Mail: June 2002

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Kirby Bonds
VP Sales Development
Avis Rent A Car
Parsippany, N.J.

In the Cesar Chavez-Ayn Rand debate, this reader champions the individualist.

There's no difference between being obligated to carry "deadwood" employees on the payroll and being obligated to continue working at a job that you hate. A job exists because an employer needs something done and is willing to pay someone to do it, and there is a person who is willing to take him up on it. An employee is not obligated to remain in a job longer than it suits him, even if the survival of a company is at stake. Likewise, a CEO has no obligation to retain someone whom the business no longer needs. Give the employee adequate notice, and then let him fend for himself.

Dr. Michael Halpert
Wilson, N.C.

House of Correction
Due to an editing oversight, we neglected to provide credit for the source of the data on community-development venture capital in April's " The Bucks in Your Backyard." That information was provided by Julia Sass Rubin, a fellow at the Taubman Center for Public Policy, at Brown University.

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Update

Hope Floats

Imagine loving software so much, you rescue its maker from certain death. Twice.

Tom Danner never expected -- or wanted -- to own Haven Corp. And yet, fate seems to have settled upon him as the company's ultimate protector. Having saved Haven once before, he's been thrust back into that role by events he couldn't even have imagined nearly two years ago.

It all began in August 2000, when Haven founder and owner Bruce Holmes shut down his company in Evanston, Ill. (See " Rescue at CC:" in February 2001.) Back then, a group of dedicated customers -- most of them small direct marketers -- refused to let the company die. Not only did they rely on Haven's Wizard software for managing their order flow and inventory control, but they were fiercely loyal to Holmes and his company. Led by Danner, a Haven customer whose company sold electronics and data-storage products, the group explored a variety of options to keep Haven alive, including raising capital for the company themselves. Ultimately, Danner got Holmes to sign over Haven's intellectual-property rights, including source code, and then reassigned those rights to $46-million Ecometry Corp., a publicly traded software company in Delray Beach, Fla. As part of the agreement, Danner agreed to step in and temporarily run the new subsidiary, dubbed NewHaven Software Corp. He hired Haven's crack programmers, signed on Holmes as a consultant, and promised customers that Ecometry's deep pockets would get things moving again. But it was not to be.

Last summer, reports Danner, NewHaven was ready to roll out a beta version of CMS, its long-awaited replacement for Haven's non-Windows Wizard software, but it couldn't get the green light from Ecometry. "We didn't feel it was ready for market," says Ecometry chief financial officer Martin Weinbaum. Counters Danner: "We couldn't get direction. We couldn't even get their attention. I told Marty, 'Either get out of my way, or sell the company back to me."

As it turned out, Ecometry had problems that included a plummeting stock price, a departing CEO, and shareholder lawsuits in the works. So at the end of September, Weinbaum called Danner. "I've got good news and bad news," he declared. "The bad news is that we're shutting down NewHaven. The good news is that we're willing to sell it to you." Déjà vu!

Danner jumped on the opportunity and agreed to buy NewHaven for more than double the price he had originally agreed to pay Holmes. In a November 9 letter to customers, whom Danner calls "salt-of-the-earth entrepreneurs," he vowed to "fulfill the promise" that Holmes had made to update the beloved software. CMS debuted in final beta form two months later.

In retrospect, says Danner, Ecometry's cash allowed NewHaven to make its new software "more robust than it would have been." But Danner and his customers are fully ready for the next chapter in NewHaven's saga. "I'm thrilled because the company is back in the hands of an entrepreneur who does what we do for a living, as opposed to a big software company that might see us as just a segment of their market," says customer Peggy Glenn, owner of Firefighters Bookstore. "Now it's Tom's business, by God, and he can run it his way." --Donna Fenn

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