Jack Ades is the entrepreneur behind AKA Enterprise Solutions, a software company that partnered with Microsoft and brought in tens of millions of dollars annually before being acquired during the height of COVID.
In this episode, Jack opens up about his journey from working at his father’s retail stores to closing $10 million deals with global tech giants. He shares the challenges of navigating the .com bubble, 9/11, and the 2008 financial crisis, as well as the leadership lessons he learned along the way.
Jack also offers insights on building a strong team, making bold decisions, and the philosophy that helped him scale and ultimately sell his company.
If you’re interested in tech, or, better yet, if the idea of building a company in a field that you love and then selling it for a life changing amount sounds intriguing to you, you’re not gonna want to miss this one.
Enjoy!
Transcript
Victor M. Braca: Have you ever wondered what it’s like to start a tech company in the bubble of the late 1990s? To navigate the challenges of building a company through events like 9/11 and the housing crash of 2008? To close a multi-million dollar deal with a global tech giant?
My guest today, Jack Ades, started from humble beginnings. Jack was working at his father’s retail stores while sending out countless resumes trying to land a computer science job. He ended up founding AKA Enterprise Solutions, a software company that partnered with Microsoft. Jack’s company would install and customize software tailored to the specific needs of businesses. His company would go on to bring in tens of millions of dollars annually before a successful acquisition.
I’m Victor Braca, and Momentum is where I dive deep with exceptional leaders to uncover the key decisions, defining moments, and lessons that propel them to success, and how those insights can inspire your journey forward.
In this episode, Jack explains some technical aspects of his software company, but he also zooms out and touches on navigating the dot-com bubble, closing $10 million deals, and negotiating a company acquisition during the height of COVID. Jack also opens up about sacrificing personal milestones for success and talking about missing weddings, parties, and family events. He speaks on the hardest decisions he had to make as a leader and the single most valuable piece of advice he believes every young professional needs to hear. If you’re interested in tech, or better yet, if the idea of building a company in a field that you love and then selling it for, let’s just say, a life-changing amount sounds intriguing to you, stick around.
Enjoy. Jack Ades, welcome to Momentum.
Jack Ades: Thank you, Victor. Very excited to be here.
Victor M. Braca: Thank you so much. And there’s a lot to unpack in terms of, you know, business advice you might have, community involvement. I’m very excited, so let’s get into it.
Jack Ades: Talk about whatever you want.
Victor M. Braca: All right, cool. So take me back to your early life. What was life like for you growing up? Were you always business-minded? Were you always entrepreneurial? Did that develop later on? Tell me about that.
Jack Ades: So my father would tell me, because my father was in retail—SNA stores, they owned 10 or 15 stores at the time—and he would tell me from an early age, I remember like seventh, eighth grade, he’d say, “You got to have your own company. You got to own your own company. You’ve got to be your own boss.”
At the time, starting a company was a lot different than it is today, but that was his thing: you got to have your own company. I don’t know if I’d give everyone that advice today; everyone has their own journey and it’s difficult, more difficult to start a company these days. But I had it in my mind that that was going to happen.
And then when I went to college, I could have studied law, I could have studied different things, but what I was really attracted to, drawn to, was math and science. At the time, computer science was very early in its stage from where it’s at now. I was drawn to that and I eventually went for computer engineering. I went to GW Engineering School and I studied Computer Engineering.
That was, to me, a great future business, great place to go at the time. Like I said, it was early days of computers. Personal computers were not even in businesses at that point. They were not business machines until the mid-80s; they became more business machines. So I was learning very, very early on. I knew it was a great future. I knew that I wanted to start my own business in that area at some point.
Victor M. Braca: When did you realize that you wanted to start a business in computers and software?
Jack Ades: I originally thought the big thing in the 70s was solar energy. That’s what I actually started out saying: “Okay, I’ll start a solar energy company, that’d be great. Great business, great money to be made there.”
Then my sophomore year of college, I was actually doing an internship at Fort Monmouth. I went to Shore Regional High School, a public school, and Fort Monmouth had this program for math and science people to go work in their labs. I was working in the computer lab at Fort Monmouth and I got very involved in the programming and I thought, “This is a great field.”
So when I was a sophomore in college, I switched from mechanical engineering, which is where the solar energy program was, to Computer Engineering. It’s really computer science and electrical engineering combined—that was what the degree was. So from then on, I said, “Look, I love software, I love doing development.” I said, “Yeah, I’m going to do something in computer science. Not sure what it’s going to be, but I will do something in that field.”
Victor M. Braca: You got into the software tech industry pretty young, pretty early.
Jack Ades: Right. So literally they were not using personal computers in businesses at all. It wasn’t until IBM started making these machines that were real business-ready. IBM came up with these hard drives on the machine and it finally was ready to be in an office.
But they didn’t have many programs to use on it. They had Lotus 1-2-3 and before that was something called VisiCalc. So they had spreadsheet programs, but they didn’t have real business programs.
