Noob School - Episode 65: Andy Kurtz of Kopis USA

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

This week on Noob School, John sits down with Andy Kurtz, CEO of Kopis USA, a South Carolina based consulting firm specializing in custom software development, SharePoint and data warehousing and business intelligence solutions. Tune in to hear interesting stories, from how he got the bug to jump into the world of computer technology, to how he and his team overcame the challenges poised by Y2K, and much more. I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL

NewB School. All right, welcome back to Noob School. Today I've got a long-time friend, Greenville friend, Andy Kurtz. Andy owns company in town called Copus, K-O-P-I-S, and Copus is a strong company. They do mostly outsourced custom programming for businesses, mostly around the Southeast? Yeah, mostly. Mostly. And besides the contract programming, you also do.

You also, tell us about the other divisions you have. So we have a group that does work around the Microsoft Dynamics Power Platform. Power BI, big data visualization, and then the low-code, no-code solutions they have in Power Apps and Power Automate. We have a group that also does Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions for the SMB space. So Microsoft had multiple products, but they've since, I guess, two or three years ago, they've gone to a one centralized cloud-based. platform for the SMB side called Business Central. Okay. And we have a team that implements Dynamics Business Central for organizations.

And we do that all around the country. All the country. So if you have Microsoft Dynamics, or if you need custom development, custom applications, or what else? What was the third one? If you need dashboarding and data visualization with Dynamics Power BI. Got it. And the one thing I will say on the dynamic,

ERP side is we find it to be a platform that's great for fast-growing companies who are probably on a product like Quicken, which was great when they started the business. And they're bumping their head on that ceiling now of Quicken. I say Quicken, QuickBooks. For folks who have outgrown QuickBooks, they've outgrown it. And we have the ability to give them a lateral shift. So they have all the functionality they had, but they've created headroom to try to grow their organization.

And so we've worked real hard to put together a way to do that cost effectively for organizations. Good, good, okay. And how long have you had the business? I started Copus in 1999. So we are coming up on 24 years. Wow. Congratulations. I say wow too.

Yeah. Sometimes it's a good bow. We're going to get into how you started it and also the kind of the important steps along the way to get to this point because you've got a great business now. And oddly enough, here we are talking about technology. You measured in accounting. I measured in political science. I mean, but you kind of learned stuff along the way. How in the world did we get in technology?

I don't know. I suppose it's just so darn effective and popular that you kind of have to get into it. You do. And for me, I was exposed to it in high school. And honestly, I fell in love with the technology side. I actually sometimes ask myself, why did I go into accounting? There's a story there. Yeah.

Well, so, and also real quick, your company now, how many salespeople do you have? Oh, wow, that's a great question, because I should just know that right off the top of my head. I believe we have six. Six, okay. Six salespeople and one person who is leading that team. Gotcha. Gotcha. Great.

Okay. All right. So you have a significant company here in Greenville, but let's back up to the beginning and figure out how you ended up here. and also get some, you know, flavor along the way for what you learned about selling, you know, because you had to be a salesperson when you started. Oh, yeah. And also hiring and interviewing and some of the stuff that our new school folks would want to hear about. So I know you started out, I think, in Buffalo.

Buffalo, New York. Buffalo. Go bills. Go bills. All right. And you, and you, is tomorrow? No, tomorrow. No, number three.

Oh, number three. Okay. Yep. All right. Giving a shout out to the. Okay, that's good. The guy who had the cardiac arrest. How's he doing?

He's apparently doing well. Good. Mind blowing. Good, good. That's great. So your dad transferred to Tallahassee. Yep. And you transferred to a, you moved to Tallahassee and you moved into a new high school in 10th grade?

10th grade is when I went into that. Okay. McLeigh? McClay. Yeah. McClay was a, I mean, it's a great school in Tallahassee. It's a K-12 college prep school, small. I think my graduating class was 55 people.

That was it. But that's tough moving from Buffalo, New York, to Alassey, Florida, and entering a school with 54 people who have, for the most part, gone to school together at that point now for nine, ten years. And so I was the new guy who taught funny. Plus, you needed all new clothes. I needed very new clothes. I could also, I was able to get rid of my hockey stick, temporarily. So what sport did you transition to? You know, I played, so for me growing up in Buffalo, there were four sports. It was football, baseball, basketball, and hockey.

Clearly hockey was gone. And quite frankly, if you're in Tallahassee now, you can play hockey. But in the southeast back then, that wasn't an option. McLean didn't have a football program. So, for you. football was gone. I basically was a little bit shell-shocked, and for my 10th grade year, did not play any sports. I was so annoyed by losing hockey and football. And to this day, I'm very disappointed in the fact that McLeigh did have a soccer program, and I never gave it a chance.

I didn't consider it even an option to try playing soccer. So I ended up playing. I also played tennis. So I ended up playing tennis when I was my – I guess my junior and senior year when I was at McLeigh. But tennis was the only sport that I played that was an organized sport. Well, you're in great shape. Is it mostly biking now?

Well, so ironically, I still play ice hockey. Okay. So I picked it back up. And I play in a league here in Greenville. And then I road cycle a lot. Okay. Yeah. I mean, every weekend, if I can.

And then when you were in school in Buffalo, was it a private school? like that or was it a big school? No, it was a small school as well. I went to a parochial school, a Catholic school up in Buffalo. That was a K through 8 school. I think my graduating class had 24 people graduating from eighth grade. Okay. Well, you're moving up because I don't know how big Furman was, but it wasn't that big. It was, no, but the selection of Furman was partially based on the fact that it was size. You know, I talked to my high school guidance counselor and my criteria when I was talking and looking at schools, and they had to keep in mind, there was no internet to look this stuff up at the time. Our only real school option was, well, friends and

recommendations from guidance counselors or U.S. News and the report had their college book that they put out, right? So my guidance counselor, I told him my only two prerequisites were I circled the Carolinas because it was halfway back to Buffalo, and I said, and I want a small school. and they recommended. I look at Furman at Davidson and Wofford. We have three schools that they recommend I look at. And I ended up picking Furman. Did you look at all three?

