Customer Interview: Gregg Moore, CEO Workplace Integra

The thing I love about Gregg Moore is his enthusiasm for what he does.  As he says,  “I’m a blessed man.  I get to get up and go to work every day and do something I thoroughly enjoy doing.” 

That’s not the only thing we share in common.  Gregg also feels like it is critical for him to systematically analyze his financial performance and manage his cash flow.  Kelly “sat down” with Gregg via telephone a few weeks ago to get his perspective on running a small business, and where SurvivalWare fits in.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  So, why don’t you tell us about your company and your specific role in the company?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Sure.  Well, I’m the President of a company called Workplace Integra, and we deal with occupational safety and health.  We provide onsite consulting, mostly in the area of occupational hearing conservation, but some other areas as well. 

And we also provide this really nice software package called Workplace Applications, which is used primarily by occupational health nurses and people responsible for safety in manufacturing environments.  So, that’s pretty much what we do. 

I guess the company has been around in its present form since the year 2000, although several of us in the company were with a predecessor company that actually went back to the early 1980s.  So, we’ve all been doing this stuff a long time and just love it.  I tell people I am a–I’m a blessed man.  I get to get up and go to work every day and do something I thoroughly enjoy doing.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, what kind of got you started with this?  What other industries do you maybe have experience in? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, sure.  Well, my training is an audiologist.  I have a master’s degree in audiology from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.  I graduated in 1988, and from there went into the United States Army and was an Army officer.  And about half of the job of an Army officer is hearing conservation, because the Army has some very loud toys and hearing loss is a big deal in the military. 

So, that’s kind of where I got my start in hearing conservation, and just liked it so much that decided to try to make a career out of it.  And that’s pretty much been the great majority of my career since graduating, oh, gosh, how many years ago has it been?  You know, 1988, a nice long time that I’ve been doing this.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And so, for example, what would be a safety measure precaution that you would advise a company to take that would kind of help with hearing conservation? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Ah.  Well, it all starts with a good thorough noise survey, that is, we actually go out and measure how much noise there is in the environment and how much of that workers are actually exposed to.  And then, based upon that, we make certain recommendations. 

Now, there’s this thing called the OSHA Noise Exposure Standard which all manufacturing companies have to comply with if their noise levels are above a certain amount.  And so, we help companies to comply with those requirements, but also to go really well beyond them, particularly in the area of hearing protection, that is, the actual wearing of earplugs and earmuffs.  And training is extremely important.

So, we help companies to develop really effective hearing conservation programs that will go well beyond just the sort of minimal regulations that you have to comply with. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay. 

And so, you said the majority of your customers are the big manufacturing plants that have a lot of noise. 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, yes.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Do you have smaller customers as well?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Um-hmm, we do.  Gosh, I guess the customer size ranges anywhere from very small companies with maybe only about 40, 50 people up to companies with–you know, multistate type companies, really multinational companies, with tens of thousands of employees.  So–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Okay–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –It’s a very wide spectrum that we cover. 

And geographically–of course, the vast majority of our customers are in the continental United States.  But, we also have clients as far away as Hawaii and American Samoa, and actually went to Saudi Arabia last year.  You know, very far-flung. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Um-hmm.  Okay. 

And then, how did you find out about SurvivalWare?  And what made you decide to buy it? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Well, I initially found out about SurvivalWare through Philip Campbell. 

I had–well, going back a step, I earned my master’s degree in business administration, my MBA, a good many years ago in the early ’90s.  And I remember, you know, going through the accounting classes and really struggling with the cash flow, you know, statement.  It really didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me at the time.  I understood what it was for and sort of basically how to do it, but it never really made much intuitive sense to me.

Well, you know, all these years later and I’m out here running my own business and here I am having to deal with cash flow issues again.  And I was using a–of course, our company uses Peachtree, you know, to do our books, but I really did not like the cash flow piece of it.  You know, it was kind of your basic accounting model cash flow statement.

So, I was out there searching for something that would help me do things more intuitively.  And I just sort of stumbled, really, upon Phillip Campbell and upon his book on cash flow principles, and that really intrigued me.  And so, I read the book.  I talked with Philip.  And that’s when I really learned about SurvivalWare, was through him.  But, very quickly after that I purchased the software, and Philip was quite instrumental in helping me get things set up.

He did a lot of legwork to get the program set up to where I could use it.  And have thoroughly enjoyed it since then, I can tell you that.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, besides Peachtree, have you used any other kinds of accounting software in the past?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Yes.  When I had a much smaller private practice, I used QuickBooks.  And for my own personal use, I use Quicken software. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And then, you said that you were looking to find a program that could help you analyze your cash flow more intuitively.  Do you care–?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –That’s right–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –To elaborate on that?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Well, of course Philip, you know, developed this peace of mind cash flow model, and that made a lot of sense.  And, you know, of course there were two ways that I could go about trying to implement that peace of mind model, which is a more intuitive way of looking at cash flow.  One was I could sit down and try to do it on a spreadsheet.  And, you know, that I can do but, of course, it’s extremely labor intensive. 

But, then the other is to go out and buy somebody’s software that already had that model built into it.  And fortunately, SurvivalWare did.  And so, that’s really what led me to purchase this particular software package was because it already incorporated that peace of mind cash flow model in it.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And how important is it for you as the President of your company to keep track of your cash flow?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, extremely.  We are a small consulting firm, about one and a half million in sales.  And in just sort of the nature of consulting, you really have to watch the cash because it’s a little unpredictable, you know, what’s going to come in from month to month. 

So, we really have to be careful not to overspend and to make sure that we have adequate cash flow to meet our needs on a month-to-month basis.  Yeah, critical.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Um-hmm.  Um-hmm.

And what is your user experience with Excel and what are some of its limitations? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Well, I like Excel tremendously, and probably would be considered a power user of Excel.  But, you know, there are limitations with its graphing capability.  Virtual anything you do in it, you have to manually set up.  If there are minor changes, then you might have to go back and make those changes across lots of different spreadsheets. 

