Teaching People How to Start Their Own Business

This is what Jim Cook, Program Facilitator for the YMCA/YWCA of Winnipeg Self-Employment Program, uses SurvivalWare for.  Last Fall, Jim was looking for software to do Integrated Financial Projections, and came across SurvivalWare after looking at 20 or 25 programs that just would not integrate the Income Statement and Cash Flow.  Together with Susie Romales, the Administrative Assistant for the program, he created the following set of intructions for how to use SurvivalWare to analyze a start up.  They ran the first set of students through the course in December, and start another batch of eight students in a couple of weeks.  He reported that the students are happy with SurvivalWare, and found it easy to learn and use.  Great job Jim and Susie!

Here is the PDF:

http://www.survivalware.com/blog/Winnipeg-YMCA-YWCA-Self-Employment-Program-Financial-Projections-Instructions.pdf

 

1. Setting up Your Business

2. Entering Data

3. If you are going to be borrowing money

4. Printing Reports

5. Analyzing the Reports

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: Deb Drexel, Accounting and Business Manager

Deb Drexel is the accounting and business manager at CivalArts,  a civil engineering and land surverying company in Longmont,  Colorado.   She spent time with Kelly recently discussing how she uses SurvivalWare and what it does for her company.

Some excerpts: 

Ease of Use

“I tried another program,  a cash flow kind of a program, and I gave it up just because it was so difficult to use.”

“I have been using SurvivalWare probably for about six or seven months.  And yes, it was very easy to learn.  I honestly don’t know what I’d do without it now. ”

Pre-built model results in huge time savings

“Survivalware is already done.  For Excel, you have to still go in and put in formulas and manipulate whereas with the Survivalware it’s just already done.  Huge time savings.”

Good value

“It’s a very good value for the money.”

Who should use SurvivalWare?

“Any business where there is cash flow needs, any other kind of construction businesses, any seasonal businesses, landscaping perhaps, perhaps even accountants where they have huge amounts of cash flow at one time of the year and the rest of the year their cash is scarce.  But, particularly businesses that are seasonal or very dependent on what the economy is doing. ”

visit their website at: www.civilarts.us

Here is the complete interview:

Interview with Ms. Deb Drexel

January 5, 2010; 4:00 p.m.

 

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

Ms. Deb Drexel:  We are a civil engineering and land surveying company.  And my role in the company is business manager in charge of accounting, HR, all the day-to-day business functions.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how long have you been with this company?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  About 15 years. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what other sector domains do you have experience in?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Well, we’re primarily, like, construction, but I also have a strong banking background and IT as well. I worked for IBM for a number of years.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, how did you find out about Survivalware, and what made you decide to buy it? 

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Well, I saw an ad in some magazine.  I don’t even remember what it was anymore, like a Verizon magazine or something, advertising it.  And I checked out your website and thought it looked very simple to use. 

I use QuickBooks for our day-to-day accounting activities and financial reporting, and it seemed like it was very similar to QuickBooks in just the ease of use.  I have tried another program, and it–I won’t mention what it is.  But, it’s a cash flow kind of a program and it’s–I gave it up just because it was so difficult to use.  And there wasn’t any mechanism to be able to tie the QuickBooks accounts into it like there is with Survivalware. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, you’re pretty familiar with QuickBooks.  How about Excel as well? 

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Yes, very familiar with both.  I’ve been using QuickBooks for, oh, my goodness, 13 to 14 years, and Excel for about the same or longer. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what, in your experience, are some of the limitations that you find in Excel and how does it compare to Survivalware?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Survivalware is already done.  For Excel, you have to still go in and put in formulas and manipulate whereas with the Survivalware it’s just already done. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, in that respect, it cuts down on a lot of time?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Yes, that would be a correct statement.  Huge time savings.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And that is important to you, and that’s something that you think is important for your job?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Yes, I would say that’s probably one of the most single biggest factors when I decided to make the purchase for Survivalware, that was probably one of the biggest selling features. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Was it easy to learn how to use Survivalware?  How often do you use it and for how long have you been using it?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  I have been using it probably for about six or seven months.  And yes, it was very easy to learn.  I honestly don’t know what I’d do without it now. 

What I kind of needed, what my main focus was — was trying to get a handle on cash flow, number one, but also to try to create a dashboard of key performance indicators that are important to me and to our industry to follow and track.  So, that’s the biggest thing that–the biggest help with. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, about how often do you use it?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  I would say several times a week. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And did you learn it on your own or with help from LSI? 

Ms. Deb Drexel:  There was a tutorial or something in there, and I kind of learned it on my own with the tutorial.  And I think there was a free web class or something I attended and got a little help from that, something on your website.  I don’t remember at this point. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, in your opinion, is it easy to load data and do projection?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Yes, it is. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what do you like best about Survivalware?   

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Probably just the ease of use and that it seems fairly stable and that I can get what I need pretty quickly. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how has it helped you–you said earlier, you know, you don’t know what you would do without it now.  How has it helped you in terms of, you know, transforming or maybe evolving in your current business?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  The biggest thing that it’s done for us is just to help keep track of the cash and to be able to project out, let’s say, three to six months where you think the cash is going to be based on some assumptions that are happening with the economy and what’s going on in your industry and that sort of thing. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, can you think of maybe any specific examples where it’s really come in useful in terms of, if you hadn’t had an accurate projection, maybe something could have gone wrong? 

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Well, let’s just say given the current economy and the fact that we’re in the construction industry, we went from having a very profitable year in 2008 to being not so profitable in 2009. 

When I took a look at it back in April, it gave me the ability to be able to project out where I thought our cash was going to be–well, about six months.  And that really helped so that we could do what we needed to do as far as making staff cuts and expenses and all that sort of thing so we weren’t in as much of a bad spot as we could have been.    

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And do you feel like there is adequate customer support?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  You know, I’ve never really had to use the customer support.  Based on my experience, I really haven’t had a need for it too much yet. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And do you think that other people who might not have the same experience as you do in terms of IT would be able to become as familiar with the program and be more–be as comfortable with it?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Well, I think it would take a little bit more work if you didn’t have an IT background.  But, I think if you have worked with Excel and if you know–are at least an intermediate QuickBooks user, I think you could probably figure it out. 

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

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Yes, I would.

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

Ms. Deb Drexel:  Any business where there is cash flow needs, any other kind of construction businesses, any seasonal businesses, landscaping perhaps, perhaps even accountants where they have huge amounts of cash flow at one time of the year and the rest of the year their cash is scarce.  But, particularly businesses that are seasonal or very dependent on what the economy is doing. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Can you think of any other last minute comments or questions? 