So what happened was I graduated and couldn’t find a job in computer science for a year. This is a typical thing, by the way. One of my lessons or pieces of advice for people if they go to college—which is not necessarily for everyone—if you go to college and you have a major that you feel like you can get a job in that major, companies come to recruit you from college. I would recommend going through that process because when companies are there to recruit you, you interview, you practice your interview skills, and you get as many offers as you can possibly get and see which job you want to take.
Because when you go out and you’re sending out resumes, it’s really hard to get a job. I know people graduating with high honors and computer science degrees who can’t get a job. It’s really tough to get one.
Victor M. Braca: You’re saying people should go through the recruitment process in the college.
Jack Ades: I think it’s the best way to do it. When you start sending out resumes, first of all, companies don’t want to train you, generally. If they’re going to colleges to recruit, then they know they’re getting people out of school; they know they can train you and they have a training program. Most companies do not have training programs. In the computer science field, they want people with at least a couple years’ experience unless they have some sort of training program, which is very rare.
Now you’re sending out resumes to all these companies and no one’s looking at them. It’s a very frustrating year. I was doing it for about a year, so I was working in my father’s store at the time—SNA stores and Easy Pickings. I was working at Easy Pickings as a manager on 34th Street for a year.
Victor M. Braca: These are retail stores?
Jack Ades: Retail stores. So I’m at the register, I’m putting clothes out, trying to get my first computer science job. For a year I was doing it. It was fine; I was making money and I was learning, but it was not what I wanted to do. In fact, I did some programming for their office—they wanted some inventory programming and stuff—so I did some light programming for them as well while I was working in the stores.
It wasn’t until a cousin of mine who knew a recruiter finally helped me to get a job. A recruiter who my cousin connected me up with, and I wound up getting a job a couple months later and I got into the field. I was doing my first job, I was really happy, I was doing development work and networking—also very early days for networking.
Networking was pretty much novel. There was this one networking company and Microsoft was doing this Windows NT thing and they were starting to get into it. But I learned all about how to network the computers, I learned how to develop on the network.
After about a year at this company—a year and a half at this company called Mercantile Stores, which was a department store chain, and I was in their MIS Department, which was their computer department—I met a guy through a mutual friend. She introduced me to her friend who was also in the computer field, which was a small field, and he was selling real estate management software. He was a salesman. I didn’t consider myself a good salesman or marketing person; I just considered myself a techie. And so we wound up meeting and talking about what we would do as a business.
I said, “Yeah, I can develop software. I can custom develop for any company if they tell me what they need. I’ll custom develop software for them.”
And he said, “You know, why would we do that? There’s already programs out there that can do most of the work that they want to automate, and then you can customize it for them specifically, but at least 80% of it is done through the program.”
I thought, “That’s a great idea. How do I find out what products are out there?”
So I bought PC magazines, I looked for what’s the best business software—at the time it was called accounting software. There were five or six top programs out there: ACCPAC, MAS 90, and Platinum. They were rating them all and I wound up getting this demo software so I could see what they looked like. At the time, they were all on diskettes; you put the diskette in the machine and ran it off the diskette.
We found a program that we thought was a good partner program called Platinum. So we said, “All right, what we’ll do is we’ll sell this Platinum software and we’ll sell it to companies and say, ‘Hey, this is automated—all your inventory, your sales, your purchase orders, and everything you need,’ and we’ll customize reports for you.” And that became our business.
Victor M. Braca: I want to go back a little bit. How did you have that vision when you were in college, seeing how technology was going to erupt and wanting to go into that field? Most people didn’t, I think.
Jack Ades: Like I said, I’m always a futurist; I’m always thinking 20 years ahead. To me, change doesn’t occur fast enough. I’m waiting for the flying cars. I’ve been waiting for AI forever—right now it’s great, I’m amazed by it, but it’s still not near where it needs to be.
At the time I said, “Yeah, I know that’s going to be the future—technology, software, software development.” I knew it was going to be a major thing and I knew that computing power was expanding. Now there’s Moore’s Law, which I think the CEO of Intel said—that every 18 months, computer power doubles. I knew we were right in the middle of that and I saw it happening.
We always were trying to push the bands because as soon as we started putting these programs in for companies, we would see where the shortfalls were. We saw where they needed to improve. I was waiting for them to improve as much as possible. But yeah, I knew in college that I wanted to be in software, I knew I wanted to be in tech and drive progress, drive innovation. Innovation is always something that excited me.
Victor M. Braca: Forward to your early days at the company. You’re selling this software. How did you set yourself apart in the beginning? Was it easy because you were a new company in a new field, or how did that look for you?
Jack Ades: The biggest competition for our software package and what we proposed to do—which was install the software package on a PC network and get it running for all your users, connect to the printer, print out all your checks, and do all the automation—the biggest competition was like a Unix-based machine. These were green screens on mini-computers.
Victor M. Braca: And what does that mean?