You know, it can be a real pain to use if you’re doing really complex things like looking at data over a long time period.  And you can think of these monthly imports coming in from Peachtree, if you will, you know, profit and loss statements and balance sheets.  You know, those things really add up over years and year and years.  And it can be a bit difficult to go back and make a change and have that change carry back into all those various columns, if you will.

Well, the way Rusty has set up SurvivalWare, gosh, it’s just so much easier to implement even minor changes.  And, you know, you do it and you go on.  It’s extremely quick and simple to do, much easier to do than dealing with Excel. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And so, was it easy to learn how to use SurvivalWare? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Pretty easy, yeah.  The software’s quite intuitive.  You know, I probably don’t use it to its fullest potential.  I use it for what I need to use it for.  It will certainly do a good bit more than what I need it for, and I probably need to sit down with it, particularly with the new version coming out. 

But, yeah, it’s–it was easy to set up, very easy to use, and I think you’ll get out of it just as much you put into it. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Um-hmm. 

And so, how often do you use it? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, gosh.  Hmm.  At least monthly, because usually I’m importing data on a monthly basis.  You know, for instance, when April is done, about a week or so thereafter, I’ll import the profit and loss and the balance sheets from Peachtree, and that’s when I look at it.  And then, I may come back to it, you know, two or three times over the course of the month just if I want to look at something in particular.

So–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Um-hmm–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –At least on a monthly basis. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  How long have you been using it?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  I think, what, three years now?  Yeah, three years.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Great. 

And were you able to learn how to use it on your own, or with help from Learning SurvivalWare?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Actually, Philip.  When all this was set up, I paid Philip to do a little consulting work with me and he showed me some things.  But, of course, I had already kind of dived into it. 

So, it did not take long to pick it up at all.  Although I will say that if you can get at Philip or Rusty or, you know, just somebody to kind of help out right at the beginning, I think the learning curve is greatly reduced by having somebody kind of walk you through a few things who has done it and who knows that software well. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Um-hmm.  Of course.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  I–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –And–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –Know that in our own company–and, of course, we are software producers as well.  We generally just don’t let that software out the door at all unless the client commits to some pretty extensive training, because otherwise we’re setting them up for failure. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Um-hmm.  Okay.

How easy is it to load data and do projections?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  It was a bit of a struggle at first to learn how to load the data.  But, I think that’s mostly because there’s no kind of direct import into SurvivalWare from Peachtree.  So, it took Philip a little while to figure out how to do that.

But, once that was done, then from that point it was a piece of cake.  I mean, I can do it–you know, it takes all of about three minutes these days.  And I can’t remember the last time that I had a problem with it.  So, it’s a very smooth process once it was worked out.

It’s probably a lot easier coming from QuickBooks than it is from Peachtree.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Um-hmm.

And what do you like best about SurvivalWare? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  What I like best about it, its ease of use, certainly that peace of mind cash flow analysis that’s built into it. 

I like the fact, too, that Rusty’s very responsive.  If there’s an issue, you’re not sure about something, you know, you pick up the phone, you send an e-mail in, you’re pretty much going to get him.  And I have found him to just be very, very responsive to my needs and concerns.  And I’m not even close to being his largest client, by any means.  I’m a pretty, you know, small potato in that field. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And have you seen the new version?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Yes, I have, and it’s sitting on my computer.  And actually went through a little webinar yesterday with Rusty, and I like it.  It looks to be some pretty significant improvements.

The neat thing I like about the software–and, you know, of course it’s designed for really a small company like myself.  But then, you know, it can also be really scaled up to really, really big companies with people who will take the time to start customizing it. 

And I think that’s one of the things that I saw on the webinar yesterday is that it’s actually far more customizable than I though that it was.  And if somebody’s willing to take the time to sit down and learn how to do it, that’s an extremely powerful feature in that software. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Yes.  I saw that, too. 

And so, another good thing is you’re able to save your customization so that once you have set it up for, you know, the first go-round, you can come back to it and use that same model to do what you need every month following. 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Yes, it is very powerful. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, what could you not do without  SurvivalWare that you can do now? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Well, probably nothing.  I mean, you know, most everything that it does I could do, but I would have to take the time to sit down and really sink a lot of effort into developing spreadsheets, and then, you know, try to keep the graphs up to date.  I think I could probably do just about everything with spreadsheets that I do with SurvivalWare, but the time savings, you know, and just not having to sit down and actually design all that stuff and support it, that’s what makes it attractive to me. 

It’s pretty–it’s an off the shelf software package that was easily customized to my needs.  And basically, all I have to do is just push a button and it does its thing.  It just saves me an awful lot of time and therefore money and headache involved in doing it another way.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  If you were to estimate a percentage how much time you think it saves you within a month, what would you say?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, gosh.  It’s probably reduced–yeah, easily 90 percent, because there again all I have to do is go into it, load the data, which takes, you know, two to three minutes, and then it just sort of unfolds before me.  And what it allows me to do is to concentrate on the metrics rather than the process.  Because if I’m having to do this stuff with spreadsheets, that’s an awful lot of process involved before I can ever get to the metrics. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Um-hmm. 

And in your opinion, what feature has become the most indispensible or critical for your business?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Well, I like that peace of mind cash flow model that’s built into it an awful lot. 

What I also like is the Comparanator, which, again, very, very easily allows you just to pick this or that and just start, you know, trending things and comparing things.  That’s something else that would be much more difficult to do in Excel, for instance. 

But, those two things really stand out for me as being extremely important, being able to quickly compare things and being able to very quickly see what my cash flow is doing.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay. 

And how has SurvivalWare enhanced your focus on analysis and projections?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  It has certainly helped.  You know, there again, is it something I could have done in Excel?  You know, do cash flow projections using Excel?  Sure, that’s pretty standard MBA stuff.  But, SurvivalWare, again, just makes the process so much easier because it already had some models built into it that you can pick and choose from. 