Ms. Deb Drexel:  I think it’s a very good value for the money, and that was a big factor in my deciding to purchase it.  It’s a very good value for the money. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  In terms of being, you know, pertinent in terms of being in construction and engineering, can you think of maybe anything that you would need to make it more personalized towards your company?

Ms. Deb Drexel:  No.  I’ve kind of been waiting.  I don’t know if your new version has come out yet that will allow me to plug in more key performance indicators that I’m looking for that might be applicable to my industry that nobody else really cares about. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:   For example? 

Ms. Deb Drexel:  we have to keep a real strong eye on equity per employee, because if the equity goes too low it limits our ability to be able to obtain loans, lines of credit, that kind of thing from banks, and our ability to grow when the economy does improve.  So, we have to track some other kind of funky things like that that are more specific to our industry. 

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Customer Interview: Mike Wilkerson, CFO of Dominion Equipment Parts

Mike Wilkerson is a savvy CFO who knows the importants of doing cash flow projections. 

Here are some excerpts from an interview that took place January 10,  2010:

Does what any small business needs to do

“I Googled cash flow or something along those lines and SurvivalWare came up and so I said, well, boy, it’s certainly cheap.  It’s $500, not a lot of risk involved.  I’ll try it.  It probably won’t do what I need it to do, but it’ll be a start in the right direction.  And really, it’s been more than I expected.  For the cost, it’s got a lot of little bells and whistles and does exactly what any small business needs to do which is projecting where the cash is going and where it’s going to be at any certain point in time and that’s critical, obviously, if you need to borrow money from the banks.”

Gain a competitive edge when requesting bank loans

“The key is — anytime a small business can present financial statements and cash flow statements to the bank’s liking –  that separates you from a large group of their customers because a lot of times, they’re not that sophisticated.” 

“Banks love balance sheets and income statements, but they really like cash flow statements and they like to see that everything ties down and balances back.  SurvivalWare does that.”

A visual tool to show how things play out

“It is a tool where a lot of times owners or companies and people within organization, they see if you sell a $30,000 piece of equipment, they see $30,000.  They don’t see that maybe it’ll cost you $20,000 to buy that piece of equipment, that you gotta pay some people, that you’ve got some overhead and then, at the end of the day, you don’t end up with $30,000 in cash.  So, it’s been, like I said, it’s been a very visual tool to show how things play out, where the money all flows to.”

Works great with MAS90 accounting software

“We’re using a fairly large company called Sage Software and they market a product called MAS90 that we converted to probably in 2004.  We moved from a DOS-based system to MAS90.  It gives you a cash flow statement, but just no way to do cash flow projections.  The beauty is that we’ve been able to export those financial files out of MAS90 in a CVS format into SurvivalWare without having to re-input all that data.”

Visit their website at: http://dominionequipmentparts.com/

Here’s the complete interview:

Interview of Mr. Mike Wilkerson

January 10, 2010 – 5:00pm ET

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Why don’t you go ahead and tell us about your company and your specific role in the company?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  My role is the Chief Financial Officer and we have four operating entities here involved in heavy equipment in some way.  We’ve got a company called Dominion Equipment Parts and we distribute about 10 different product lines nationally through a warehouse distribution system and we’re selling parts and rubber tracks and hydraulic hammers and things of that nature to equipment dealers and end users. 

And we’ve got another company called American Track Carrier, where we import a piece of equipment from Japan and we sell it to end users and dealers or we sell it to an affiliate company, American Track Rentals and who, in turn, then rents this equipment to equipment dealers and end users in the natural gas pipeline industry.

And then we’ve got a fourth company, Dominion Credit, which finances used construction equipment for equipment dealers.  So, collectively, we’ve got separate—we’ll we’ve got separate four—we’ve got separate LLCs for those four companies and we operate those individually.  But, it’s some–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Okay.

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  And so, I was going to say, it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to $40 million in revenue. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, what other industries do you have experience in?  How long have you been with this current company?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  I’ve been with this company almost 10 years.  My previous experience has been in insurance in the financial industry, financial services industry is in banking and auditing.

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

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Well, basically, it was kind of on a whim.  You know, I needed something to do some projections that didn’t require that I have all the formulas right in Excel to make sure that it [unintelligible] and that I didn’t miss something.  So, I was looking for something – a tool that, you know, would work internally for us and it would project to the banks well. 

And so, I Googled cash flow or something along those lines and SurvivalWare came up and so I said, well, boy, it’s certainly cheap.  It’s $500, not a lot of risk involved.  I’ll try it.  It probably won’t do what I need it to do, but it’ll be a start in the right direction.  And really, it’s been more than I expected.  For the cost, it’s got a lot of little bells and whistles and does exactly what any small business needs to do which is projecting where the cash is going and where it’s going to be at any certain point in time and that’s critical, obviously, if you need to borrow money from the banks. 

So, I guess—is it your dad that I have been talking with? Rusty?

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Uh huh.

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Okay.  Yeah, and, you know, he’s been great to work with and helpful as I have come across problems or issues related to the software.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what type of accounting software are you familiar with or are you—have you used in the past or are you still using?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Well, we’re using a fairly large company called Sage Software and they market a product called MAS90 that we converted to probably in 2004.  We moved from a DOS-based system to MAS90.  So, we’ve been on that since 2004.  And it gives you a cash flow statement, but just no way to do cash flow projections.  So—and the beauty is that we’ve been able to export those financial files out of MAS90 in a CVS format into SurvivalWare without having to re-input all that data.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Great.

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

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Well, you know, Excel is a great tool.  I have some knowledge.  I am certainly not by far a super user or anything, but you don’t know what you don’t know.  Rather than trying to take the time and learn Excel and all its features and how to build a cash flow model with all those formulas, it’s already been done for me.  You know, here’s what I’m asking for and what I was looking for and was something that probably a lot of small businesses are looking for.  So, nothing unique.  So, rather than take the time to learn Excel to the degree I didn’t know or did and didn’t do, I just decided to invest that time in an outside cash flow software package. 

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

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  It was fairly easy.  I mean, you know, again, like I said, Rusty’s been very helpful in making that transition and it’s like anything else, you’ve got to stay, you know, you can’t put it away for a month and pick it back up in another month or two.  You kind of forget where you were or how you did things.  So, it was a—it wasn’t a difficult transition, but once you learn the background for the model behind some of the things in SurvivalWare it becomes pretty easy.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, how often do you use it?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  I use it at least every month.  I update monthly and we close our month end for the companies.  I go ahead and export those files into SurvivalWare and then see how that plays out for the remainder of the year.  And, of course, here at year end, it’s—I’ve been using it fairly often as we go and look at 2010 and how we think things are going to play out. 