I did, but through brochures. Okay. Not through coming and visiting. Yeah. I think it was a great choice. I think you probably would have liked all three of them. I think I would have too. You know, they're all good schools. But Furman was a great school, great experience, lifetime friends that I met there to this day.

It is funny. It landed me in Greenville, which I did not in 1987 when I graduated, think that that may have been the greatest thing in the world. But it has turned out wonderful. Thanks to people like you, it's turned out to be a great city. It's amazing. We have some wonderful people here. But it is funny when I talk to people that are roughly our age about picking school, it's always something like, well, my cousin went there. And she said it was a good place.

And so I chose there. So my guidance counselor recommended those three schools. and then my parents found friends who had a kid home for Christmas, I think it was, or it might have been for summer, actually. I think it was between my junior and senior year when I was making the decision. But who went to Furman? So I went and chit-chatted with that person, and they talked it up so much. I was like, why would I even think about the other ones?

I've got a recommendation. Yeah, yeah, interesting. And then the funny part of that, the whole story is I picked Furman. I got in. We were going to Buffalo, New York for a family reunion that summer before I even went to Furman. and we were going through Greenville on 85, and my dad says, hey, do you want to go see Furman? And I said, no. He's like, you're kidding me.

Why don't you want to see it? I said, because if I don't like it, it's too late. Too late, yeah. I'll be surprised in August when I show up. I like that. I like that thinking. That's good. That's good.

So you went to Furman, small, halfway to Buffalo, and you majored in accounting. So tell us about that choice. Yeah, so originally, when I, when I, when I, you were going to be able to see. I picked firm and they had a degree that was a business and computer science course. And so I picked it. That was one of the reasons I went there was that combined degree. And when I got there, the prerequisites that I was taking for that particular major, the computer classes at the time bored me.

I was doing a lot of self-teaching on PC. Everything we were learning was mainframe-related coding. And I just, it didn't, it didn't catch me at all. What year was that? That was my freshman year. So in 83, 83, 83, 84 time frame. So the, oh my gosh, so the revolution was already happening and you had mainframe teachers. Yeah, I am.

My roommate and I actually had a PC. Yeah. And I mean, I was doing, if you remember back in the time I was doing, well, it was Lotus 1, 2, 3 macro. development, but also D-Base as a language, was just starting to come about. And I was learning how to program in D-Base, but all on my own. So I switched, but I mentioned it was a business on a computer degree. I was taking accounting classes. My dad's a CFO, by the way. So I think accounting's a little bit in the blood. But I didn't know anything from him. The accounting classes just clicked. They just made complete and total sense to me.

And so when I decided, I don't want to do these computer classes, I'm learning more on my own than I am in these classes. I think that was a little bit of the, I was naive and I was also a little bit, I had a little too much self-confidence at times, honestly. And there's a little bit, when we get to some more of the story, I think that self-confidence shines through again a couple of times. But I was like, I can teach myself the computer stuff, but this accounting stuff really is fast.

It's interesting. Yeah. Well, I can appreciate the frustration you must have had because I was a little ahead of you in school. I don't know. I graduated when you were starting, but they were still, Citadel, they were still doing punch cards in minis and mainframes. And, I mean, I couldn't imagine going to one of those classes when you're actually doing stuff on the computer back in your room. Yeah, and doing, I mean, everything, including opening it and all these. But you know, now, D.

I didn't give it enough time. To be honest with you, it probably was a great major. Yeah. I just didn't. I wasn't patient enough. Right. Well, that's all right. That's why you're an entrepreneur, I suppose.

Probably. Once again, there's a theme that does run through a little bit early in my life. So did you know at DeBase 3, wasn't that an Ashton Tate product? Did you know the story behind Ashton Tate? I know there's a Greenville connection. Well, Tate. His name was George Tate. And he was from Greenville, went to Silicon Valley, and started.

D-base and added to Ashton because some marketing company said it would sound better than Tate software. Ashton Tate sounds pretty good. It does sound good, actually. Good marketing. And then... It was a great product. His brother or cousin started Baby Superstore. Pretty successful.

And then two of his nephews worked for Datastream. That's awesome. Yeah, Tate. And anyway, it's a great story. I wish he would have been able to come back and kind of share that with the group. But anyway, it was a heck of a story for Greenville to have one of the early database companies. Honestly, I don't think COPS would be here if it hadn't been for D-Base. And then leading to, there was a product that allowed you to compile D-Base code into an executable called Clipper,

which was a very popular language back in the late 80s, early 90s, that I really, I sunk my teeth heavy into that. Okay. And the reality is the dots connect because of all that. So I can probably point back to getting my hands on those first five and a quarter floppies with D-Base. Put a whole sleeve of them. Oh, you had ten of them to install. They had to talk what we're talking about.

So this is an important theme for the folks listening is that Andy somehow probably accidentally discovered a real passion for computers and for databases and things like that that led him to eventually start an IT company that would help people with that kind of thing. Before we get to that, I'll just put a pitch in for accounting. Warren Buffett, if you say Warren Buffett, what is your one piece of advice to people that want to get the business? Do you know what he says? I'm guessing it's related to accounting.

He says learn accounting. He goes, how in the world? He goes, you could be the greatest salesperson in the world. or you can be in a wonderful inventor. But if you understand how that's how business works is numbers. Makes sense. Yeah, no balance sheet, income statement, cash flow, all that stuff. So you might not have to major in it, but you better understand it.