Again, why in the world would I go invest that amount of time in a spreadsheet when, you know, here it is just kind of laid out in front of me?  And if I want to choose this model, I can and see what it does.  And if–you know, if I want to choose another model, I can choose it and see what it projects and then go from there.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what are some of the differences that you notice between models that are in there?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Well, you know, you can get different results depending upon whether you’re doing–whether you’re trending things, say, seasonally or whether you’re trending things based upon an assumption of a 5 percent growth. 

Or, you know, the neat thing is is that you can apply all of these different models to see which one you think kind of best fits reality.  It doesn’t force you down one road of projecting cash flow.

And again, that’s–that process is far easier in SurvivalWare than it would be in using Excel, for instance. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  So, it allows you more flexibility.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Um-hmm, yeah.  Flexibility and speed, yes. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay. 

And what types of businesses do you think would benefit from SurvivalWare? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, gosh.  Be pretty tough to imagine one that would not benefit from it, really.  You know, any kind of business is going to have cash flow to deal with.  And so, any–you know, any business that’s in business is going to benefit from this.  If they’re not doing cash flow analysis, they’re probably not going to be around. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And then, also just one, do you have perhaps a real life example of where SurvivalWare kind of helped your business in a way, or avoided disaster, maybe? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  I think probably not in the avoiding disaster area, because we’re pretty conservative in how we do things. 

What it did help me to do was just kind of see what cash flow had looked like over the past several years, and so I can see bumps in the road.  For instance, if there’s a month or two or a particular season of the year that’s been kind of slow for us, then it helps me to prepare for that, to see it coming, as it were, and, you know, maybe try to put a little bit more cash away during the immediate few months prior to that so that we can weather the little storm that comes up over the slow period.  We can see those coming. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Um-hmm.  Okay.

And would you recommend SurvivalWare to a friend or a colleague? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, sure, without reservation.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Well, great. 

Do you have any questions or last minute comments?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  No, not really, it’s–well, other than that it’s a great software package.  Rusty’s done a fantastic job with it. 

And I’ll tell you, for a small business to be able to have this kind of a capability at its fingertips, there’s just no reason not to do it. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay, Gregg.  Well, thank you so much for your time today, this afternoon.  Well, afternoon, nighttime.

And also, I just wanted to make sure that we have your permission to use any of your comments or any of the content of this interview for commercial purposes. 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Yeah.  Go right ahead.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay, great.

Well, thank you so much, and you have a great day.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  All right.  Pleasure talking with you, Kelly. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Thank you.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Bye-bye. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Bye-bye. 

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Outtakes

For those of you interest in Paris or Europe, here’s Kelly talking about the weather while warming up for the interview.

Interview with Mr. Gregg Moore

May 7, 2010; 4:00 p.m.

 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Hi there.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Hello.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, you’re in Greensboro, North Carolina? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Yes, I am, and it’s a beautiful day.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  It’s actually been quite chilly up here in Paris. 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Uh-huh.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  But, it’s a little bit warmer today.  We’ve got some sunshine. 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, very nice.  Very nice.

So, you are in Paris, huh?

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Yeah.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, very nice.  Are you selling SurvivalWare over there?    

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  No, actually we’re kind of investigating the market.  And I had previously moved here in September of 2007 working as a nanny.  So–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –Well, it’s a beautiful place.  I haven’t been to Paris in quite a long time, but–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Oh, okay–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –It’s just a gorgeous city. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, when was the last time you were there?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Oh, gosh.  Twenty years ago, easily. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Oh, wow.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Long, long time.  Long time. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Cool.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  And growing up, my dad was in the Army.  So, we actually lived in Germany when I was young and got to travel a good bit throughout Europe.  And I don’t–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Cool–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –Remember Paris at that time.  But, I do remember going into the northern part of France and, of course, all over Germany and the Swiss Alps and such.  So–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Oh, nice.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Yeah.  I have some good memories of Europe. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  I haven’t quite made it over to Germany, but I’ve been to Madrid and to Amsterdam and Rotterdam. 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Amsterdam’s great.  Get up to Copenhagen, too–. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Yeah–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –If you can do it.  I lived in Saudi Arabia for a while and spent a Christmas in Copenhagen. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Oh, okay.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  There’s not a whole lot of daylight hours up there that time of the year.  It’s a little bit on the gray side.  But–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Uh-huh–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –It is an absolutely beautiful place to be around the Christmas season.  So–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Oh, wow–.

Mr. Gregg Moore:  –I would highly recommend Copenhagen.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Cool. 

Well, why don’t we go ahead and get started? 

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Certainly.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  So, why don’t you tell us about your company and your specific role in the company?

Mr. Gregg Moore:  Sure.  Well, I’m the President of a company called Workplace Integra, and we deal with occupational safety and health.  We provide onsite consulting, mostly in the area of occupational hearing conservation, but some other areas as well.

Customer Interview: Hank Luhring, Founder and CEO of INC 500 company, IssueTrak

Sure we share the same last name, but Hank is uniquely positioned to understand the intrinsic value of SurvivalWare, and is darned good at communicating it.  Hank has been a software entrepreneur most of his adult life, and we have intimate knowledge of each other’s product offerings and businesses.  I serve on his board of directors, and have been using SurvivalWare on his behalf for years to keep an eye on his finances.  (Of course lately it means I’ve just been drooling over his cash position and lack of indebtedness!)

Hank has been an informal advisor of mine since I was 2.  I’ve always enjoyed having an older brother who was close in age (he’s 19 months older).   We still manage to have great fun together exploring the latest technology, or comiserating about our oldest kids (just wanted to see if they read my blog..)

I really appreciate all the help Hank and his wonderful people at IssueTrak have provided to me – financially, technologically, and otherwise.  I use his product, and expect it to have the same positive impact on my company as SurvivalWare has had on his.  If you need a way to track issues – such as  support calls in a help desk environmet, or customer complaints - why not go with the best.  Check out their website at www.issuetrak.com

Some excerpts:

“You know, there’s the product and then there’s the company behind the product and the product is great.  But, the reason why the product is great is because Rusty has had an unbelievable amount of experience in analyzing financial data for all kinds of companies.”