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

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Probably maybe less than a year I would say.  I can’t remember exactly, but somewhere in that year timeframe. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And when you were going through the learning process, did you take advantage of the webinars that were offered or did you rely mostly on the customer support from Rusty?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  I think I did one webinar, but mostly it was having Rusty walk me through how to import the files because really that’s the most difficult part is importing the files, but once you do it and you get it mapped, then it’s all—then it’s a matter of just understanding, okay, if I change this number, where does it fall out?  What else changes?  So—but, Rusty was probably a bigger help in getting the files exported into SurvivalWare and then understanding, was there a programming issue?  Something that I didn’t see?  Or didn’t understand?

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  How easy is it to load data and do projections?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  It is—like I said, once you do it a couple times, it’s very easy.  The hard part is getting the first time doing it and mapping all the accounts within SurvivalWare.  But, you know what?  After that, it’s just a matter of loading a CSV file and it shows up on all the financials.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And now, do you use it for all four different LLCs?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  I use it for three of the four LLCs.  I really don’t need it for the finance company. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Why is that?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  We just don’t have a need for projections and all of that with—we know what the portfolio is and we know what it spits off as far as cash.  So, it’s not as critical.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what do you like best about SurvivalWare?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  I think, you know, two things.  It’s fairly intuitive once you get over the initial learning curve.  Two, the cost is relatively inexpensive for I think a pretty powerful software program.  You know and the key is really to the bank’s liking and anytime a small business can present financial statements and cash flow statements, that usually separates you from a large group of their customers because a lot of times, they’re not that sophisticated. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, what has been missing from your previous financial projections or accounting software that SurvivalWare provides?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  SurvivalWare does what we didn’t have before, and that’s a projection tool.  You know, anybody can put projections down in Excel for sales, but the key is cash.  You can book receivables all day long but if you don’t collect, your cash isn’t going to happen.  So, that’s where SurvivalWare has filled in a gap that we currently had that our other systems didn’t have.  So, like I said, it’s filled a void that was missing.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And can you think of maybe a specific example and maybe one of the companies where having that projection really helped kind of, you know, maybe, oh, no, I can speak the word in French, but not in English.  This is terrible.  That you could avoid any kind of shortfall?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Well, I mean certainly in this economy in 2009 and going forward in 2010, I have been able in, obviously in 2009, to lay those projections out, show the owners of the company who are not accountants, and show them where things are going to be.  So, we kind of know ahead of time, generally speaking where we’re going to be.  But, this puts some specific criteria to it. 

What type of loss?  What type of gain based on sales projections are we going to be?  How much cash is that going to throw off and where are we going to be with our line of credit with the bank?  Are we going to be maxed out?  Are we going to have available—availability in the line to make additional purchases?  So, that’s been real critical in 2009, being able to say, here’s what we’re going to look like in the next three months, in the next six months.  And then, if we take those projections out and say, okay, it worked in ’09, I proved that to you, here’s—let’s take our projections for ’10 and here’s where they’re going to be.  Where do we need to improve?  Where do we need to kind of watch things to make sure that we don’t get in trouble?

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And would you say you have noticed a difference and maybe the profitability or in the satisfaction of the company?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  I don’t think this is just a tool.  It certainly is not going to make profits or create losses. But it is, again, it is a tool where a lot of times owners or companies and people within organization, they see if you sell a $30,000 piece of equipment, they see $30,000.  They don’t see that maybe it’ll cost you $20,000 to buy that piece of equipment that you gotta pay some people, that you’ve got some overhead and then, at the end of the day, you don’t end up with $30,000 in cash.  So, it’s been, like I said, it’s been a very visual tool to show how things play out, where the money all flows to.

And when you have historical information to prove that, and then to project those out, you know, it’s not numbers you’re making up.  It’s again, trying to show people where that dollar goes and how it flows through to the bank account at the end of the month.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And would you say that the bank has been satisfied with the visuals that are provided by SurvivalWare and just the financial projections, in general?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Yes they have.  They’ve been very pleased with our numbers.  We’re dealing with lending requests in the millions of dollars.  Banks just aren’t going to lend you millions of dollars on an idea or on past performance.  They want to see how this is going to play out.  So, it’s been very beneficial in that fact that we’ve got the numbers.  We know—we’ve taken the time to input them and see how this thing is going to play out, so that it’s not just an idea, it’s an actual—there’s actual numbers to support the idea and that it does cash flow.  Banks love balance sheets and income statements, but they really like cash flow statements and they like to see that everything ties down and balances back.  So, and SurvivalWare does that. 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Great.

What types of businesses do you think would benefit from SurvivalWare?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Do you know what?  I think any small business that’s got a sales revenue that may be – whether it’s seasonal, whether it is static, I think any small business, you know, should invest in some type of software that shows cash flow projections, so that it is like your personal household budget.  You gotta know where the dollars go so at the end of the month, you’re like, God, what happened?  Where did the money go, you know?  I got paid.  But, I don’t have any money in the bank account.  Well, you have to go through that laundry lost of things, besides the mortgage and the utilities, you gotta figure out, well, how much did I eat out?  You know?  You’ve got to do the same thing with the business is, you know, where does all this money go?  And it’s not—it’s a limited supply.  So, I think any small business that wants to (one) find out where their dollars are going and (two) you know, how can they grow that business?  You know, SurvivalWare certainly seems to be a good tool at a reasonable price.

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

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Yeah, I mean, I’ve always called and Rusty’s always answered the phone and, you know, if he can’t get back with me, he’s prompt in getting back with me at a later time. 

Like I said, it exceeded my expectations for the price that we paid.  I really didn’t expect it to be that great of a tool.  I didn’t expect to get the support that I’ve gotten.  So—but, in being right up in northern Virginia, you know, it’s kind of nice.  It’s not somebody across the country.  So, it’s worked out for a lot of reasons. 

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

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  Yeah, I certainly would, yeah, in a small business roundtable.  Certainly, how do you do things better?  How do you do things smarter?  I would certainly recommend it to someone that had the same need that I did.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Great.

Can you think of any last minute comments or questions?

Mr. Mike Wilkerson:  You know, the only couple of things that come to mind is as far as improvements and that’s really somewhere having a minimum cash balance.  Right now, I don’t know that there’s something in the system that allows you to say, I want to maintain a balance of $100,000 at all times.  So, you kind of have to play around with those numbers to get back to where you need to be. 

And then, I think there is a limitation on term notes in the system to five, where we probably have 10 or 12 that I’d like to input in the system, but I can’t do it.  I have to lump it all together and then, make my own assumptions as far as what those amortization schedules look like.  But, for my initial purposes, it’s worked very well.

