Jadwin. "We were risking client relationships."
The board agreed to bite the bullet on earnings for a year. This time, vowed Kashou, the fix wouldn't be a Band-Aid. "If we were going to take this company to the next level," he says, "we were going to have to rebuild the system from scratch."
The company searched for an off-the-shelf software package, but it couldn't find one that met its needs. The only solution was to bring in a programmer, but this time Kashou was loath to deal with one on a contract basis. "I was uncomfortable that our lives were depending on guys who weren't ours," he says. It was time, he decided, to add an experienced programmer to the payroll.
Kashou knew enough to realize that a new system would rest on the database software he selected, so he took pains to query the programmers he interviewed for their recommendations. Most said he'd have to spend at least $30,000 on a database package just to get started. Then one candidate explained how the company could get by fine with a $5,000 database package to start and then painlessly upgrade it to more powerful versions when the need arose. Kashou hired him, and Jose Gonzalez joined the company. "It was like signing Superman," says Kashou.
* * *
Like a lot of software impresarios, the 38-year-old Jose Gonzalez exudes a Peter Pan quality: his dark bangs, his gangly, six-foot-two-inch frame, and an ironic smile all belie 22 years of workaholic code crunching and high-tech company building. "I am a classic nerd," he says, his words inflected with just a trace of his native Cuba. The first thing Gonzalez did at Collectech was to conduct a four-hour seminar on the future of computing. "I wanted to see people's reactions," he says. "Did their eyes glaze over when I talked about this stuff? Would they resist the ideas?"
Kashou remembers Gonzalez's speech clearly. "He was talking about having everything integrated -- the contact management software the sales force used, Microsoft Word, Excel, all running under Windows," he recalls. "This is genius, I thought. It was blowing me away. I couldn't sleep at night thinking about the possibilities."
As a first step, Gonzalez installed Microsoft Mail electronic-mail software. The field reps, who had long been deprived of information and fast communications, took to it so quickly that by the second week Gonzalez had to dedicate a second PC as an E-mail server. Soon the entire company had embraced E-mail, employing it to deliver customer service, communicate sales and income reports, conduct meetings, and even hold elections for employee of the year. Before long, Collectech's E-mail-happy staff had an average of a half-billion characters sitting in the electronic post office at any given moment.
Armed with laptops, addicted to E-mail, Collectech's employees were suddenly getting off on technology. Top managers bragged about their software collections. Nobody had to tell them how to format a disk. Clearly, evangelizing wouldn't have to be Gonzalez's primary mission. If he were going to build the sort of database that would take Collectech to the next step, understanding the business would have to be the top priority.