 

Interview with Mr. Hank Luhring

February 8, 2010 – 3:30 pm ET

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Why don’t we start talking about your company and your specific role in the company?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  The company is IssueTrak and that’s I-S-S-U-E-T-R-A-K and the “T” is capital and there’s no “C” and we are a software company.  We’re about $5 million in sales and we sell a software package used by organizations of all sizes – big companies and small companies – to do tracking of various issues. Oftentimes they’re IT issues and it’s often used in a help desk environment.

My role in the company is I’m the founder and the CEO of the company.  We have 40 people here working here.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.  What other industries do you have experience in?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Well, it depends on what you mean by experience.  Early on, I did a lot of IT and data processing work for school districts and a lot with their finances.  And I did work for Ferox (Ed. Note: Rusty’s first startup) in 1989 and ’90, where I helped support a product similar to SurvivalWare used by corporations to do financial modeling and financial reporting. That was interesting because the customers were in a variety of industries.  Also, I did custom programming when I started my own business in ’92.  I worked with a variety of clients and that, too, was good because I wasn’t focused on one industry. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And do you find with your product that it’s geared towards the same type of audience?  That there are numerous different kinds of companies that use it?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Yes, there are.  Microsoft is a customer.  Cisco, Verizon, UPS — we’ve got big companies, we’ve got medium sized companies and we’ve got small companies, so it’s just a big variety of customers.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how did you find out about SurvivalWare and what made you decide to use it?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Rusty Luhring is my brother and I’ve kept up with him throughout his career and I’m always familiar with what he is working on. Early on, I asked if we could use it for financial reporting. Since I had worked with a predecessor to SurvivalWare, a product called Encore, I knew the concepts and knew that it would really help out. And it has.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And what type of accounting software have you used in the past or are still using? 

Mr. Hank Luhring:  We’ve been using QuickBooks for many years.  We’re about to switch to Great Plains.  We’re in the process of running dual systems right now.  I have used others in the past, but for the last 10 years or so we’ve been using QuickBooks.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And do you find that it’s easy to load data from QuickBooks into SurvivalWare?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Yes, it works out pretty well.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what is your user experience with Excel and what are some of its limitations and how does it maybe compare to SurvivalWare, for example?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Well, I’ve used spreadsheets like Excel for years.  Before Excel there was Lotus 1, 2, 3 and so on.  I have done financial analysis in Excel.  I’ve even written VBA code to automate Excel to do things, such as grab data out of databases to pull into Excel automatically. Excel is okay for some things, but the approach SurvivalWare takes has a lot of advantages over Excel.  One problem with Excel is it’s almost too easy to set things up.  You can quickly put some numbers in a spreadsheet, put some formulas in, and you’ve got something and that’s very quick and easy to do for simple tasks.  But, if it gets very complicated (and it often does), it gets very hard to maintain an Excel spreadsheet and it’s very hard to be sure that everything’s correct.  Especially if you make changes.  You can have some pretty complicated spreadsheets that are linked to different sheets or tabs and can be linked to external files and everything’s so hidden, you don’t just get a simple listing of the formulas, then it’s really hard to verify that everything’s doing what it’s supposed to do. 

The SurvivalWare approach is quite different and it’s much better just from an information architecture point of view.  What’s very exciting to me about the SurvivalWare approach is that the formulas are not stored in the spreadsheet with the data.  With SurvivalWare, there’s what’s called a matrix file that has just the numbers.  The formulas that operate on those numbers are in a completely separate place.  They’re written in plain English so you can see things like “net income equals revenue minus expenses”.  Those will be spelled out just like I said it and you can have all kinds of complicated calculations, but it’s all very verifiable.  That’s not the case with the spreadsheet. 

Also, it makes for better reporting because your numbers are all in one place.  Oftentimes with rows and columns, the columns will be time periods.  There might be columns that represent months of a year and you might have three years worth, so you might have 36 columns of months.  You might have 12 columns of quarters and then 3 columns of years and then you might have some columns for projections and so on.  And then, the rows often represent accounts from your P&L or your balance sheet.  And then, with all the data set up like that, the reporting is great because you can just write a report to extract the data you want.  Tou might have a very summarized version of the P&L say for the last month.  You might have that same summarization, only instead of last month, maybe the last 12 months or this quarter or the last three quarters or whatever.  And you’re not really changing the underlying structure of the spreadsheet to do that, where you would have to make substantial changes in a typical spreadsheet like Excel.  To do reporting in Excel, with the reporting functions mixed in with the data, it’s harder to do and you can’t get the variety of reports like you can with the SurvivalWare approach.  When you do do the reporting, you’re often making copies of the data or making copies of the spreadsheet and then changing it.  Again, it gets hard to be sure all the calculations are accurate and that you haven’t accidentally broken a link or done something to mess things up.  Fundamentally, the SurvivalWare approach is much, much better than the spreadsheet approach at doing very sophisticated financial analysis. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how often do you use SurvivalWare?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Roughly monthly.  At the end of the month, we close out our books and then we export the information to SurvivalWare and then look at reports. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how long have you been using it?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Three or four years, maybe five years – something like that. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And did you need any help learning how to use it or was it pretty self-explanatory?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Well, I think my case was not typical since Rusty’s my brother and Rusty’s also on our Board of Directors. I’ve gotten more help than probably the typical customer.  It’s easy to use and the documentation is really good. But, I’ve been very fortunate.  My guess is, from talking with Rusty, he’s responsive to everybody, not just his brother.  The support is excellent.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  What did you like best about SurvivalWare?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  I think what I like best is the fact that you can quickly look at things by month and then if you want to take a slightly longer view, you can look at them by quarters and then if you want to look at an even longer view, you can quickly switch to years.  You can look at a very summarized version of your P&L and then, if you see something that looks like you want to find out more about it, you can drill down and keep getting deeper and deeper.  It’s lots of different ways to look at your financial data is what I like best.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  What feature has become indispensible and really critical for your business?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Again, I think it’s the way you can look at your financial data in lots of different ways.  It’s not like with an accounting package—you have your choices of some reports, but you have to look at one, and then the other and it’s the ease with which you can look at your data with SurvivalWare.  You can just follow your instincts.  If you’re looking at your financial information and you think, net income isn’t as good as I’d like. I’m wondering why and you can just drill down and see the expenses or see the revenue and determine, is this a trend that’s been going on for months?  And quickly switch to months or switch to quarters.  The flexibility of how you can analyze your data I think is what’s best. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Have you, for example, had to show any reports to your outside companies or banks?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  No, we’re a privately held company.  We’re self-funded.  We don’t have any debt, so we really don’t have to show anything to outsiders.  Althoug, I do have a Board of Directors and I use SurvivalWare to display information to them.  Actually, during the Board Meeting we’re going to have SurvivalWare projected up on a screen and do a financial review that way.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Can you think of a specific scenario in which case SurvivalWare was able to maybe put your company in a better state than it would have been without it?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Well, there was a time period where I had a partner in the business who is no longer with me and he sometimes liked to exaggerate or emphasize certain things regarding the finances and I used SurvivalWare to do a reality check.  I felt like I was helped greatly by having an independent view of things. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And then, also, recently I believe, Rusty had told me about how he had noticed that commission expenses were out of whack?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Yeah.  You know, there’s the product and then there’s the company behind the product and the product is great.  But, the reason why the product is great is because Rusty has had an unbelievable amount of experience in analyzing financial data for all kinds of companies.  He’s focusing on smaller companies now, but he has had a lot of experience with larger companies, you know, multi-billion dollar companies and they use his software to do the top level reporting.  I remember one particular customer was a conglomerate up in Canada and it had billions of dollars in revenue.   The holding company had companies and those companies owned companies and so on.  It was quite a complicated consolidation operation and it all was done with Rusty’s software.  And the insights Rusty has gained over decades of experience doing financial reporting and modeling helps SurvivalWare customers.  The software is designed by this expert who has had all this experience. 