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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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Customer Interview: JR Samples, Chief Accountability Officer

JR Samples has spent 30 plus years in sales and business ownership, and currently runs a consulting firm called Accountability Partners.  He uses SurvivalWare to make it easy for his clients to provide financial data that he can analyze in a common format.   The participants in one of his CEO peer groups no longer have to laboriously (and sometimes inaccurately)  key numbers into an Excel template.  Instead they just export their P&L and Balance Sheet to CSV files and email them to JR, who loads the data into SurvivalWare.    Reports and graphs are presented at meetings held 3 or 4 times a year, and the participants share experiences and try to figure out how the best performers do as well as they do.

Learn more at JR’s website:  http://www.accountabilitypartners.com

Here is the interview:

December 24, 2009

2:00 PM

 

 

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

Mr. JR Samples:  Hi, I’m JR Samples.  I’m the CEO of Accountability Partners, and we are a management consulting firm assisting firms on revenue growth and personnel development.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And how exactly do you go about that, actually?

Mr. JR Samples:  Well, we many times get engaged with clients that are seeking to take their company up to the next level and looking at substantial increases in revenue and/or they’re profit challenged, and I come in to look at the dynamics of that and how to get some of that working better to increase the profitability cash flow and ultimately the valuation of the company.

And then, we look at where the organization needs to go and who the players are and what development they need or what roles need to be filled that we’re looking forward to and work on a very hands on role in that context.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  So, do you do–what kind of companies or organizations do you work with?

Mr. JR Samples:  I principally am working with firms less than 20 million in revenue, and many of which are technology oriented, whether that’s from software development, professional services, technical services, managed services, software as a service, principally in the technology side, but much of the revenue analysis, sales analysis, sales process, marketing process is consistent across many industries.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, what kind of other maybe sector domains do you have experience in?

Mr. JR Samples:  It’s principally been the technology sector that is servicing any number of financial industries, manufacturing, distribution.  I’ve also done a lot of work in the financial recovery sector doing financial audits and recovery services for organizations, as well.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what kind of interested you or got you started doing this?

Mr. JR Samples:  Well, I’ve spent 30 plus years in sales and business ownership, and half of that’s been with Fortune 500 firms and half of that’s been as an owner or partner in my own small medium business.  And so, I’ve had the benefit of running my own business and knowing the challenges associated with that, and I’ve also been exposed to the best practices of Fortune 500 firms who really do have in many cases, in my experience, excellent resources and processes.

And it’s really the Fortune 500–we sometimes think Fortune 500 firms, they have all of these resources and how wonderful it must be to have all of that, and that’s true.  But yet, at the same time, the Fortune 500 or 1,000, Fortune 1,000, they’re actually the largest users of management advisory services.  So, when you think of Accenture, Mackenzie, it’s really still these Fortune 1,000 firms that are tapping into professional business advisors.

So, through my work as a division president for a Fortune 500 firm, I had some exposure to processes, if you will, that were really just fantastic.  And so, what I decided to do in 2005 was kind of work with small medium business owners, of which I had an experience and a passion for, and bring some of those best practices to help them in their growth as an organization as well as the principal shareholders.

So, I try to blend a lot of the best practices of sales and marketing and of personnel development, and yet blend that into the culture that has been created within a privately owned company.  And that’s sometimes a challenge, but that’s–but, at the same time, you can really see the impact of this right away.  So, it’s very rewarding from that standpoint.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Great.

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

Mr. JR Samples:  Well, one of the things that I work in–on in both my–as my focus on revenue growth and personnel development is I do run CEO peer groups for the technology business owners.  And so, we get together three times a year and work on our business best practices.

And one of the areas that we share are financial data.  So, what’s different about our peer group, which is kind of important to understand the use of SurvivalWare, is I was tired of–you go to trade shows and you see other–talk to other business owners and you ask how’s business and, oh, business couldn’t be better, things are fantastic.

And you know that that’s only true for a very small percentage of everyone, but yet, you don’t really as a small business owner sometimes, you don’t know who you can trust and you don’t know who you can really go to to get good advice.  And so, as we put our groups together, one of the things that we insisted on was transparency on the financial numbers.

So, we don’t care whether somebody’s making money or not, that’s not a requirement of being in our group.  But, you do have to have transparency because we don’t want to sit and listen to somebody tell us how wonderful their business is and then look at the financials and not see a correlation between what they’re telling us and the results that are really happening.

So, it’s a membership only group by invitation or referral.  And we really kind of work as a board of directors in that sense of each other, but really getting into the numbers.

And when you get into the numbers, that’s many times where you can really find out how people are getting their results and detail behind that.  So, it really takes your conversations to a much deeper more effective level as a business owner when you can really see the financial results somebody’s getting.

And so, I hate to go off on a long diatribe here, but I’ll continue, is there’s a lot of benchmarking studies.  And you can always kind of see where your results line up against this invisible peer group.

But–and that’s fine and that’s wonderful.  But, other than that, there’s nobody you can reach out to and say, hey, tell me how you got those kinds of results.

And so, what we do is put people in a place where we share those results, and yet they can look across the table and talk to the person that’s generating those results.

So, in the context of that, we–I needed a process and a set of software that would allow me to do the comparisons between organizations.  And so, I had set up a fairly extensive Excel spreadsheet of where I would send a spreadsheet out to the clients and the clients would fill out the input section of the spreadsheet and send it back to me.

And then, I would run a variety of macros and create my comparison charts and my graphs and some of those things.  And it worked, but it was a little kludgy for me and it was a little kludgy for the client.  And 50 percent of the time, the data that came back wasn’t accurate and took a lot of time.

So, I was speaking with a friend of mine at Comp TA who had recommended on a different initiative entirely Judy Shream [sp].  And in my conversations with Judy, I was also explaining what I do, she said you need to talk to Rusty Luhring.  And I said, great, why do I need to talk to Rusty Luhring.  And she said, well, he has a set of software that does exactly what you’re doing presently.

And she didn’t necessarily say whether I should drop what I was doing or not.  She was basically making a professional referral.

So, I got in touch with Rusty, I think about a year ago.  And we began using the SurvivalWare product for our data capture and our comparisons.

And from that standpoint, it’s really been a huge improvement both for myself and my clients in that at this point, all they need to do is send me a CSV file out of their–most of them are on QuickBooks–out of their QuickBooks.  So, there’s really no additional spreadsheets for them to fill out and that sort of thing.  They click a couple buttons, get their file and send it to me.

And then, I receive that file and import the data into SurvivalWare where we’ve already set up the mapping to make sure that we’re comparing apples to apples.  So, a lot of the work that I do with the firms is get all the work in the right buckets.

And so, SurvivalWare allows me to do that–do those conversions, if you will, so the client never has to worry about changing their chart of accounts or changing anything about the way they do their business.  SurvivalWare itself takes their data and puts it into the areas of comparison that we use in our peer group.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

So, basically, you had mentioned that you got back some inaccurate information.  And what–how were you able to tell that it was inaccurate?  And just in general, what is your user experience with Excel and what are some of its limitations?