Yep. I agree with them. To this day, I love it. Don't love public accounting. Right. Right. I don't love the disciplines of tax and audit and those types of things. But I've always said what I love about accounting is the ability to understand

the business, where does it stand and what needs to change? Right. And fairly quickly just look at a financial statement. In fact, my team sometimes, they just kind of look at me and I shock when I can just look at a financial statement and go, something's wrong. Something's wrong. Something's not right here. And then sure enough, we dig into it.

Right. There's a wrong number or something. Something's wrong. It's just that it doesn't make sense. Just looking at a one-page financial statement. It's. Well, so you've got that discipline. You got out of Furman.

And what was the graduating class? I think it was 700. 700. Somewhere in there. 6,700 people I think. 24, 56, 700. That's good progression. That's not bad.

It's not bad. But you stayed in Greenville and went to work for Price Waterhouse, which at the time was one of the... Big Eight. Yeah, Big Eight. Big Eight. How many years left now? I think it's four. Four.

I think I think that's right. What's it called now? Price Cooper? something? You know I should know that since I'm an alum, but... Price something. Price, it might be, yeah. Cooper's is definitely in there. Okay. So there's four... PWC, yeah, Pricewaterhouse Cooper. Okay, four big county companies left in the country, big ones. I think. So you worked for them and you did, what was your area? Auditing. Auditing. So you would go in, the CFO of a company would turn in their books for the quarter and you would,

would go in and audit it before they would publish them? It was typically an annual for us. I was working at the time Price had satellite offices, so Greenville was not a huge office, right? And we didn't have a lot of publicly traded companies that we were doing work for. So what we tended to be doing is working on the annual audited financials. And quite frankly, the story of ending up at Price is so similar to the story of ending up at Furman. Again, no internet. Yeah. My knowledge of what my opportunities were in terms of a job were incredibly limited, no real opportunity to research it. And one day in September, my senior year, they come into our accounting class and say, after class, go to the job center and sign up for the interviews.

I went and signed up for the interviews. Well, the only company is interviewing were Greenville-based companies. So at the time, I think we had four of the big eight in Greenville. And then we had Elliott Davis was here. So I went and signed up for my five interviews, got my five job offers, picked price. And ironically, because it was the smallest office. So going back to that, I kind of just, for some reason, like that smaller, quite frankly, a little more entrepreneurial. But that's why I stayed in Greenville.

It was no great decision. It was them walking in and not really realizing that all the opportunities that were out there that I could have done indefinitely. And so where was the office physically located? It was in downtown, in what was the Nation's Bank building, turned into the Bank of America building, is now the, I think not. It's canal. It's no, it's not canal. It's right there at, right at the heart of Main Street and where coffee comes in. And the big, tall building.

It was Bank of America. It was Bank of America building. And so we were on, I believe, the ninth floor of that building. And let me tell you, in 1987, downtown Greenville, that was not a hopping place. It is now. It is now. But I remember lunch options. Well, we could go to Hot Dog King, I think, and Marines.

Yeah. Marines was good, though. Marines was awesome. Yeah. Yep. The chef's salad was one of the best. Yeah. And the Hot Dog King was down where Sobe's is.

Exactly. But those were, there weren't very many lunch options in downtown Greenville other than those two. Wow. Yeah. Times have changed. Yes, they have. Huh. That's a good build.

building. I like that building. So how many years did you work there? I only worked for two years. And did you learn anything about the businesses you studied? Oh, I did. And what was interesting is as I was working in the audit side of this business, my brain was thinking through what could computers do. Yeah. And keep in mind, this is, I mean, we were doing handwritten auditing work papers. I mean, we literally had big binders where we were handwriting, invoice, one, two, three, four, five, check. All of it was completely manual. And so my brain was always twirling on how could this process I'm doing with price be automated, but also the business stuff that we were looking at it. How, what are the options? Where can computers be used there as well? But yeah, I learned, I say I learned a lot. I mean, I got to deal with

inventory and it started to understand the importance of inventory, started to understand financials better and reading that and certainly understood, you know, we were primarily in the accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory, those types of functions. But it was valuable, but I also learned I didn't like audit, which was probably the most valuable thing. Yeah, but probably another, a good extension on your education to see behind the curtains at multiple businesses what's going on. things work. And then you were, sounds like you were thinking about, we could turn these computers

loose here and help them figure out where their best customers were. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think I got quite as deep as figuring out how they could improve their business as much as process. Just process. Okay. Yeah, I was way more process oriented at the time. I remember, you know, if you go back and look at the old Steve Jobs videos on YouTube, there's one where they ask him early on, you know, well, with this new McIntosh computer, what do you think businesses will do with it? And he's like, well, we don't know yet. He's like, he goes, we're thinking maybe accounting. It was like kind of the first thing he thought of was, you know, because you obviously can

hit the button and process the numbers. That's so funny. But it's come a long way since then. It is. It is. But it's a great example of put it out there and let people's imagination figure out what they can do with what problems they can solve. Yeah.

Well, this is a little early, but I can't, because of what you just said, I want to talk about it. The new thing, the chat GPT, I describe it as kind of Google on steroids or Google plus artificial intelligence. Yeah, that's probably how I describe it. Tell us what you think about it and how it might apply to your customers. You're doing custom applications for people. How might they use or consider using this for their business? You know, specifically around that one technology, I don't have any direct thoughts on that one. As much as it is absolutely an extension of AI and it's AI taken to the next level, right, in terms of your ability to communicate with it.