And then, if you have questions, you’re not just talking to some low level person or hot shot programmer.  You’re talking with someone whose had decades of really high level financial analysis experience. That commission issue was a good example. I asked Rusty to take a look at my finances for December. He called me back and said it looks like my sales commissions are  high for December.  I looked into it and talked to my accounting people and it turned out we accidentally booked January’s commissions into December.  Rusty’s the one that caught it. That’s an example of it’s not just the product, it’s the company behind the product that is so valuable.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, another thing in talking to other customers, they’ve said the ease of use and then also it’s a time saver in terms of doing the projections very quickly.  Do you find that as well?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Yes.  It’s designed to make it easy for you to do things like projections.  It has a lot of nice short cuts.  And again, it’s Rusty’s expertise of doing decades of projections for huge corporations that helps.  I remember when I worked for him back in ’89 and ’90, one of the customers was Federal Express and I remember I was doing technical support.  I remember helping them do their projections with Rusty’s productWith all that experience he’s had helping all kinds of companies, big and small, do projections, it’s all been in the software, so that it’s much easier to do it.  So, yeah, it is easy. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, what other types of businesses do you think could benefit from SurvivalWare?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Well, I think any kind of business because with any business it gets down to the dollars and cents and profit and cash flow.  All businesses look at those things.  SurvivalWare is general enough that it can help.  It’s especially useful for businesses of any size that have cash flow problems.  You think oftentimes that it is small businesses that have cash flow problems.  General Motors had a cash flow problem, as well.  It’s useful for any size business.

And you know what’s interesting?  You get these big corporations like General Motors and some of the concepts are the same, whether it’s for a small business or big business.  In other words, one of the metrics SurvivalWare tracks is days of cash.  In other words, based on your daily rate of spending money and how much cash you have, SurvivalWare figures out how many days of cash you have.  That number is a helpful measure whether you’re General Motors or a one person company. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Anyway-—you do feel like there’s adequate customer support?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Yes.  I know I can get a hold of him, but in chatting with him, I hear him talk about his other customers. It sounds like people get excellent support and that’s probably worth every bit as much as the cost of the software.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, would you recommend it to a friend or colleague?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  Yep, I definitely would.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

Do you have any last minute comments or questions?

Mr. Hank Luhring:  No, it’s just, you know, a fabulous piece of software and a fabulous company behind it, so I think it’s a real bargain.

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Customer Interview: Terry Armstrong

I worked closely with Terry Armstrong during the Spring of last year to help her use SurvivalWare in her financial analysis engagements, often under considerable time pressure.  She was most appreciative of the help, and graciously agreed to spend time with Kelly relating her experience with the software.  I am happy to announce that several enhancements found in SurvivalWare version 3.0 are a direct result of Terry’s insights and “dumb questions.”

Some excerpts:

“due diligence .. financial analysis .. projection analysis”

 

What I was doing was working with a company that linked up businesses who were interested in going public with hedge funds for finances.  And what we did was we did due diligence work to assess companies’ operations and we did some past financial analysis and some projection analysis for the hedge funds to look at and determine whether this company was a viable operation for them to invest in. 

“Spreadsheet .. was just full of errors”

 

I was engaging with a company that had 250 general ledger accounts that needed to be boiled down into 24 categories of income expense categories and consistently reporting how they did versus how they said they were going to do.  So, I would be trying to take all of these account balances and push them into this 24 account format every time I was going to be reporting.  And it was crazy to do that with a spreadsheet.  It was just full of errors and I started searching on the internet for a tool that would allow me to do that and I knew it was going to be working with projections.

“signed up for it because it had a free trial..”

 

So, I found SurvivalWare on the internet and signed up for it because it had a free trial.  It had high recommendations.  Seemed to be a tool that would work for what I wanted it to do and I—so I signed up for the free trial and began to use it.

By the time my 30 days were up, I realized that it was something that was absolutely imperative for me to have to do this work and it worked really well. 

“And If I had had to do that with the spreadsheet, I would have been crazy.  It would have been absolutely insane.”

