History of A1 Enterprise

Chapter 1: A Journey Began by Learning how to Learn.

While teaching computer software courses at New Horizons in Santa Cruz, CA in 2001, I was assigned a class in unfamiliar territory: MS Access and Relational Databases. I was not hired because I had a teaching or software background, but instead for interpersonal communication skills.

Teaching computer software was totally unfamiliar to me because my degree was in Sociology. After receiving the lowest feedback scores in my tenure at New Horizons from my first MS Access database class, I surged with determination to explore this topic to a point where I became the in-house database guru and started getting referrals for software and database consulting jobs from businesses. I studied hard, and gave up many of my personal passions at the time to invest into my knowledge of database and software architecture. In my spare time, I created small custom desktop applications in VB and VBA and dug deeper into the courseware for database theory. As my course ratings went from 6s to 10s, the requests for database and software consulting flooded in from business representatives who attended my classes. It was these organic opportunities that ultimately prompted me to create A1 to provide uniquely tailored business applications and database solutions.

I was approached by several companies with opportunities for database and software consulting projects. One of them was a Fortune 100 heavy civil construction company with 10,000 employees. The objective of this project was to provide a workers’ compensation safety management software prototype for their current vendor. A year after delivering the prototype, I was asked into a meeting to discuss building a system from the ground up. Although there was a catch: a safety conference was scheduled in six weeks to present a new safety management system to 60 national safety managers. The problem was there was nothing to present! My job was to demonstrate how a safety manager can input an incident, send a notification, and then generate a report.

Not being a developer myself, I advised them that I would have to hire a developer to work with me on the project. The answer I received was: “You do what you need to do to get this done for the conference.” That day, I approached a colleague of mine at New Horizons who was also a developer, to see if he could help with this project. Four days later, he delivered an incident entry screen that could submit an incident. This sealed the deal and we moved forward at lightning speed, working seven days a week until the day of the conference.

Those same two safety contacts from this company turned out to be among my strongest mentors for years to come. I didn’t just learn about software, I also learned about business, life, humanity, and much more.

This one project spun off into multiple projects from the same organization, as well as others through word of mouth. I left New Horizons in 2003 to fully dedicate myself to A1 and moved to San Jose (Silicon Valley) where A1 had a hand in a growing number of businesses, departments, and industries:

From 2001 to 2008, A1 grew from one developer to eight without having a physical office. To support this, I had to find a way to enable our developers to work from home using remote access so they could share the same code base without overwriting each other’s code. Living in south San Jose at the time, I proceeded to set up a garage network of 15 servers and learned Windows Server 2000, MS Exchange, DNS Services, MS Visual Source Safe, Citrix, and hardware. I installed Windows Server alone over 100 times over a two-year period across 15 servers, to develop cloud-based collaboration software was before the term "cloud" existed.

The environment we started was among the first supporting collaborative remote development, otherwise known today as cloud Development Operations or “DevOps”. DevOps engages all team members involved on a project who may be working in different locations or even different time zones. The ability for everyone involved to contribute visionary ideas proved critical to the success of each project, and the DevOps infrastructure we had at the time laid the foundation that made this possible.

A1 proceeded to build upon this infrastructure for years to come, thus expanding and adapting it to newer and more scalable and secure technologies. Business after business, department after department, A1 nailed solution after solution developing full design-build web applications using this DevOps infrastructure to maintain productivity, security, code integrity, and consistency while at the same time allowing our people to work remotely. This DevOps concept would eventually serve as a major factor for A1’s ability to adapt and scale, and thus set us on course for a bright future.

The First Decade

For the first 10 years of A1 was exclusively a work-for-hire software development shop. When the market dropped in 2008, I had to figure out what to do with A1 in order to pivot into evolving market needs. We had no re-sellable product as all of our work was custom work, to be wrapped up between 2007 - 2010 due to mergers, acquisitions, and changing market conditions. What we had was 60,000 hours of full cycle software development experience and very well refined processes for software and business management. This included many collaborative processes that integrate people and their talents, personalities, and passions while empowering them to grow and evolve with A1.

I was always very hands-on with our projects and engaging with all of our team members and customers. I was able to contribute to our team’s productivity and work side-by-side to accomplish our objectives.