Mr. JR Samples:  I’m fairly adept at Excel. One of the biggest differences for the clients is they never have to fill out anything.  I just take an export of their data, which for them is fairly simple to do–we’re talking minutes–and I don’t have to worry about them keying data into a spreadsheet–and doing that whole translation themselves from their financials into my spreadsheet and hoping they put it on line 12 instead of line 13 and that they entered $12,000, not $21,000.

And so, it eliminated all of those kinds of things from the client standpoint.  So, then from my standpoint, it certainly made it easier in that basically from meeting to meeting, it’s very simple to then import that and run the comparison reports that we’ve set up to prepare for the meetings.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And was it easy to learn how to use SurvivalWare, and how often do you use it?

Mr. JR Samples:  I would say it’s been a fair learning process.  The support that I’ve gotten from SurvivalWare has been phenomenal.  I only use it every other couple of months when my meetings are occurring.  And so, that means I’ve in essence used it three or four times.

And so, I haven’t quite myself gotten my own rhythm down.  Bu –let me tell you this – it’s far less onerous on me using SurvivalWare than my previous process.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  So, in a lot of ways, it really has saved you a lot of time?

Mr. JR Samples:  Oh, yeah, without question, yeah, yeah.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And just if you could guesstimate, about how much time do you think it has cut down on?

Mr. JR Samples:  Probably 50 to 60 percent.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Wow, okay.

And when you were learning SurvivalWare, did you kind of jump in on your own, or did you have help from–learning SurvivalWare from Rusty at all?

Mr. JR Samples:  Yeah.  No, I had a lot of support from Rusty and the SurvivalWare staff.  They were very patient, assisted me significantly with webinars and sharing Go To Meetings and sharing back and forth and just been–actually did some customization that I was looking for, so just has been very pleasant and competent in helping me.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, how easy would you say is it to load data and do the projections that you need and have all of the graphics, etc.?

Mr. JR Samples:  ­The loading of the data is exceedingly simple, the importing of the CSV files, in my case, the matching process–so, for sake of argument, somebody might add some new accounts that have to be mapped someplace within my matrix – very simple to do, very easy to do.  The reports are excellent.  The few unique needs that I had, Rusty was able to assist me with in a very timely fashion.  So, all of that has just really assisted me in my preparation and in my deliverable back to my peer clients.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And what do you like best about SurvivalWare or what’s something that you really appreciate that it can do?

Mr. JR Samples:  Well, I mean, really in its entirety, the fact that for what I do in collecting the data, analyzing the data and presenting the data, it’s just–it’s simplified my life significantly, and as importantly, it’s simplified my clients’ process for providing me the data.  So, if I had to pick one, I would probably pick the fact that it’s simpler for my clients to get me the data.  If I had to pick one, that would be it.

But, all of the rest of the stuff that I used to go through that I don’t have to go through or has been significantly improved is also very important and material.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, how have your clients responded when–you said you have these meetings, kind of like the board of directors, and when you’re able to all sit down and kind of look and analyze the data, I mean, what was their reaction when you kind of brought in this new software?

Mr. JR Samples:  They’ve been very pleased with it, as well.  Principally, from their standpoint, the deliverables that Rusty was able to help me with were somewhat similar to what they’ve been used to seeing.  So, from their standpoint, the output hadn’t changed dramatically.

What changed for me was the ease of use of presenting that output, if you will.  What–from the clients’ standpoint, in my particular case, they love the fact that they didn’t have to sit down with an Excel spreadsheet, because many of them were not necessarily conversant with that, and fill out rows of data.  They could tell their controller to send me the CSV file and they show up at the meeting and get to look at the important stuff.  So, they’ve been–that’s just one other thing that they didn’t have to worry about in their busy lives.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:

And so, ultimately, would you recommend SurvivalWare to a friend or a colleague?

Mr. JR Samples:  Oh, yeah, absolutely.  It’s–depending on the kinds of things that they’re wanting to have or doing, there’s a lot of demand nowadays for business intelligence KPIs, key performance indicators.

And this SurvivalWare is a great method for not necessarily just the small companies, but certainly the small companies that don’t have literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to invest in this KPI business intelligence type of thing to get, in many cases, the core data that they need in running their business on a day-to-day basis.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And also following up that line, what types of businesses do you think would most benefit from SurvivalWare?

Mr. JR Samples:  Any business – a non for profit business, for profit businesses.  It’s really any executive even within a business unit versus a standalone company that’s trying to measure financial data and performance.

So, one of the areas that SurvivalWare addresses is that we can use non-GL information.  And so, we can have and do have the numbers of staff in different categories, whether that’s administrative, development, customer support, sales.  And we can do various analysis of the productivity based upon some of those things.

So, really anybody that’s measuring and managing people and numbers can find some value in using this.

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Customer Interview: Stan Touchstone, 18 year small business veteran

Stan Touchstone has been a customer for some time.  He is the owner of Kissimmee Valley Feed and Ranch Supply in St Cloud, Florida – just outside Orlando.  I find his story inspirational.  He is one of the nicest people I’ve met.  Yet he has this dogged detrmination to learn and make himself and his company better.  I am honored to be considered part of his financial team. 

About the customer interviews:  my daughter Kelly recently joined the SurvivalWare team, and is based in Paris, France.   She is a marketing assistant, and reports to Rosalie Cushman who is based in Southern California.  Kelly created and manages our Facebook page and Twitter account, and is an understudy to our key video guy, Sam Sabzehzar.   She is doing a series of 10 in depth customer interviews to help us tell the SurvivalWare story.  She has been living in France for 2 years now, and convinced me to open a representative office there (which is “”in process”) based on the incredible contribution she is making to the company and the fact that she’s willing to work for slave wages if we pull it off.  Phone and internet service is great in Paris, so it is almost like she is next door.

My thanks to Stan and to Kelly.

Here is a link to Stan’s Website:

http://www.kissimmeevalleyfeed.com/index.htm

Here are some excerpts:

The Value of having a pre-built model

“I guess the biggest positive for me in SurvivalWare is all that Excel type of work of setting up equations and trying to get to the thing, it’s already done for me..”

Uses it monthly

“I upload my data on a monthly basis.  I’m in the program using it at least once or twice a month.  Basically what I like to do is set up projections and then go in on a monthly basis and kind of review where I’m at physically with the projections that I’ve made in SurvivalWare, and then make appropriate changes in my business if I see something’s not right.”

Helping to manage cash

“Yeah, one thing is I have a line of credit that I use to fund purchasing inventory.  And being able to make my projections–my–the business that I’m in, because of the weather here in Central Florida, is very cyclical.