 

To take it from the raw data, from the company and put it into their spreadsheet would have been massive collating and sorting process because it had to be done 60 times.  And while we were analyzing and trying to figure out how to put their projections into a future basis, there would be lots of changes that were happening during this analysis process.  And If I had had to do that with the spreadsheet, I would have been crazy.  It would have been absolutely insane. 

The complete edited Transcript:

Interview with Terry Armstrong

January 12, 2010 – 9:30 pm ET

 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Tell us about your company and your specific role in the company.

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  I have to tell you a story of a company that I no longer am working with to connect it to SurvivalWare because about six or eight months ago, I stopped doing that work and I may go back to it, but right now the financial world has flipped a few things around, as you know, and what I was doing at that time is no longer available to me.  So, I’ll tell you about that story because what I’m doing now doesn’t relate to SurvivalWare.

What I was doing was working with a company that linked up businesses who were interested in going public with hedge funds for finances.  Okay?  And what we did was we did due diligence work to assess companies’ operations and we did some past financial analysis and some projection analysis for the hedge funds to look at and determine whether this company was a viable operation for them to invest in. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, how did you find out about SurvivalWare then?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Well, when I was doing this work, I was having to take companies’ financial data and distill it into a specific format that the hedge funds wanted to see it in and it was a grueling process – changing significantly every time I had a new engagement.  Also if the hedge fund decided to engage the company and move forward, there would be future analysis of, “this is how you said you were going to do and this is how you did.”  I was engaging with a company that had 250 general ledger accounts that needed to be boiled down into 24 categories of income expense categories and consistently reporting how they did versus how they said they were going to do.  So, I would be trying to take all of these account balances and push them into this 24 account format every time I was going to be reporting.  And it was crazy to do that with a spreadsheet.  It was just full of errors and I started searching on the internet for a tool that would allow me to do that and I knew it was going to be working with projections.

So, I found SurvivalWare on the internet and signed up for it because it had a free trial.  It had high recommendations.  Seemed to be a tool that would work for what I wanted it to do and I—so I signed up for the free trial and began to use it.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Oh, great.

And after you began using it, then you decided to go from there and actually buy a package?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Oh, definitely.  By the time my 30 days were up, I realized that it was something that was absolutely imperative for me to have to do this work and it worked really well.  I worked with Rusty who was giving me instruction and help all along the way because I was using it for a purpose that the software was probably not intended for.  A major sorting tool is what I was using it for and to keep my sorting consistent throughout the periods.  So, I might end up with five years worth of financial information from a company in each of the five years would need to be put in and report out in these specific 24 categories and present income statements and balance sheets in these specific categories each time.  And that is what SurvivalWare did for me. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Did these companies use a specific type of accounting software. 

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Well, it varied. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, how easy was it to learn how to use SurvivalWare?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  It was pretty easy.  I did use Rusty a lot.  He gave me a lot of pointers as to how to do it, but it functioned very well once I got the hang of it. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, was it easy to load data from different accounting software and do projections?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Well, the ease of loading from the accounting software depended on whether the client was able to get the accounting data into a spreadsheet format because I would either download a couple of times.  It works pretty well with QuickBooks, but even QuickBooks downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet and then into SurvivalWare.  So, that’s the way I always used it.  I created a spreadsheet from the accounting system and then fed the spreadsheet into SurvivalWare.  And I got to build my row maps and went from there.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And before were you just relying on kind of Excel?  What was your user experience with Excel and what are some of its limitations?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Well, I’ve been using Excel since it was Lotus and there was some product even before that, so I have been using a spreadsheet a long time – 30 years, I guess.  Mostly I’ve used Excel and I’m a pretty high level user of Excel.  For the purpose that I was using it, it would have been a nightmare to try to do this with Excel.  I could not have done it with Excel without a lot of errors, and inconsistencies. You know, to take 100 general ledger accounts and pull them into a 24 account level of structure consistently over years, past data and future data would have been an Excel nightmare.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so–?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  –And trying to figure out how to do it.  I never did it with Excel.  As soon as I saw the tasks and realized what was going to be necessary, I started looking for another tool because I wasn’t going to have that kind of patience.  I knew it wasn’t an application for Excel, you know?

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how was SurvivalWare able to do what Excel – what would have been a nightmare in Excel?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Well, once you have the account number or account name and you link it in the row map to the final account name, all you have to do is just import it and it does all that sorting for you. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, how often were you using SurvivalWare and how long did you use it for?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  I used it about a year.  My work had distinct phases to it.  I would spend time at the client’s site gathering a lot of information and preparing a narrative report and then I would move into the financial analysis phase.  And when I moved into the financial analysis phase, I worked with SurvivalWare constantly for two or three weeks for that client.  Once I got the financials in the format that I needed them in, then I would move into the next phase of the project which was to do some projections with regard to stock sales and purchases and then my intent was to use SurvivalWare again once the client company and the hedge fund linked up to assess their performance against their projected performance.  But, I never got to that phase of it. 

So, what I was doing during the year that I was working with SurvivalWare was intense working with SurvivalWare in that middle phase of the reporting work that I did for each client.  So, I probably had about 15 clients that I went through that process for in a year.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what is it that you liked best about SurvivalWare? 

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Well, I like its functionality.  I liked the way it took data from many different types of sources and allowed me to pull it into one piece of software.  I think it would have been outstanding and really valuable to compare your actual performance with the projected performance. 

The part that I liked the best that I used was just being able to take a massive amount of data and consistently and predictably distill it into a comprehendible format of income statement and balance sheet to analyze that data.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what did you—you were pretty content in terms of the financial projections being on point and not full of errors?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Yeah, I found it pretty easy to use and pretty flexible so that it could accommodate a lot of different scenarios.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what did you think about the graphics as well?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  I didn’t get into the graphics very much.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  So, was the data showing—just showing all of the past and then there’s perhaps financial information as well as the financial projections and they were satisfied with that format?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Yes, they didn’t want to see anything graphical.  They wanted to see the numbers in a specific format and that’s all we showed them in addition to narrative work that we did.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And were they satisfied with the SurvivalWare projections?