And then its ability to put out information and creativity that is a little bit mind-blowing. So, for instance, I'm a really big jam band fan, and somebody fed in apparently a bunch of fish songs and then said, give me a fish song or give me the lyrics to a fish song about XYZ and or finish or add lyrics to this fish song. And it was mind blowing how good they were. They were actually awesome lyrics, which is a little bit scary, right? So part of it is going to be a challenge, I think, to say. society of what's machine created versus real, real people, human created. And so, and in some cases we probably care.

In some cases, I don't think we do. The larger picture on our business side is about where we can leverage that kind of technology and that kind of AI function and functionality and automation. It's such a huge part of what KOPUS does, both on our ERP side, but also on our app dev side. is how do we automate processes and how do we, so how do we make them more reliable, more predictable, more consistent, and not as reliant on people,

and specifically not as reliant on Superman to get the job done, right? So how do we make this so that everybody can do it the same way and do it correctly? Yeah. I think it'll be very interesting, particularly for companies like, yours because I think your customers are going to say how can we use this to help us do so-and-so so it'll be hopefully more business it will be I think one of the interesting

things that we do that that I hope we can leverage some of that technology with is a concept called an innovation lab which is where it's not really a project where somebody has come in and say I want you to build something to automate XYZ it's more come help us answer a question can this technology do this. So it's really kind of prototyping slash research with a customer to figure out is something possible from either a technological standpoint. Do we have the technology to do it? Or yes, it's doable, but is it cost effective to do it? And does it produce the results? So I'm curious to see, that's probably where that's going to start for us, our innovation labs. Well, for any of the Noob

schoolers hadn't tried it yet. Chat G.P.T. Golf Papa Tango. And it's not an app. It's not an app yet. It got to go to the web and go to the URL and look it up. But it's, again, it's Google on steroids. I would definitely try it. It'd be interesting to see what... Got Google scared from everything I've read. It ought to too. Yep. I'm not going to Google. I didn't go to Google in a week. Oh, that's amazing. I just go right to this thing and type it in and I get, you know, a more, a more, I think it's a fuller answer. It's a fuller answer to my question versus just a bunch of links. Yep, that's interesting. So I like it. All right, so this is important. This is important. So you're rolling along, doing a good job, you're learning at Pricewaterhouse. How did you roll from accounting major,

working at a public accounting firm to entrepreneur got my own business? So step one was I got my first opportunity to leave price, which was literally our first, I was doing an audit. One of the clients said, would you like to be our controller? And I was so anxious to get out of audit. I'm pretty sure I didn't ask what the salary was. I think I just said yes. Yes. I think I just said yes. That was an industrial automation company. That company did PLC programming and electrical control system design, heavily doing automation in the textile space, which was, of course, really big back in this would have been the 89-90 time frame. So I went in, as their controller, and first thing I did implement,

computerized accounting system, then they didn't have a job costing system, couldn't find one, so wrote a job costing system for them. Did you write it? I wrote it. Wow. And so relatively rudimentary, but enough that we could get the job costing stuff. That was eye-opening when I got that job costing data in there. I realized this, and this great example of where we're having systems and data and visibility so critical,

this company had a lot of large projects that they were doing. Yeah. And they were multi-year projects. Once I got the job costing data in, I realized we are, we're underwater on most of these projects as a company. Wow. And ironically, we were in there doing the audit and didn't know it. but didn't have the data. So once I got the data back filled, realized that.

So fast-forwarding, I went to the owner and shared what the concerns, and he wasn't as concerned. But myself and another person in that company said, you know what, I think we could do this too. And didn't have confidence the company was going to survive. So myself and that gentleman who was an engineer, he was an electrical engineer. I'm an accountant.

We went and started our own company. We each threw in a whopping $500 and started an industrial automation company. Two people, as you can imagine, he was an engineer, so he was generating revenue and he was getting a paycheck. There was not a lot of accounting to do. So to eat, I started doing software development contracting for organizations. So that's actually where the software development, as a doing it for hire, started coming from. Okay. I started finding people who needed software written.

I said, I can write that. So I would do that, do the little bit of accounting at night. And I ended up doing that with companies like Floor. Yeah. Was one of my larger companies, BMW, was doing software development at BMW. And ultimately, in 99, turned that into copus. Right. So what year would you have gone out on your own, what you're?

that have been? I'm going to say 1990. Okay. Right in there. 8990 timeframe. And so?

Whopping 23 years old? Yeah. I like it. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. You put your time in in corporate America.

Oh my gosh. I gave them two whole years. Yeah, two years. I will never forget the partner when I turned in my notice. He says, you have not learned. You're making a mistake. Yeah. You should stay and learn on our dime.

a little bit longer. And those were, those burned me for a long time. And I was like, I'm going to prove you wrong. Good. And I did drive me. Although I met, he hosted a Pricewaterhouse reunion probably 15 years later. Yeah. And the first thing I did when I was I walked up to him and said, you were right.

I should have learned on your dime a little bit longer. Well, you never know. You never know what the other door would be. You don't. But so I guess what I'm thinking is when you were making these calls to sell your personal development services early on, were you calling on the CFOs and the accounting people or the CEOs or who? It depended. So, you know, in the larger companies, I certainly wasn't calling on the CEO of floor or BMW, right?

Those were typically referrals that people who knew what I did made a wrap. referral of this, which to me has always been a huge part of sales. It's been, make one customer happy and they're either going to refer you internally or to other people that they know. And so that warm handshake, that warm handoff is so much easier than the cold calling. Smaller businesses, which I would do software development for and other computer-related services, was definitely calling on both owners of those businesses, kind of in the SMB space, as well as either financial people or the operational level people.

It was somewhere in there. I'll make a guess here that one of the reasons you were successful early on was because you weren't a guy who just majored in computer science. Because if you had, you'd be going to these people talking about computer science, right?

