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The Foundation Is Built for the Future

Personalized Programming’s growth was astonishing. With it came all the problems associated with a rapidly growing technology company. Managing ten to twenty people is one thing, managing fifty-five is quite another. At some point you have to start hiring managers just to manage the people. I resisted creating middle management as much as possible. I tried to let the teams manage themselves with my constant guidance. Because we had grown from the ground up, and very few of my people ever left, we had a tremendous wealth of technical and industry knowledge in our programming group. With twenty-five percent of all independent physicians across the United States using The Medical Manager, the practice management industry flowed through Alachua, Florida. We didn’t have to decide what direction to go in; we were surfers riding the powerful wave of industry demand. There was so much work to do that it was almost impossible to keep up.

By late 1994, I began to realize that I couldn’t possibly run all the programming groups and the financial and management aspects of a multimillion-dollar business, as well as prepare for the next wave of growth. I needed some serious help. So I did what I always did—worked even harder and waited for the flow of life to do its thing.

It was in this backdrop that I first met Tim Staley. Tim was a professional software developer and senior IT consultant who had decided to move his family out to the country. He had chosen the tiny town of High Springs, just a few miles north of Alachua, as his new home. If you’re a professional IT person and you move out to my neck of the woods, you are certainly going to hear about Personalized Programming. Tim applied for a job just like anyone else would. But Tim was not like anyone else—Tim was another miracle. Just like everything else that showed up exactly when it was supposed to, life had dropped this highly skilled and experienced IT developer/executive in my lap. He would not only end up being the solution to the software development problems we were having, he would also end up being the solution to a much larger problem that hadn’t even surfaced yet.

I remember the first time I met Tim. He was in a rush to find employment in the area so he could move his family up before school started for his children. After seeing his résumé, I allowed HR to set up a Saturday meeting so Tim did not have to miss work. He was young, very clean and proper looking, and in his right hand he was carrying a bible. That’s an unusual thing to bring to a job interview, but Tim was clearly a very religious Christian, and he wanted me to know it. I had no problem with that, but I was not sure that he would not have a problem with a ponytailed, sandal-wearing yogi for a boss.

We went up to my office, and we began to get to know each other. Tim was, in fact, a rocket scientist. He had worked for years at Harris Corporation writing code for missile guidance systems. I immediately realized I could check off the “smart enough” box. He had been a developer, team leader, and project manager. Tim excelled so thoroughly at his overall project development and people skills that he was now a senior consultant for Texas Instruments running large projects for clients. Interestingly, at that time he was consulting on a major IT project for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida.

We began to discuss development philosophy, and we were as different as the way we dressed. To me, software development was a creative art—to him it was an engineering project. The truth is, I knew it had to be both in order to be successful in the long run. Tim clearly brought to the table the experiential discipline that comes from being a senior software engineer in a Fortune 500 technology company. We were desperately in need of that knowledge and experience.

Tim and I spent hours together and really got to like each other. He was a perfect fit for what Personalized Programming needed, both professionally and personally. But I still had one issue that needed to be resolved. If Tim was going to seriously consider taking the job, I needed to be sure he was going to be comfortable with who I was. At some point he was certainly going to hear about the Temple across the street. I decided the only fair thing to do was to take him over there and show him around.

I was amazed by how open Tim was to the Temple. He was fascinated by the artifacts of the various religions and asked a lot of deep questions about meditation and yoga. It turned out that Tim was much more than a very religious person—he was deeply spiritual and was truly a lover of God. Rather than being offended by how I had come up, he was inspired by it. A very deep spiritual bond formed that day as we shared our spiritual experiences and beliefs with each other. This bond of spiritual friendship grew stronger and stronger over the next ten years that we worked together. Apparently, life had outdone itself once again I hired Tim, and we decided to quietly bring him in as a developer instead of as top management. He wanted to work directly with my people to get to know the development environment firsthand. The plan was that after some months he would start to reorganize and take charge of the development teams. I would remain in charge of product direction; he would be in charge of engineering. I couldn’t wait to find out how much of the load Tim would be capable of carrying.

The Medical Manager product was more than fifteen years old by the time Tim began working with it. It had been designed for small doctor practices and was now being used to run large clinics and sprawling managed care organizations. It was not unusual for some of our larger dealers to install systems that supported hundreds of users. If this kept up, we would eventually outgrow the technical capabilities of the software. In addition, our clients were beginning to ask us to modernize the overall product. The writing was on the wall: unless we did something, our days were numbered. If we wanted a solid foundation for the future, we were going to have to completely rewrite the product.

This was not a decision for the faint of heart. It was going to take a tremendous investment, putting at risk years of development resources and millions of dollars. As I pondered over the enormity of the project that lay before us, it finally hit me—this was the real reason that Tim had been sent to us. He had been sent to reengineer The Medical Manager into a totally new product with the latest development technology.

We couldn’t afford to stop the rapid pace of development of the existing system, so I gave Tim the go-ahead to hire an entire additional development team to build the new product. Intergy would be the new product’s name, and it was a good thing we were building more buildings because we were certainly going to need them. I trusted Tim implicitly and gave him whatever he asked for. It took us close to five years to release the new product, but when all was said and done, we ended up with a product that would keep us in the marketplace for many years to come. As I look back now, it is so obvious that we could never have succeeded as we did without Tim showing up exactly when he did. How in the world does this keep happening, again and again?