Ms. Terry Armstrong: Actually, I would take the SurvivalWare data and put it back into a spreadsheet format because that is what they required.  It would be month-by-month for five years.  So, we’re talking about 60 columns of data had to be pushed through this sieve to get it from two or 300 general ledger accounts pulled down to 24 general ledger accounts that were reported in a financial statement format – sixty times for one client.  So, I put it back into a spreadsheet format for them to look at because that’s what they wanted.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Oh, okay.

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  To take it from the raw data, from the company and put it into their spreadsheet would have been massive collating and sorting process because it had to be done 60 times.  And while we were analyzing and trying to figure out how to put their projections into a future basis, there would be lots of changes that were happening during this analysis process.  And If I had had to do that with the spreadsheet, I would have been crazy.  It would have been absolutely insane. 

And what SurvivalWare allowed me to do was to have a holding place where the links between the huge number of general ledger accounts that the company was using to collect their information.  And the few number of general ledger accounts such as hedge fund wanted to see all this data and allowed me to keep those links straight month-by-month through a five month historical process—I mean a five year historical process and a five year projection period.  So, it was a massive amount of data that was constantly being manipulated and reworked until it finally settled into the product that would be presented to the hedge fund in the form of a spreadsheet.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, in your opinion, how much time do you think you saved using it?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Oh, an immense amount of time.  Hundreds of hours per client.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And then, what types of businesses do you think would benefit from SurvivalWare?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Well, I think the projection capability which I never really got into for myself, but I looked into because I had expected it to go in that direction.  Any kind of business would benefit from that, particularly smaller businesses that don’t have any mechanism for doing that already.  Ones who aren’t projecting their cash flow, who don’t know what’s going to happen to them with regard to cash flow over the next “x” months or years. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And did you feel like, Terry, it was adequate customer support?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Oh, outstanding.  Outstanding customer support. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And would you recommend it to a friend or a colleague?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  I definitely would.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Well, do you have any maybe last minute questions or comments?  Something that possibly you would have liked SurvivalWare to have done that it wasn’t able to?

Ms. Terry Armstrong:  Well, the only other thing I would add is that I was able to get help any time, day or night, and it was invaluable.  I got into this work not knowing how it was going to function and if I hadn’t had SurvivalWare, I would not have continued with it.  I would have had to get out of it because I’m not interested in pushing numbers through spreadsheets like that.  That would have been grunt work that would have been just driving me insane.

I really appreciated it and I thought Rusty was outstanding and he was always willing to help me figure out how to do things with the software that maybe somebody else hadn’t asked to do before and I really appreciated it.  I thought it was an outstanding piece of software and the price was unbelievable.  Definitely a very good value.

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Customer Interview: Kirk Allen, AlphaGraphics

I read recently that there are over 900,000 franchise establishments in the U.S.  With support from a franchisor like AlphaGraphics, I can see why.   I’ve heard the CEO of AlphaGraphics express time and again the idea that the success of the franchisor depends entirely on the success of the individual franchisees.  The management team at AlphaGraphics takes a long term view of the business, and they genuinely care about their franchisees.  They don’t just talk the talk, but walk the walk through SurvivalWare and other initiatives.

We, of course, are pleased as punch that AlphaGraphics has adopted SurvivalWare as a financial reporting standard  They have been a great company  to work with these last 5 years, and we look forward to continued success working together the next 5 years and beyond.  If I was going to open a franchise business, they would be the first ones I would talk to.

Check out their website at www.alphagraphics.com

Here is an in-depth interviw with Kirk Allen,  National Director of Financial Services for AlphaGraphics, who manages the SurvivalWare project.  Kirk explains what they are trying to do to help the franchisees better run their businesses, and how SurvivalWare is a key part of that effort.

Interview with Mr. Kirk Allen

December 30, 2009; 4:30 p.m.

 

Mr. Kirk Allen:  I work for AlphaGraphics and I’m the National Director of Financial Services.  One of my main tasks is helping the regional teams to drive bottom line profitability with our franchisees.

It’s a franchise-based network, and our centers are individually owned.  And so, it’s real important to help our centers maximize their investment.  And so, that’s one of my roles.

My main task is helping centers maximize their profitability.  If there are some centers that are struggling, specifically working with them through some of the challenges that they’re facing, trying to identify, you know, kind of what the root cause is and what changes they need to make whether or not it’s sales related or cost related.

Our franchisees are required to submit financial statements to us on a monthly basis.  It’s the 30th day after the end of each month they’re required to submit them.  And starting January 30th, each of our owners will be required to submit those statements to us via Survivalware. 

I got a Bachelor of Arts in accounting from Point Loma Nazarene University and also have a number of designations, one of which was I got a stockbroker’s license along the way and some other things.

We found out about Survivalware as a company, I believe it was, five to six years ago.  The Director of US operations had come across Philip Campbell’s book on cash flow.  And just through having read that, he got in touch with Rusty and Philip. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how long have you been working with AlphaGraphics?

Mr. Kirk Allen:  I’ve been working with AlphaGraphics coming up on 12 years.

I’ve probably visited about 35 or 40 percent of the centers at one point or another over 12 years.  And while I don’t directly support any states now, at different points in time, I was responsible for 14 different states for providing the regional work. 

So, one of my roles had been the regional operations manager prior to my role now.  And I worked directly with the franchisees trying to help them with various things in their business.  That would be in their “point of sale” system, working with them on pricing, reviewing financials, those types of things. 

About 7 or 8 years ago, myself and another individual developed a financial overview tool which we took a considerable amount of time.  It was something where we would take their financial statements and input by hand into this tool.  And through the tool, it would create all types of benchmarks for them, compare them to the profit leaders of our network. 

And it was something that we would do a couple of times a year.  And it was just a critical part of our support process, something that me and this other individual, Danny Wilson, spent quite a bit of time helping just to develop it. 

It was an Excel based tool.  And while it did a good job, you can imagine, we were really limited to how often we could look at financials, because in order to use that tool we actually had to take a financial statement key it in by hand. 