And this bits and bites and whatever. And you went in there talking about, I know you guys are probably seeing these things on your balance sheet. I can help you with this stuff over here to make it go away. Yeah, and I don't know if it was quite as much like balance sheet or income statement related, but it was very much a wire trying to understand why are we trying to solve this problem, right? And I've always said, my team quotes me on this all the time is there's really only three reasons. any organization should ever spend money with us or with anybody.

They either should spend money with us because what we're doing is going to help them sell more, generate more revenue. They're going to spend money with us because we're going to help them reduce their costs of delivering on that revenue. Or we're going to help them eliminate a risk, which is actually just elimination of a future cost. Yes, yeah. Right? So in reality, there's two. Make me more money? Save me money.

Sell more, less expensive to do it. But any other reason to spend money by an organization is just because they want to. Right. So I think because of the financial and the accounting background, I kind of had my head around, listen, those are really the things that matter. So let's try to understand why we're doing this and not walk in talking zeros and ones, but try to understand why and then hit that bullseye. But in terms of your, you know, we talk to the noob schoolers about having a skillers

about having a skill stack. You know, what are the different things that you're pretty good at? And, you know, because you became pretty good at developing, you know, software for businesses, and you became pretty good at understanding numbers of being an accountant, those two things together, I think, really helped you get to get the COPS. I think so, too. They, once again, I always had, for some reason, a capability of walking into an organization. sit down in a room in a business I've never been in before and they start talking about their

problems and I can real quickly understand the problem and start to see potential ways to solve it. So that's a, I don't think that was learned. I think that just, it probably was learned because of the base of knowledge that I'd gained. And then the ability to translate that and how do I do that with the technology we have available. How do we solve this with the technology and connecting those dots was definitely a skill that was part of my selling. My selling process. The reality is my selling process was very much a combination of understanding and then solutioning and creating confidence that we could

solve the problem, that somebody who's just more focused on the sales side probably needs to partner up with, you know, in our world now, our salespeople partner up with a solution architect. So our salespeople's job is understand the why. Why are they, why do they, why are they trying to solve this problem? What is the pain that is driving them to be willing to spend money to solve a problem? What are the constraints that we face? Whether there are budget constraints, people constraints, technology constraints, then bring in the way. and the solution architect, who's the expert who can figure that out. I was able to merge those two things into just me doing them both.

But it's not required to be able to successfully sell. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Back to, you know, we're talking about the skill stack. Steve Jobs talks about how he took these classes when he was, you know, let's say attending college for a little while in typography, you know, and all that kind of crazy stuff. and how that kind of turned into the Apple, a beautiful Apple logo, the simplicity of it and the font and everything.

Because you never know when these things are going to come together. So I think it's, you know, I go back and forth. Sometimes you think you should laser focus and just get really good at one thing. And then sometimes you're like, I want you to learn about a number of things and see where that leads. You can probably do both. Do both. I do think there's real value in laser focus when you have your goal. and your objective and what you're trying to solve, right?

And so, however, having a broad foundation of knowledge about a lot of different things can help with that laser focus in my opinion. I agree. I agree. And you don't have to get great at everything. You really should be great. You can't. Right.

You should be great at something and then understand a lot of other things. Yeah. So I think a huge part for me is the ability to ultimately have that huge base of knowledge and then figure out when to connect the dots. And there were times in that focus of, well, we're trying to solve this problem. It's like, yeah, you know what? I've heard or read about XYZ. I think now it's time to dig deeper into that.

But just to even know that that was even an option and to look into, this might be the time for this technology to come into play, or this technique or this capability. Okay. Well, that's amazing. I love the story. I love to hear how people go from, let's call it a normal job, to having their own business.

And it sounded like your first step was just getting out of the big company to a smaller company and then figuring out. I definitely made the move from that big corporate, which Big Eight accounting was absolutely big corporate. Even though I was in a smaller entrepreneurial office, it was still Big Eight accounting, down to what was absolutely an entrepreneurial startup. So I got to watch for that time I was the controller there,

a very entrepreneurial company by a guy who started the company. self. And then once again, a little bit of impatience. I mentioned earlier, a combination of impatience, and then maybe some overconfidence of, I can do this better. And me and a gentleman just decided to take that plunge. And then, quite frankly, the software development came from desperation to eat. Yeah, that's a good motivation. It was a really good one. My wife thought so too. No kids at the time, but my wife was really interested in food showing up on the table, too. So now you started Copus, and so that's 99? Yep, 99. Okay, 99. May 1st, 1999. Ironically opened up the office about probably 100 yards from that Pricewaterhouse spot.

Wow. We opened it in a little, we were subleasing a little office right in that Bergamo Plaza in one of the buildings. That was where we started the company. Very nice. But 99 was very different than 87 Greenville. Yes, it was better. Also, it was probably good for custom development people, I would think. With the Y2K coming, it's a good lot of Y2K business. You know what?

So the irony here is I thought I was one of the most brilliant business people ever. Yeah. Also a great salesperson. Because when I started in May of 99, there were three of us, myself and two other folks who were developers. we quickly went to 15 really quickly. And then by, so that would have been in 2000, coming into 2000 and for a little bit into 2000. And then, oh my gosh, by the middle of 2001, we were,

that's all right. It's actually my daughter, the soccer player. Oh my gosh, you should talk to her. Tell you what, let me just tell her. I'll call her back. Yeah, tell her. She's got a professional soccer player daughter. Where's she living now?

She lives in Raleigh, plays for the North Carolina Courage right now. Okay, very nice. Oh, so... 15 people. We went from three people to 15 people. Yeah. And then by 2001, we were back down to about four. Okay.

