As I mentioned, I had “pounded on the table” at several Franchise Advisory Council meetings asking for the standard accounting system which was promised in our franchise agreements. Jeff McKeever, one of the Co-Founders of MicroAge offered me a consulting position at headquarters. My project there would be to choose the system that would be the standard accounting system for the Franchisees. My contract was for a fixed monthly fee as an outside contractor and was for 13 days a month. That would allow me to have around seven days a month to spend finding other consulting work. I was focused on my project at MicroAge and, instead of building another business, I put all my working time in at MicroAge. My contract was for six months but it stretched to 15 months as I stayed to write an Operations Manual for running the stores on SouthWare.
Some of the primary selling points for SouthWare is that the inventory system provided for two vendors for every item. One was for the manufacturer or distributor, the other was for the source of floor plan financing. Learn more about this financing method here.
Another major benefit for SouthWare was its ability to manage billing and contract management for services the stores provided.
Doing the consulting work was really hard for me. I felt like such a failure because I lost the corporation that I founded, the store and a great market position. The other stores and the others employed at MicroAge HQ knew about my history. Up until this point I was able to use “self talk” to stay positive and forward thinking.
At the end of my time at MicroAge, I missed out on a major opportunity by not pursuing consulting work for individual Franchisees helping them with the migration to SouthWare. Not many stores had the accounting and technical staff necessary to change to a new system. I know now but not then, that I could have named my own price and I could have moved around from city to city and been paid well for doing it. It would also have provided a mechanism for me to build capital in order to plan my future businesses. Moreover, that effort could have also increased my knowledge of the software itself.