And November, December, January and February, I’ll do 65 percent of my annual sales in those four months.  And even though I may have a great cash balance in the spring, after those four months of a lot of business and earning a lot of profits, I chose not to completely pay off my loan for inventory not all in one month, of which I could, but I cash flowed it out over several months and I used SurvivalWare to help me determine that would be the best thing to do.”

Improving Profits

 “I also use SurvivalWare to look at my expenses and figure out how to massage those so that through those summer months, I was able to for the first time earn profits during those three months during the summer, typically months that were–I operated at a loss.  So, SurvivalWare allowed me to be able to look at the numbers and predict and do what ifs on a very quick basis to make decisions in my company so that I now have 12 months operating in the black instead of eight months operating in the black and four months at a loss.”

SurvivalWare is something different

“I like just about every aspect of SurvivalWare.  I like the graphics on the home page.  It’s something different.  It’s easy to look at and you know which spot you need to go to just by the picture.”

Small business wisdom

“I’ve learned some wisdom from him (Rusty) on operating the businesses.  It’s always great to have kind of a–whether he realizes it or not, he’s part of my financial team.  I’ve kind of got a team of men and different people and business operators that I rely on their comments and their council, and he’s part of it, whether it he realizes it or not.”

eLearning would be really nice

“Maybe the only thing that I could see is possibly if Rusty could put together some type of demonstrations that I could look at online in my own time–.”

Here is a transcript of the interview in its entirety:

Interview of Mr. Stan Touchstone

By Ms. Kelly Luhring

December 22, 2009

1:15 PM

 

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Hello.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Hello, Kelly.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  How’s it going?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Doing just fine.  How are you this morning?

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Good, good.  It’s actually afternoon.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Excuse me.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And where are you now?  You’re located in Florida?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Yes, St. Cloud, Florida, just outside of Orlando.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

I actually have a friend who’s from–where is she from again?  I can’t remember.  It’s somewhere near Orlando, though.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Okay, yeah.  Big–got a lot of places.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Uh-huh.  Okay.

Why don’t you go ahead and tell us a little bit about your company?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Okay.

My company name is Kissimmee Valley Feed and Ranch Supply, Incorporated.  I’ve been in business for 18 years.  And I started out primarily selling cattle feeds and supplying ranch supplies to the area cattle ranches that are in Central Florida.

It’s mainly a large commercial type business, but in the last few years, 10 years or so, it’s evolved into a large retail outlet where I supply any type of animal feeds and supplies for any kind of animals from zoo animals to commercial agricultural type animals, dogs, cats, any of the zoo animals.  We supply feed to the major attractions here in the Orlando area for their exotic animals, and then all the related supplies that may go along with that.

We do about $1.7 million worth of business a year.  It is a high volume type sales but low margins that’s associated with this business.

So, it’s–even though the sales figures appear high, the margins are usually pretty tight and slim on it.  So, we have to very–be on top of our financial statements monthly to make sure that we’re not spending more money than we make.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And so, what–how did it end up evolving over the years?  Why did it change more into–why did you decide to deal more with retail and–?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  –Well, it wasn’t really a decision.  It was an opportunity.  In the Central Florida area–it was 19 years ago, which it still is today – we have some of the largest cattle ranches in the Southeast are here.  And matter of fact, the largest ranch in the United States is in our county.  It’s over 300,000 acres in land size and very large in cattle numbers.

But, these large vast lands around here right next to a large urban area such as the Orlando market the last 10 years or so with all the growth and influx and people into the state of Florida, our little town and surrounding towns around Orlando has become [unintelligible] communities for this major metropolitan area.

And with those come families and smaller land tracts.  We have a lot of horses in our area that people use for pleasure and their competition type endeavors.

And so, that’s provided new opportunities for me as a store being able to meet those needs of those folks supplying good quality dog foods and horse feeds and small animal feeds as well as the new attractions that have built in the areas that all include animals into their theme of their park.  So, it’s just–it’s kind of been a huge trend in the United States in the last 10 or 15 years of these urban areas on the outskirts of these large cities as people that live in the middle of these towns, as they earn incomes and more monies, wish to move out of that very concentrated life into a little bit more open space and enjoy their animals and buy–you know, want to have animals for their personal enjoyment and satisfaction.

So, that’s–I’m trying to meet those needs is what it’s evolved into the last few years.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And then, tell us a little bit – what’s your specific role in the company?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Okay.

I own the company.  I started it from scratch, as well as most small business owners know that you have many titles and wear many hats.  I do all the accounting work–well, I say that.  I do have a certified public accountant that does the majority of my work, but the day-to-day billing, invoicing, coding payables, paying bills, payroll, all those things I do as well as delivering feed, customer service, cleaning restrooms, office work, building displays within the retail environment of my store.

So, I, you know, I play every major role there is in the business, I do it.  I do have what–three other employees that help me with this.  But still, we are a–we’re a small business and you do those kind of things day-to-day.

And so, that’s–I don’t really have a primary role other than just to see that everything works in benefit of each other and we all work towards a common goal of trying to make sure we earn enough money to pay our bills and provide for my personal goals, paying for my [unintelligible] retirement just like anyone else.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And what sector or domains have you–do you have experience in before getting into this business, for example?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Well, I have grown up in rural areas of the South on small farms, and then kind of as I finished high school, went to college at the University of Florida and earned an animal science degree, managed a couple of large cattle operations before I opened the store for myself.  These other cattle operations were for other owners, and I worked in a management role with them–And went to several different schools for learning how to operate business profitably and always been kind of fascinated with the accounting side of business and the financial side of it.

And so, that’s–everything that I know financially and have learned how to operate spreadsheets and use this information that I’ve got from SurvivalWare, I’ve had to learn on my own.  I’ve had no formal training in it.

My formal training has been in how to meet the nutritional needs of livestock and animals and to use those animals to provide income for [unintelligible].  It’s kind of a funny way how these things wind up, but I am fascinated with the financial side of the business and like to look at numbers and been involved in–with volunteer organizations from the financial management [unintelligible].

So, it’s kind of just been a personal thing of mine over the years–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Okay–.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  –Again, everything I’ve learned I’ve had to learn on my own.

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

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  I found out SurvivalWare from Philip Campbell and Never Run out of Cash.

I stumbled across the book and Philip through the internet just in my personal searches and things that I like to look for, and I purchased his books and read his books.  And through that, that’s how I learned–found out about SurvivalWare.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And what made you decide that it was a good investment?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Well, I–it was a, you know, a risk, try something.  It seemed fairly inexpensive for what I was gonna get.  And it was–looked like it would provide a need.