And what I learned a very valuable lesson, which is the confluence of Y2K and the emergence of the Internet doesn't happen all that. That's not normal. You're like, I'm a genius. Oh my God, it was so easy, right? All I had to do is find a person who pretended they knew about computers and somebody would hire them, right? And then obviously Y2K, we got through it, you know, a couple months afterwards, we started scaling back on that.

And then the NASDAQ bubble burst and then you had 9-11 happen and 01. There's three things. In about one year. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it was a really intriguing. first couple of years. So it was up, down, and then then we started building it on a much more stair-step approach. Yeah. Wow.

Well, so you started the business. It was going great because of Y2K. People were hiring Andy's company to just fix things. So when we flipped over to a year 2000, all the system didn't break, right? That's what Y2K was. We got a lot of business from it, too. And then when that Y2K came and went and nothing really bad happened. Because of all the great work we did.

Of course. You saved the world. We did. We were part of it. That was good. That was good. All right. Which I'm sure is partially true, by the way. With your customers anyway. There were definitely systems that would have broken. Had the effort not been spent, I'm sure it was, we probably did things that were overkill.

Yeah. That's a long time ago. It is a long time ago. No statute of limitations there. No, okay. So you got through that, and before we keep going there, let's start talking about interviewing. It's very important to our audience, is the things you learned about hiring your first people and what people did well and not so well to either get or not get a job.

Yes, so, you know, I would actually tell you that I'm not the greatest interviewer and never have been. Personally, I think I hired the first, oh my gosh, I probably hired the first 20-something people in our company. And actually, I probably did okay. But I think I was terrible at asking questions and I was really good at selling our business. And so I look back on that and realized

that I'm not a great interviewer. You want some people. to describe with passion why copus is a great place to work. Yeah. I'm your guy. Right. But so I brought in a larger team to help us on the interview process and I'll tell you what I've learned from them more than what I personally am good at is number one making sure it's a cultural fit which I think I was doing inherently. Yeah. So that is a two-way street and we make sure when we're doing interviews we make sure everybody knows this this cultural,

This analysis of is it a good cultural fit is something that we're doing with you, but you need to be doing it with us too, right? So I would tell every interviewee that they should be looking at as part of the interview process. What's the culture of who I'm interviewing with? And do I believe it's going to actually help me become a better person and thrive? Or is it going to be something that I'm going to struggle in? Because if you're going to struggle in it, you won't do it for long. Yeah.

Right? So the other thing is, we can tell when an interviewee comes in prepared, right? So preparation ahead of time, at least knowing the company you're talking to, certainly a lot easier now, going to website, what do they do? And having some of that information down, as well as going on LinkedIn and maybe knowing some of the key people. So already walking in, we're always impressed when somebody's done some research ahead of. of time. It doesn't just tell us about the interview. It tells us a little bit about their process and how they're going to approach things. And quite frankly, from a sales standpoint, probably very important from, you know, when we're trying to break into a new customer,

research is a huge part of that. Do it, do it when you're interviewing for the job is a big one to me. And then the other one is, is quite honest, honesty on the interview. We don't mind if the answer to a question is either a pause and I have to think about that or give me some time or I don't know. That's actually better than stumbling through and making stuff up because we can see right through that. And so, again, I don't care if it's our developers, project managers or a salesperson, that honesty of and the willingness to say, I don't know. Yeah.

My favorite interview question that I always ask when I'm brought in on interviews now is describe to me the job you think you're interviewing for. And it is sometimes, well, it doesn't happen anymore. Our team knows I'm going to ask that question now. So they make darn sure that there's no misunderstanding there. But you'd be surprised early on how often the description of the job by the interviewee and what we're actually interviewing for. not match. And it's like, well, so making, I think it's part of the interviewe's job to make darn sure they have a good idea of what is the job that I'm interviewing for. And what's the definition of success in this job? And how comfortable are you that you can succeed in that? To me,

those are some of the really key things. There's a lot of little tactical things you can do. but at a big level, those things, and I think we walk out of an interview impressed. Yeah, I agree. Those are all great, and they're all great to pass on to the noob schoolers. You know, the one thing different about what you said is the honesty part. I think that most people go in there thinking

they've got to have the perfect answer to every question. And the perfect answer may be, you know, the reason there's a gap here is because, you know, I decided to goof off for four months. I went and stayed with my cousin in Tuchum Carey, and now I'm back. And now I'm back. And you'd be like, that was cool.

What was Tucum Carey like? You know, that would be my... You could probably tell me what did you learn while you were there. Right. Why did you come back? Yep. Why did you come back? Yep, yep.

But if they could have said, well, it was just a re-positioning, you know, you could have just, you could tell they were BSing. Yeah, yeah. So be honest. Be honest. And if that, if that answer doesn't work, then we're not a good fit. Exactly. I think that answers the cultural question, too. Helps answer that. In my company, Tukum Care would be cool. I'd love to hear it. Probably you too.

Oh, definitely. But so the reality is if the answer to every question is, I don't know, or it's like, well, probably not a good fit as well, right? So, but it's perfectly fine. Right. You know, we've now modified our interview process where early, before we even bring a group of people in, two people just go sit down and have coffee. Uh-huh. Just make sure. And it's just a, it's a 15 to 30-minute conversation over coffee, not an interview.

Yeah. Just to make sure two ways. Yeah. Culturally. Right. Good? Yeah. Do we think there's, is it even worth spending anybody else's time, including the interviewee's time?

