Russell Berman

President

My first job was as an accountant for Merrill Lynch in New York City. After I’d spent a few years there fighting to climb the corporate ladder, I came across a job posting looking for accountants who love computers. I felt like that was a description of me, and so I left to work for a few of the large Sage 100 Resellers. Interestingly, it was at the first reseller that I met my current business partner, James Shadwell. We worked together at the company for 3 years before we decided that we didn’t like the way the big resellers were treating the clients. Because our organization was so large, the clients got shuffled around or even lost and rarely treated with the respect that clients should always be treated with. James and I knew we could do better – we cared about the clients and knew that clients would appreciate a more personal approach. And so in 1999 we began discussing the idea of starting our own company; two weeks before my second child was born, we made the big decision and risked it all: we quit our jobs. It was an extremely scary experience because at the time my wife wasn’t working and we had a baby on the way! James and I persevered, however, and were successful in building our company from the ground up.