When you get cash flow projections from your accountant, they’re always kind of, at this point, looking backward, so to speak.  And with the SurvivalWare information, I could actually do projections, cash projections out into the future and be able to look–utilize past data that I had paid for from my certified public accountant in financial statements and balance sheets and be able to use those actual numbers in simple transactions to be able to predict out into the future what my cash balance–what my business would look like in a year’s time if I followed these steps.  And that’s what my primary interest in SurvivalWare was all about.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

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

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Well, I really haven’t, and that may sound kind of odd because I’ve had my financial–my CPA that actually prepares my financial statements.  Just from a legal standpoint and from an IRS standpoint, I’m the kind of person who likes my Is dotted and my Ts crossed, so to speak.  And so, I manage my businesses by the books and I like everything to be accurate.

So, I didn’t rely on my own personal use of software because I felt like I would be making mistakes because I have no formal training in it.  But, I would–we developed a system with my CPA that he was able to generate me very accurate financial statements on a monthly basis for a reasonable cost.

I think he used the Peachtree Accounting Software.  And so, I let him kind of worry about the mechanics as long as I got the reports at the end of the month on a timely basis so I could look back and manage my business and see where things needed to be changed going into the future, building histories and things like that.

So, I really have nothing to compare SurvivalWare to other than a yellow sheet of paper and a pencil and an eraser and did my own little financial calculations and projections on paper.  So, that’s–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Okay–.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  –In the past.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And so, in your opinion, was it easy to learn how to use SurvivalWare?  Did you learn it on your own or with help from the Learning SurvivalWare Company?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Majority of it was on my own.  There’s still some of it that I feel like if I touch a button, the thing’s gonna disintegrate.  But, that’s personally.  I’ve just got to practice with it and use it much more.

And I really have not had any formal training like in Excel.  Most training I’ve had in Excel is I went down to the local bookstore and found a book that was on my version of Excel and kind of mustered through that the best I could.

But, I do like SurvivalWare because it’s–the equations are already built into each line, and all I need to do is just put a number in there and know that at the bottom of the column, it’s gonna come out right.  And so, it’s–and it may be the best kind of learning is where you sit down and do it yourself and learn how to operate it yourself instead of working with things.

It takes a little bit longer to do that, but once you’ve been through it yourself and have–rely on no one but yourself, you tend to–at least for myself, I tend to focus on what I’m doing a lot harder and make sure that I do learn it so I don’t have to keep repeating the lesson, so to speak, each time I want to do something.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And so then, your user experience with Excel, in your opinion, what are some of its limitations and how does it compare to SurvivalWare?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Yeah, I would be very poor on answering this question appropriately because I really do not know how to use Excel that well at all.  I’d be the first to say SurvivalWare has really helped me and speeded up the process for me because it already has the calculations done for each line and each column. 

And I basically had to take the time to set the lines up so that at the bottom of the column it’s totaled out right.  So, as far as labeling each line if it’s expenses or ever what portion of the financial statements according to each one of those little brackets in SurvivalWare, getting it set up right.

And then, I don’t have to worry about doing the mathematical calculations or setting the computer up so it does it for me.  It’s already been done.  So, it’s very easy and fast for me with no financial software training.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay, great.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  [Unintelligible] SurvivalWare for me.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  I’m sorry?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  The–I guess the biggest positive for me in SurvivalWare is all that Excel type of work of setting up equations and trying to get to the thing, it’s already done for me in SurvivalWare.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Uh-huh, uh-huh.

And how long have you been using SurvivalWare?  And what is your use?  How often do you upload data or just do your projections?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  I upload my data on a monthly basis.  I’m in the program using it at least once or twice a month.  Basically what I like to do is set up projections and then go in on a monthly basis and kind of review where I’m at physically with the projections that I’ve made in SurvivalWare, and then make appropriate changes in my business if I see something’s not right.

SurvivalWare numbers are still coming up true and just, but my business numbers are not correlating with it.  And I look and make the changes in the business necessary to achieve the things that I want to achieve.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And can you think of any specific examples of where you’ve seen that you need to make a change in your business numbers and how you’ve done that, just something, I don’t know–.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  –Yeah, one thing is I have a line of credit that I use to fund purchasing inventory.  And being able to make my projections–my–the business that I’m in, because of the weather here in Central Florida, is very cyclical.

And November, December, January and February, I’ll do 65 percent of my annual sales in those four months.  And even though I may have a great cash balance in the spring, after those four months of a lot of business and earning a lot of profits, I chose not to completely pay off my loan for inventory not all in one month, of which I could, but I cash flowed it out over several months and I used SurvivalWare to help me determine that would be the best thing to do.

Instead of cashing out, it was better for me to pay a little bit of interest, extra interest on the money and then just pay the loan back out because in the summertime and the months of June, July and August, we’re very slow in the business.  And I just didn’t want to rob the business of any type of a cash balance or cash support knowing that in those three months in the summer that it was gonna be pretty difficult to operate each month profitable.

I also use SurvivalWare to look at my expenses and figure out how to massage those so that through those summer months, I was able to for the first time earn profits during those three months during the summer, typically months that were–I operated at a loss.  So, SurvivalWare allowed me to be able to look at the numbers and predict and do what ifs on a very quick basis to make decisions in my company so that I now have 12 months operating in the black instead of eight months operating in the black and four months at a loss.

So, those are the kind of things that it’s really helped me–able to better massage and really work my business so that it operates profitably 12 months out of the year.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Great.

And so, do–what’s one of your favorite things about SurvivalWare?  Do you like the graphics or just the ease of use?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  I like just about every aspect of SurvivalWare.  I like the graphics on the home page.  It’s something different.  It’s easy to look at and you know which spot you need to go to just by the picture.

I like how easy it is–we–Rusty helped me set up with my accountant the way they send me the month-end financial data via email in Excel spreadsheets, and then I–once we got things set up with Rusty, I was able to just–only just takes just a few minutes to download monthly financial data into the SurvivalWare software.  And just in minutes, I get very valuable reports that really help me manage my business.

Those are the–how easy it is, the graphics, all those things, I really like the whole software.  It’s a great tool.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And going on with that, do you feel like there’s adequate customer support?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Yes.  Rusty’s always been great when I have questions of answering the questions.  He’s supported me.  We’ve had a couple of issues of making sure we get different editions operating appropriately, and he’s been able to solve all those quickly and properly and been very much a pleasure to work with.

I’ve learned some wisdom from him on operating the businesses.  It’s always great to have kind of a–whether he realizes it or not, he’s part of my financial team.  I’ve kind of got a team of men and different people and business operators that I rely on their comments and their council, and he’s part of it, whether it he realizes it or not.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

And would you recommend SurvivalWare to a friend or colleague, or what types of businesses do you think would benefit from the software?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  I think any small business could benefit from this software.  And, yes, I do recommend it.  I don’t know if anybody’s purchased it.