Right. Doing this. That's good. That's good. That's good. Now, I assume being on time is important. It's one thing I hear pretty. consistently is it is a disqualifier for an interview definitely definitely be early as a matter of fact

i mean don't be 30 minutes early yeah but i don't think there's anything there's nothing wrong with walking in five minutes early what about uh like uh i've been to your office it's just pretty casual what would you expect a salesperson to dress like when they came for an interview i would expect business casual business casual i don't want them really walking in in jeans and in the end you're probably going to, when you're working for us, there's going to be a lot of days you're wearing jeans. That's not probably the way to approach an interview. And same way with going to a client for the first time. I know I'm wearing them right now, but if I'm going to meet a client for the first time, I am not wearing jeans. I'm dressing up. Until I learn enough about them to know

whether jeans is appropriate, I'm going to end up wearing khakis and a button down shirt. And so if we were interviewing with you and we'd had, say, a pretty good interview so far, and all of a sudden you say, well, John, what questions do you have for me, which is kind of my cue, right? That's my cue, because really, I don't think you want to walk in there blasting out questions right off the bat. I think you want to wait, and it's my turn. How many questions do you think are appropriate for someone to ask?

I don't think there's a number. It depends on the quality of the questions. Okay. You know, if I'm getting asked, or if we're getting asked questions that would have been easily answered by doing research on our website, we're going to be annoyed. And probably one is too many questions. But if we're, if they're good questions, if they're actually questions that are around you trying to figure out, are we a good fit, I don't think that we really feel like there's a number of them that, that's. That's a good answer. As long as it makes sense, they can ask more.

Yeah, but I think if they become annoying questions, you know, that's, if they're not good questions, then it becomes annoying. Yeah, and so people might ask what's a good question. Once again, I think if the information is readily available and spend the 30 minutes before the interview doing research on who we are and the company, you know, what we do, if that's annoying. Yeah. Right. I like a question like, you know, if you hired me. a year from now, what would success look like for that first year? That would be good.

That's a great question. Even success in the first 90 days? 90 days. What are your most successful salespeople? What are their most popular habits that they do every day? That kind of stuff. Any of those types of questions. Yeah.

And I do feel like there's kind of two phases to it. One is certainly you don't want to not say anything. You don't want to be like, I don't have any questions. Yeah. You know, at the very least, you want to have a couple of good questions. But if the conversation flows and you have more and more, I think, you know, you can kind of feel it for yourself. I think so, too. The other one that I will say for a salesperson interviewing, I kind of like to see them end the interview with a close if they think it's good.

Right. Right. So, you know, even just a, yeah, how did I do? Or when are you going to make a decision? A scale of one to ten. Yeah, things like that that are giving some indication of, so walking in, hey, I research, exiting, hey, I'm going for the clothes, or at least the disqualification, right? I'm in or I'm out. Yeah, I love that. I agree. And it doesn't happen much. I had a young salesperson one time I was interviewing, first interview, and we finish up, you know, and I said, tell you what, like what you said, I'll give you a ring on Tuesday. And he goes, he pulls his phone out.

He goes, you got your phone with you, don't you? I said, yeah. He goes, well, we just check our calendars real quick and put something on the calendar. I'm like, I don't need to talk to you Tuesday. You're hired. Let's do it. Exactly. That's a great.

That's great. He crushed me. Exactly. It was great. That's good. That's good. Well, that's good on interviewing. Is there anything that sticks out to you that people did that just got them kicked, not

not thrown out of an interview, but immediately you knew you weren't going to hire them? The answer is yes, and I can't think of what. I mean, I can tell you that I have sat in interviews, and in the first five minutes, I'm like, I know this is, and now that's almost a, God, I'd like to just end this for both of our sake right now, but that's almost rude. I don't think it actually is, but it feels rude. But I can't think of exactly what it was.

It was either, you know, in some cases, I can tell from a personality standpoint, that there's not the cultural yeah uh that doesn't happen to us anymore once again that screening process early on yeah those people don't even walk in the door right you don't see them until they've gone through a few screens exactly so um and nobody honestly there's just two people on our team that do that initial screening that that so we never see anybody who it's like yeah they don't get it the likewise on certain things like technology stack like if we're hiring developers um you know some testing to make sure that we've got somebody who is a good sales candidate. Those pre-screening things, I think, have filtered out a lot of the situations where, hey, it's

really obvious that this is not a good fit. So that's happened less and less. And if I had, once again, I can't remember specifics. I think that's happened to be more with hiring technical talent, where I realized right away not a good fit than it has been sales talent. Now, one more thing on the interviewing that we used to do, we used to have a receptionist, and we coached the receptionist up to talk to all the interviewees as they waited, and she would tell us what she thought.

That's great. And, man, she would say, you're going to love Andy, or she would say, she would go, no. There's your screening process. Yeah, that was the first screen, and it was unbelievable. She was uncanny how good she was, because they, If they were a jerk to the receptionists, they were going to work at our company. Makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, once again, that's kind of what our group is screening and figuring that out over a cup of coffee really quickly now. Yeah. Good. All right. Well, let's move on. Let's talk about building the company. So you went after the dot-com bust in 2001, I guess.

Yep. But since then, it's been a nice, steady run. for COPS over the years. I know you've done a couple acquisitions along the way. Can you kind of describe the process from then to now? Yeah, what I'll tell you is probably the first 15 years. We grew, but we grew as much as one person could make it grow. I did it very much just through brute force.

