Happy 45th Anniversary, AdvantageCS!
It was late summer, 1982, and I had just graduated from university after a long saga of changing majors four times. A former roommate of mine was working for a local startup software company and he recommended that I apply for a programming job. I did, got the job, and when I began my employment, the company, T & B Computing (as AdvantageCS was known at the time), was just two years old.
I navigated that wonderful shift from paying money to study every evening to being paid money and having my evenings to myself. T & B was in the business of developing software, and sold mini-computers from Prime Computer on which to run the application. We lived off the hardware margins and software licenses, but made little on services. We were always chasing the next deal.
I spent my first months creating magnetic tapes which were used to send our software to new clients to load on their new Prime hardware. We were developing three product lines at the time: INTACT 50 for Publishers (“INTACT 50” stood for “INTeractive ACcounTing” and ran on the Prime Computer 50 Series); INTACT 50 for Project Accounting; and Track 50 for Project Management – not unlike Microsoft Project (years later) with Gantt charts showing project task dependencies. I was then trained on RatFOR (“Rational Fortran” was a preprocessor of Fortran 66) which was the programming language used for many of our software modules for the publishing product, in addition to COBOL (“Common Business-Oriented Language”), of course.
But this part of my career was short-lived, because I discovered that I really disliked programming. To sit in front of a screen all day, every day, writing a program, was really unbearable for me, an extravert. I told my boss, Dave Edwards, who smiled when I said I wanted to talk with customers. “You’re a strange programmer, if you actually want to talk with the customers,” he said. So I shifted from developing programs to technical customer service, and eventually moved to the product analyst side of customer service. I was so much happier! I got to talk with clients, help solve their problems, and every now and then hear them say those magic words: “thank you” when I succeeded in solving their issue. Being a product analyst back then meant you had a pool of clients and you did everything for them: mod specs, testing, customer support, visits, projects and when needed, therapy.
This exposure over the next couple of years helped develop my product knowledge, and before long I was asked to do detailed sales demos. I loved the excitement of sales and getting the deal! As I spent more time supporting the sales team I decided I wanted to try direct sales, so thought about leaving to work someplace where they were hiring direct salespeople. But the sales director at T & B at the time (the late Ron Potter) took me to lunch and said he’d make an opening for me so I could stay. This characterizes the spirit at AdvantageCS: we want staff to be happy doing what they’re doing. If someone wants to try something else, they only have to speak up and we’ll see if we can give it a go! Many employees have switched their roles at AdvantageCS – from engineer to analyst and often vice versa as proof of this.
In 1988, our parent company, Townsend & Bottum, sold us to Thomas S. Monaghan of Domino’s Pizza fame, who was picking up some tech companies at the time. I stayed in direct sales through this transition.
At some point in those years, a colleague named Tom Burbeck (who had left the company to go work for EDS), came back to T & B Computing with a whole new approach to services that helped us continue to expand the services that we provide to our clients. This was met with some skepticism, given our past, but it quickly began to transform our business model to be a company with innovative software and great professional services for our clients.
Then, in 1991 I left the company. We had an opportunity to move to my wife’s home country of Nicaragua and we took it. We sold our house, I resigned from T & B, and my family (including three children) moved away.
I learned about another ownership change in 1992: the company's president, Roger Varblow along with the two vice presidents (Tom Burbeck and Sam Williamson) had bought it from Monaghan. Roger and Tom remain the two partners of AdvantageCS to this day.
The company reached out to me in 1997 and said they needed a project manager for a new implementation in Orlando, Florida and was I interested? I was. We had lived through six years of daily devaluation of the local currency in Nicaragua against the dollar and were slowly going broke.
When I came back to visit, I was shocked at how much the company had changed in six years, and it wasn’t just the name change from “T & B Computing” to “Advantage Computing Systems.” People were engaged, energetic, and excited about the company’s successes. The software was now running on Microsoft Windows.
My family and I moved to Orlando and I managed a large implementation project for a scholarly publisher there (Harcourt Brace). Four years later, we moved to Oxford in the U.K. for me to do much the same thing at Oxford University Press in the Journals Division. Eventually, after completing that project, I started selling our software more broadly in the U.K. and Europe.
In 2007, I was asked to move back to our headquarters in Ann Arbor to take on the role of Vice President of Sales, Marketing & Product Management, a role I have been in for the last 18 years.
By 2012, 24% of our clients were outside the US – mostly Western Europe. By 2021, that had increased to 31%. We currently have clients in 12 countries.
Of course, during all this time, the Advantage software has evolved greatly. There isn’t room in this blog post to tell you about all the wonderful things Advantage can do for you. We started on our WEB integration in 1997. We developed subscription management for digital products: time-based rather than issue-based, way back in 2003. We moved away from our home-developed Tools to the .NET framework. We moved our UI to the browser. We moved to a monthly software usage fee. We began to harness AI. We have expanded our market both geographically and in the industries we serve, namely membership associations and the general subscription world.
After 36 years on staff, I can say that AdvantageCS continues to be a great place to work with a culture that is second to none, allowing employees to manage their work/life balance to meet their needs. We have a high ethical standard from which we do not sway. We’ve gladly walked away from some opportunities because we wouldn’t play their games. We’ve stuck to our values over the years:
Innovation – our solutions and technologies evolve to meet the changing needs of our clients.
Trust – we mean what we say and we do what’s right for our clients.
Reliability – we’re responsive and dependable in our drive to serve our clients.
Collaboration – we work with our clients as a team to address their needs.
It’s these things that make AdvantageCS a special place to work. The average length of stay for employees is 12 years, even with all the young employees. That’s remarkable these days!
As we reflect on these values and our shared commitment, it's clear why we've thrived for so many years. Let’s raise a glass and wish AdvantageCS a happy 45th anniversary! May we keep up the great work striving to fulfill our vision for success: to be the preferred partner for our clients through delivery of exceptional solutions and services, now and for many years to come. Cheers!