In 2008, seeing the writing on the wall, I hoped to find some way to salvage the past eight years of software development knowledge to pivot A1 into a thriving product-based business – but how?

The Desert Scene - Change of Mindset

With free time on my hands, I traveled and explored options for a change of scenery and landscape, hoping ideas would emerge. I settled in west Las Vegas where the desert felt foreign and far from home back in Santa Cruz and San Jose in California. After several months, wondering how to pivot A1 Enterprise and the body of business and software knowledge eventually converged to inspire a simple concept – one database with the capacity to expand into indefinite market segments and industries. I reduced all of the customer pain-points that A1 solved since 2001 to a single problem that wreaks havoc on a company: Data Decentralization. This is where the path of knowledge and learning came to my awareness, and how important that would become to the future of A1.

The next question was, How do I take that knowledge and convert it into a tangible product? I drove through Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas, Nevada, and this brought me clarity of mind and allowed ideas to flow.

In 2008 I contemplated in quiet spaces how to build a scalable product based on our historic knowledge. Observing the shapes at Red Rock Canyon inspired me to start small scale using one module, then expand the system from there after having a solid base to build upon. The search began for a team to help take me there.

Having released the contract module into production, I had not yet considered how to market a SaaS product – or any product. The sleepless nights trying to define the next steps for A1 continued with a different theme – How to build and market a SaaS product. Where was I to begin?

Chapter 2: A1 2.0 - Conceptualizing A1 Tracker’s Architecture and the Challenge of Digital Marketing

For the first 10 years of business, we had no product. All revenue generated came? from professional services in software development. This enabled A1 to absorb vast amounts of business process and domain knowledge over the years before starting development on A1 Tracker. We started building the product with one developer and one project manager assistant. These were the two initial team members who would lay the foundation of what’s to come.

When I started developing in 2008, I had a vision for A1 Tracker: to build a highly dynamic software that we could build upon and adapt to change, thus allowing us to eventually expand into any business domain. We want to achieve these objectives:

1. Adaptability: Create an architecture that can adapt to evolving business needs without requiring costly coding changes, long quality assurance testing cycles, and other impactful change consequences. In business as in life, change is inevitable. The question is not how to minimize or prevent change, but how to plan for change and adapt to it.?
2. Scalable: Create an architecture that we can build upon, allowing us to pivot into any business domain without redevelopment, thus maintaining industry agnostic to capture business from any market.
3. Resilient: Protect A1 from market demand fluctuations in any given business domain we serve. The more modules we produce, the more markets we can penetrate over time.
4. Value: Compound revenue by offering customers additional modules that integrate while still allowing department-level ownership with data segregation.

I also credit two unlikely sources of inspiration behind my vision: Nature and Philosophy. With an educational background in humanities, I looked at business through the lens of how I observed nature and philosophy. Like that of an ecosystem, various parts must harmonize together to function and adapt to an ever-changing environment. Much like living species, I view this as applicable to businesses too. The question I had at the time was, how do we build a software system that gives our customers the strongest competitive edge while adapting and evolving, and without losing them as a customer to a different system in the coming years??

Aside from that, at a higher level, people tend to engage more when they grow, learn, and develop both professionally and personally. In addition to the above question, I also wanted to find a way to offer our customers a level of engagement that is uncommon in the software marketplace where they can contribute to the success of their software implementation and appreciate the reward that follows.

I had no experience with developing a product architecture or digital marketing strategy back in 2008. Fortunately, A1 purely grew by referral. In addition to SaaS product development, I now had to figure out how to get our product which didn’t exist yet, exposed to the world to attract an audience of prospective customers to build a sales pipeline.

I hired several internet marketing gurus, all of whom promised what seemed to be the unattainable: rank in top position of the organic search index. Some, at least temporarily, succeeded where most underperformed. The digital marketing landscape was still much like the “wild west”, and quite undefined at the time. A few digital marketing consultants wound up getting our site blacklisted using marketing tactics prohibited by search engines. This ultimately inspired me to take matters into my own hands and learn more about digital marketing strategies.