But, for example, I sell feed products from Purina Mills, and there’s a group of dealer networks across the United States.  And they have men that is in charge of–their primary duties in Purina Mills is helping dealers with their financial analysis of their company.  And I’ve shown this software to them a couple of times and they found it very interesting.  I think they’ve even made some phone calls possibly to Rusty and looking at and found this.

I also was–in the last three or four years–I’m glad I didn’t get exactly what I wanted because of the downturn of the economy in the United States.  I’ve been wanting to do a large business expansion and I was able to make five year projections for my bankers and lenders, just a few keystrokes and then I had those projections completed and they were much more thorough and more graphic for the bankers to understand than what they were used to getting.  And they had some very positive comments about the software and had questions about what I was using and how I was able to generate those kind of reports.

So, through that, it’s just been kind of word of mouth, advertising and passing the information along about SurvivalWare.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Great.

And then, if there’s anything that you think that you would like SurvivalWare to do that it doesn’t now, any limitations maybe that you see with it?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Gosh, I’m not that smart.  I’m not a programmer.  I’m not an accountant.

Everything that SurvivalWare has in it has met my needs.  I haven’t had anything that it–I’ve run across to say I wish it could do that.  I’ve been very satisfied with the product as is.

So really, I don’t–I couldn’t see–I wouldn’t be the right person to ask for changes on that.  I’m not that well versed in programming and knowing what else to do.  So, those are things that–I’m very satisfied with the product the way it is now.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay, great.

Can you think of anything else you’d like to add, any last minute comments or questions?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Maybe the only thing that I could see is possibly if Rusty could put together some type of demonstrations that I could look at online in my own time–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Uh-huh.

Like a tutorial?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Tutorials on doing projections, some of the more advanced things, and have like little You Tube–I don’t know exactly–some type of a tutorial that I could go, because I do operate a small business and my time is very valuable.  If I’ve got 30 minutes in the morning before I open my store, then I could sit down and look at a tutorial at how to better use the program and get more out of it, that would be absolutely wonderful.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay, okay, great.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Something like that–it wouldn’t have to be in front of a live audience.  He could just do the tutorial using somebody’s numbers.  I would even be willing to lend him my numbers and let him–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Uh-huh, uh-huh–.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  –Say, okay, we want to–I want to look at opening a new store where I’m gonna go from 5,000 square feet to 15,000 square feet and how would I work through the mechanics of building a cash projection or projections on the spreadsheets, just do all type of what ifs and do tutorials on that so that I could sit down on my own time and be able to look at it and then go into the software and do it there.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Uh-huh, uh-huh.

I know that he has conducted a couple webinars.  So, they’re with groups of people that can go and see him run through sort of a tutorial process from his computer screen.  But, I’m not sure if that is more just introduction to the software or–.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  –Some of it was introductory and I did sit through the webinars.  For me and my business and the way I had to operate because I’m very hands on, we’re a small business, and it’s nothing against Rusty, but a lot of times, the times that he has to conduct those where it’s the benefit of a lot of people, I’m sitting there listening to the webinar and I’ve got a customer that walks in and wants a lot of feed.  And obviously, I’ve got to take care of those priorities first–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Okay.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  So, I would have to–I’m remembering a couple of the webinars, I had to get up and leave the webinar and leave it just playing while I went and worked with a customer or answered a–handled an issue with an employee or something like that because it was conducted in the middle of the day.

And that’s where–like I said, if he were to record the webinars and make them available to us so that we could go to it on the internet on our own time–I start early every day.  I get up early and I go to work early and I usually have 30 minutes to an hour early in the mornings that I can do just whatever I want to do, so to speak, without interruptions.  And that would be very valuable time that I would use to go through his tutorials to learn how to better use the software.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay, great.

Well, Stan, thank you so much for your time.  And how’s the weather down there?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  For Central Florida, it’s pretty miserable.  We’ve got–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  –Really?

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Yes.  Usually, we’re–I understand why everybody wants to move to Central Florida because we’re green nine–12 months out of the year.  We usually have a lot of blue skies.  But, the last several days has been cool and windy and overcast skies.

For us, high temperatures in the 60s is not the norm.  Usually, we’re in the mid 80s and kind of in the 60s at night.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Wow.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  So, it’s just kind of Central Florida wintertime.  It’s not–I’ve been other places in the world and it is much more miserable than this, and this is probably great for a lot of people.  So, I’ll just say that it’s a great place.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Yeah, it’s been, I guess, in the 30s over here.  We got a bunch of snow a couple days ago.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Yeah, yeah.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  But, even–my dad was telling me that in Virginia, they got up to 18 inches of snow.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  [Unintelligible] it’s just a mess.  The whole Northeastern part of the United States has just come to a screeching halt.  And they–I don’t blame them for leaving that area if they ever got a chance to go because that has got to be miserable living.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Well, I went to school in Philadelphia, and so that is–it gets pretty cold–.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  –Oh, yeah–.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  ­–And especially in the city with all of the high rises because there’s so much wind that whips around them.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Yeah.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  So, I wonder how I ever survived those winters.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  We have–our summers here in August and September can be very brutal, extremely hot, very humid.  And we have the issue with the hurricanes whenever they come through and have to deal with all the torrid rains and the strong winds.  And in this little town here, in 2004, we had three hurricanes blow across us – significant damage to buildings, trees, lines, infrastructure.  Everything was just a big mess for months on end.

So, living through those kind of has a very strong impact on [unintelligible] that you hear of a hurricane coming, you think about–every summer, when they roll around and it starts the “hurricane season,” you prepare yourself and get ready for it, everything from making sure your yard furniture is in an appropriate place because those become projectiles and can tear up property, things like that, to just making sure your roofs are in tact, your cars have gas, you have food in the house and you have the ability, the generators to produce your own electricity for weeks on end.

So, you have to prepare for those things.  And that’s the miserable part of Florida is the summer.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Yeah.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  So–but, anyway.  I don’t guess there’s any perfect place in the world to live weather-wise.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  This is true.

Okay.  Well, Stan, you have a wonderful day.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Thank you.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  And we’ll keep in contact.  If we decide–so, the–this has been recorded vocally.  And then, we might use some of the audio, or if not, just take some of your quotes, if that’s okay.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Okay.

I understand, and ever what you need to use, that’s just fine with me, and if you don’t use it, that’s just fine with me, also.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay, great.

Well, I think you said some pretty nice things, so.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Okay.

Thank you very much.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Okay.

Thank you.

Mr. Stan Touchstone:  Uh-huh.  Bye bye.

Ms. Kelly Luhring:  Bye bye.

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