And I've told people, I didn't know it at the time, but I've realized I held back our ability to do. grow by keeping control over everything. And there's one of the downsides of being able to do coding, do project management, do sales, do the accounting. I could do it all. I shouldn't do it all, but I could do it all. And so, you know, in the early days when there's three of us, I needed to do it all, but I let go of,

it took me too long to let go of the reins. So the reality is we grew, but, and we did steady growth and it was very stair step growth. You know, I was the primary salesperson. I had always had one other person helping me with the sales, but we very much had a mindset of sell to our capacity. If we had 10 developers, we were always trying to keep 10 developers busy instead of just go find as much business as we could, and then we'll find the developers to do it all. We didn't have that mindset. We very much had a, this is our inventory, sell that much. Hey, we've got them all busy for three months. Well, we can quit selling for a while. So,

and we literally, that's pretty much how we approach the process. in 2014 we were at a size of number of people that it just got to be on the realities it got to be no fun for me and I remember very distinctly walking into our Monday morning meeting and we were all the whole team was sitting around and we could all sit in one room at the time and I told them I said we are embarking on a different path which we're is a path to eliminate any single points of failure in the business, and we're starting with me. So at that point, started down a path of letting go and letting go and letting go and bringing other people into manage and control things. So that was a very pivotal moment in the company's business, and so our growth trajectory

increased when I did that. But I still did it in kind of drivels. I didn't just didn't one day come in and let go of everything. And even to this day, coming into 2023, I'm kind of still letting go of some things. So there's still a few things that it's like, nope, got to let go even more of some areas. But we started growing, started bringing in other people. And so to me, one of the interesting things about growth for us and what we've done over the last maybe seven or eight years, wasn't really growing with a specific growth number target in place,

but as we started adding other people in roles, that meant we started having overhead in places we'd never had overhead before. So because we needed people leading development and doing, right? So all these things, administrative functions and sales functions and non-revenue generating functions that I always did, as I put other people in place, there was more cost associated with the non-revenue generating, which we mean to cover that, we need more revenue.

So our growth has kind of been targeted towards supporting that. We're an organization that doesn't have a single point of failure. How big do we need to be for that? So that's changed a little bit now for us, where we've shifted now to where we have the sales and marketing team, and that is one unit, one leader, and their goal is to just grow revenue. Yeah.

And the operation side is to, how do I support the revenue that's being generated? So we've got different people in place. So that's evolved into that. But early on it was not. So we did three acquisitions as part of this growth. One of them was adding additional software development. So our custom development and digital development side was adding capacity there.

And that was a very significant. in terms of number of people, but it was not significant in terms of tech stack. That moved us into a different sector, though. So we had always done private sector only, and we acquired a group that did public sector, so that we almost had a 50-50 split on our development after that acquisition of public-private sector, which was healthy for us, actually. The other one was the second acquisition, well, actually the first acquisition got us into the Microsoft Dynamics ERP space. We had decided we didn't always want to,

come solve people's problems writing code, we could solve people's operational efficiency problems starting with a platform and building upon that platform. And it would feed development work, but we could start with the platform. So that was not a huge acquisition in terms of people, but it was a completely new product line inside of business. We just, in December of 2022, added on to that group and did an acquisition of additional people and customers on top of that ERP group. So that increased the size of that group by almost 30%. And so that was very much strategic decision around just trying to, in a big chunk, grow revenue and grow capacity. Yeah.

And so you're located in the next building on Church Street, right? Church and University. Church Street. Yeah. And do you have a favorite word you'd like to share with us, Andy? Probably a few of them, but if I had to pick one, I'm going to go with impact. Impact, okay, why that word? So, first of all, we have four core values.

Impact is one of them. And I always, whenever I describe these to people, I always say, listen, the one thing about impact, with our core values, each of them, we wanted one word. We want positive impact. You can have negative impact. That's not what we're trying to do. To me, though, the word impact describes how we want to approach sales, but also how we want to approach what copus is and part of its purpose.

So we always want to have to have a positive impact in delivering a solution to somebody. you have to understand why they're doing it. So you have to start with why in that case. And if you don't understand that, the odds of hitting the bullseye and having a positive impact are not high. There are a lot of our other core values that are around leadership and around working with people in a respectful manner and so forth. But in the end, that's all part of having a positive impact on them.

So we can have a positive impact on our clients by the solution we can deliver. We can have a positive impact on our clients just by our interaction. with them and them saying working with those people is just a good experience or has been beneficial to me. Or they may not have solved our problem because they couldn't, but they helped us figure out where to go. But on top of that, impact to us represents, we want to have a positive impact on all of the people in the company. We want them to grow while they're at Copus and become the best them that they can be. And we want to have a positive impact on our community as well. as well. So that one word, when we looked at our core values and kind of, our core values came

from what makes me tick ultimately since I started the business and so much of the early hiring, that if I had to look at all of them, that one, I think, encompasses success of the other ones being put in motion. Okay. That's a great word. And is there anything you want to promote today? Well, so, you know, Copus in terms of what Copus does and who the right clients are for Copus, I'm going to put it in two different buckets. Okay. So one is organizations who feel like they're growing, but their systems are holding them back. Okay. And so what does it mean when your system's holding you back?

It could be just obvious. Our system's too slow. Our systems, you know, it's, it's. It's clunky. It's old. That might be really obvious that your system's holding you back. Other examples, though, might be that this works great when one person does it who's been here for 20 years, but I can't hire somebody else and put them down and do it. So it's your system's holding you back because it doesn't incorporate the institutional knowledge of how to do things and systematize that institutional knowledge.

Okay. Right? So organizations that are trying to grow and their systems are their ceiling, we can help. Okay. We can help sometimes by writing code. We can help sometimes by changing ERP solutions, sometimes by both, sometimes through visualization of data. So, but really so much about what we've built a copus and so much about what we do is about helping organizations who are growing, who are bumping their heads on something. it's that.

And that would be if they wanted to reach copus, copus.com? CopusUSA.com. We tried to get copus.com, but Mr. Copus would not sell it. He would. It just wasn't worth the price.

It was a lot, yeah. Well, Andy, you built a great company so far, right? You got a lot of one way ahead of you still. So far, we're still working on it. Yeah. But proud of you and appreciate you sharing. the story and a lot of stuff to pass on to the noob schoolers. So thanks for being here today.

That was great. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. All right.