So, one of the real appeals to Survivalware was being able to export it directly from QuickBooks, and then import it into Survivalware.  And of course, there’s the one-time mapping that you do, to map things from that QuickBooks file into a common chart of accounts. 

Sometimes there are things that people do that’s unique to their centers and their financial statements, yet Survivalware allows us to have a common chart of accounts so we can evaluate all of our franchisees on a common basis. 

Something that kind of played into that decision was, one, really making the process a lot easier.  Rather than it being kind of a painstaking, you know, key entry of the financial statements, that it was rather a process where the franchisees import it.  They submit it to us and we’re able to run reports where we can look at all of our centers and have a discussion or review that. 

And in about a day, Survivalware allows us to review all of them where really that would have been something that would have taken, you know, a month or two to do previously.  Now, we can do it in one day. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  How many different locations does your network contain?

Mr. Kirk Allen:  Right now, we have roughly 235 centers in the US that are open and operating.  We have other ones internationally in Brazil and in the UK and other places. 

The US centers are the only ones using Survivalware at the moment.  We’ve talked about getting some of our other franchisees internationally set up.  We just have not done that yet. 

We’ll run a vital metrics report.  We know where the benchmarks are and we’re able to real quickly determine where our franchisees should be, the progress they’re making, and adjustments that need to happen in order to help them improve. 

The actual running of the report and reviewing it does not take a significant amount of time.  It’s having the individualized conversations with our regional teams on, what are things that we can do to help out, what is the action plan for each of the centers?  That’s a process that we spend a day doing each month.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how much time would you say that you’ve saved using Survivalware versus the Excel tool that you helped design beforehand?

Mr. Kirk Allen:  It’s not just the time. It’s really less about the time that’s been saved and more about this: rather than looking at somebody’s financials twice a year, we’re now able to review financials on a monthly basis.  We’re able to identify trends that are going on really immediately. 

For instance, this past year with the recession, we were able to help identify concerns early on.  And we were able to have conversations with the franchisees and help them through that process on things.  Those converations would never have happened previously.

So, it’s more about the increased level of support that we’re able to give and about being able to review just the health of our network, on an in-depth basis – on a monthly basis as opposed to a semiannual basis.  There’s no doubt about it, the time savings is very significant.  Before we would have a whole team of people doing it. That time is being replaced with actually providing support.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  So, for example, what kind of trends that maybe you would be able to catch early on that you could remediate with Survivalware, if you could think of maybe a specific example that has come up?

Mr. Kirk Allen:  Sure.  

We have benchmarks for labor, you know, our sales for full time equivalent on a monthly basis, three month, a 12-month trend.  And so, labor this year, with sales pretty much all over the place having gone down, we’ve been able to identify on a case-by-case basis what centers need to readjust their business model specifically in labor. 

It’s also helped out through the equipment decision making process and determining, are they at a place where they really need to add additional equipment.  And then, specifically the cost of goods sold on different products, it’s a way of helping to make sure they’re in line with where they should be.

We have 103 different vital metrics that we’re looking at.  That’s a lot. 

About 95 percent of our franchisees are using QuickBooks.  So, that’s worked really well for our network.  There are some franchisees that use other types of accounting software. 

We’re just in the process of moving to version 3.0 of SurvivalWare.  And every version is becoming more user friendly with the different accounting systems out there. 

So, in regards to Excel, you know, one of the things that sometimes comes up is this: franchisees, quite frankly, will ask the question, “What is it that I can do in Survivalware that I can’t do in either QuickBooks or exporting a file from QuickBooks over to Excel and then creating my own custom variables?”  For us, with Survivalware, there’s two things. 

One is that all this is customized for us.  And so, we have an unbelievable amount of data calculated each and every month and all those things are done automatically.  And charts can be quickly done, whether it’s a monthly basis, a quarterly basis, etc.  It has become very easy to do that.

In addition to that, within our network, our vital metrics, – all 103 different benchmarks – our franchisees can compare themselves to the rest of the network.  So, looking at their sales per full time equivalent, they’re able to see last month where did they rank against the rest of our network.  Were they at 35th percentile, the 45th percentile?  And where did they rank over the last three months and where did they rank over the last 12 months?  That’s something they just can’t get anywhere else other than SurvivalWare. It is how are they doing against the rest of our network. 

We also show our median, our 12 month median, each and every month.  We update our profit leaders on a quarterly basis.  Those are things that you just can’t get from QuickBooks, you can’t get from an Excel template. 

Survivalware is really the only place that our franchisees are able to get that.  A franchisee may say — if they’re not using it — they may say, “Well, we’re improving.  We’re doing well.”  It really opens up their eyes when they see exactly where their center–and how their center is doing against the rest of the network, and even more importantly, how they’re doing against our profit leaders in our network.  Because now all of our franchisees are wanting to improve their bottom line, and it helps to know what our most profitable centers are doing.

Those are our important things.  What I like the best about Survivalware is being able to allow our franchisees in our vital metrics reports to see exactly how they rank against the rest of the network, in the 103 vital metrics that we have. And then also what their trends are. 

From the standpoint of the franchisor, the thing I like the best is it allows us to quickly identify a problem and be able to work with those owners before it becomes too late.  From our standpoint, it will sometimes be the difference of helping a center making it through a difficult process.  We are able to help them because we’ve identified the issues early on.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Would SurvivalWare be a good fit for other businesses? 

Mr. Kirk Allen:  I think it could be something that would be very helpful, specifically business where there’s a lot of different units whether it’s a franchise network or a business that just has a lot of different outlets.  I think Survivalware would allow them to identify trends and identify the common characteristics of their best centers, and then provide those benchmarks to the other units to set goals to strive for. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –And so, was it easy to learn how to use Survivalware? 

Mr. Kirk Allen:  –Well, the first version was actually not easy.  The first version was a huge step forward for us, but it was not the easiest process.  A significant step forward was made with version 2.0 (Fall 2008) and now with version 3.0, it’s a very user-friendly interface.  From my standpoint, it’s fairly easy to use.

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