I worked intensely over the holiday period since there was so much to absorb. These industries were also fairly new at the time and undeveloped. There were many conflicting opinions on how to approach internet marketing and my job was to weed out substantive and consistent points that might serve A1 and its transformation. This time period reminded me of the time I spent crash-coursing MS Access VBA and SQL, when we got our first gig developing a workers compensation software prototype on behalf of a customer to serve as a specification to their existing software vendor. I poured myself into the art of internet marketing. To my surprise, A1 started ranking on page in one of the major search engines for targeted words.?

At one point, A1 dominated eight out of ten results on page 1, along with a series of blogs and solution-specific microsites. I was astounded as my imagination ran wild with possibilities on what this company could lead to.

In 2008, I sourced technical resources to help build out the concept of A1 Tracker. With the help of a small international team, “I” once again became “We”. That, unknown to me, would endure and unfold for years to come. We put our heads together and built our first module for Contract Management, then rolled it into production in 2009 in parallel with my deep dive into internet marketing. Social media had a few years to go before ramping up, so I focused more on keyword density in our website content and backlinks.

It was exciting to see our first organic customer inquiry followed by our first customer adoption. The process of adoption involves a discovery process of customer needs, followed by configuration to provide a best-fit solution to ensure we meet or exceed our customer’s expectations. Our second customer adoption came through internet marketing and organic search. It was at this point that I realized I was on to something.

Throughout the development of A1 Tracker, we kept flexibility and adaptability at the forefront of our minds. Having developed custom software systems for ten years, we knew all too well how software changes impact software costs, implementation timelines, users, and virtually every aspect of the business that the software touches. For this reason, our mission was to architect a software that can adapt as the business changes. We knew from experience that it’s not practical to expect a business owner or manager to understand and know upfront all of their needs that the software will or can serve. There may be a good idea, however, those ideas change and morph over time as new variables are introduced to the business and as other members of the company get involved. Therefore, our team set out to design and implement a software and database architecture that was far more dynamic than usual, thus giving A1 the ability to scale to a far more diverse audience of businesses and stakeholders.

An example is our first module, Contract Management, that appeals to legal, operations, procurement, accounting, and contract management professionals. On the other hand, we also have our second module, claims management, that attracts a very different audience than the first module. We then found ourselves being able to market to both contract and claims management professionals differently by bridging the gap between data and business processes. The snowman back in 2008 then emerged as a reality. For me, this was one of the most enlightening periods of my career thus far. Still, we had no idea what was to unfold in the coming years. We continued to plow into product development, internet marketing, and expanding our targeted keywords while simultaneously expanding our module base.

We re-invested into our product and our team over the next 11 years and into 2021. With over 1,500 recorded product demos, all of which we have in our A1 Library, we collected feedback from organizations from around the world to compare what we had to offer at the time to what they needed to help us improve. As our team refined our product, the inquiries became more serious and we started closing bigger deals. With each case, we had the opportunity to consider how to improve our product for our entire customer base, as well as potential customers. Our primary focus was to continue building out the product to maintain its universal applicability, while at the same time allowing us to tailor it to specific niche markets. That’s a remarkably challenging undertaking considering the diversity of business needs across various sectors.

Module-by-module and feature-by-feature, we methodically built out our product while absorbing direct feedback from potential and existing customers during demo presentations and training sessions. It wasn’t until 2019 that big players started to show up, including large multinational entities doing billions a year in revenue. We were arriving at peak performance in terms of lead generation and sales potential since first creating A1 Tracker. It was then we realized the potential of what we had created.

To prepare for these pending opportunities, we felt it was time to change our development methodologies. Following a source code management and SDLC audit for one of our new large opportunities, we invested two solid years into a new development operations process. This upgrade launched A1 from a 10-year old source code management system into a state-of-the-art source code management system that we developed specifically for our product architecture. There was no product available that could deal with the dynamic nature of A1 Tracker as a single-tenant application. Due to A1 Trackers’ dynamic nature, we developed our own using one one of the world’s foremost tech platforms. The conclusion of this DevOps upgrade marks the conclusion of A1 2.0, and the beginning of a new journey for our team, product, and company.

Chapter 3: A1 3.0 - Into the Third Decade 2021

We are going into our third decade in business, 2021. We Write it as We Create It

Thank you to all of the contributors to this article - 22 years of relationships, and going.