Jack Ades: It was a centralized computer and it was called a “dumb terminal.” It was a green-screen terminal and you’re typing out commands on the terminal, and it’s Unix commands. Unix was an old language that was a big business language at the time.
So companies would say, “Yeah, you buy an IBM mini-computer for $50,000, you buy the software on top of that, and then we’ll program it for you.”
And I said, “No, no, this PC network is where it’s going.” I had to convince people early on. “Are you sure that’s where it’s going? You’re going to put these PCs on people’s desks and connect them to a network, and they’re all going to be like regular computers on each desk, not one central computer with terminals?”
That’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to have a computer on every desk, they’re going to be networked together, you can communicate with each other, run all the same software. That’s the vision for the future—which is how it still is today, which is exactly what’s happening today.
Victor M. Braca: You’re selling the software and that’s what set you apart from the competition. That was a new business model at the time.
Jack Ades: Brand new software. This Platinum software was on version three, it was running on DOS, which was an old operating system for Microsoft. Microsoft didn’t come out with Windows until the late 80s, and even when they first came out with it, it was very clunky.
Then Windows became the operating system, and we wanted to have products that ran on Windows. Platinum wasn’t working great—it wasn’t a great partner for us; we had a problem with them. So we went and did another search for what were the same five or six companies that were out there, but who improved over a few years?
Great Plains Software was the one that we chose. Great Plains Software was running on Windows, they had the best vision for running optimized on a network, they eventually had SQL Server as their backbone, and so Great Plains Software was the one that we really grew very well.
Victor M. Braca: What does it mean to partner with Great Plains Software? What is that arrangement?
Jack Ades: Good question. Every software company is told by all the analysts that they need to be selling directly to customers. But what happened was, if you were smart in the early days, you had a partner network. You had companies that would get trained on your software, they would be the experts, they would even get really good in certain niche markets.
But they sell through partners. So pretty much what would happen is you’d sell the software; it was a license for the software. It wasn’t cloud-based, which is what we have today. You’d buy licenses; let’s say it was a $1,000 per module. You got six modules: accounts receivable, general ledger, accounts payable, purchase orders—these are all different modules. You’d pay for the modules and the partner would get 50% and Great Plains, who was the software developer, would get 50%.
That was the software arrangement, which was great because you sell a nice deal, you get good license revenue right up front, and then you sell the consulting services. You do the consulting for that company to optimize that product for their company.
Victor M. Braca: So you’re putting in Great Plains software and you’re setting it up in offices and spaces and things like that.
Jack Ades: Exactly right, and customizing it. I learned the development language for the software and I would customize it for them, develop reports, develop add-ons to their modules that would help them to track more information, different types of information. And I would do the support for it. People called me—for the first many years, I was doing all the work. I was doing all the training, I was doing all the support, and my partner would do the selling and marketing.
Victor M. Braca: Taking back to those early years—a lot of people, when they picture starting a company, they see late nights, working on weekends, skipping parties. Was that what it looked like for you?
Jack Ades: Exactly. Exactly what it was like. And it’s funny because I was just talking to my son Dylan, who is now working a consulting job, and he’s like, “It’s really grueling.” You know, billing 40 hours and then working extra the time that you’re not billing. And he said, “But once you get into the flow, it’s amazing.”
And he said, “Obviously when you were building your company, you were working a lot of hours.”
I said, “Yeah, I was working seven days a week lots of times, late hours, skipping parties, skipping some major things that I could have been at.”
There was a friend’s wedding in Canada and I could not go because there was an order that had to get done by Monday, and I had to work over the weekend to get it done. We got all the computers shipped to me, I had to configure all the computers, I had to get all the wiring ready—it had to ship out on Monday and I couldn’t go. And I was like, “I really like this friend,” and my wife Debbie was saying, “You got to go, this is the most important thing, you’re going to really love the wedding.”
And I said, “I know I’m going to love it, I know I’d like to go there, but I just can’t do it.”
You had to make sacrifices. You’re doing everything: you’re mailing, you’re shipping things out, you’re going to FedEx or UPS and doing the shipping yourself, you’re buying stamps to send out invoices to be paid. You’re doing everything. But it was also very satisfying. My father told me early on in life: when you realize how hard you can work, that you could put in the time, that’s when you become empowered to know that you can make money. When you know that you can do the work, you know you’re going to make money in life.
Victor M. Braca: When you have the confidence that you’re able to do it, then you know you can execute. So you’re running this company for how long? Tell me about how long you were running the company for.
Jack Ades: All right, so we started in 1989. It was right before my 25th birthday that we incorporated. I had a partner that, again, we were in the office together doing all the stuff. He was doing all the selling and I was doing all the implementing.
So from 1989 to about 1993, we were doing this Platinum software. We were also selling real estate management software at the same time; there was another company that we were doing real estate management software for. By around 1995-96, we had switched over to Great Plains Software.
I was really energized by this company. By the time we were in 1994-95, maybe we were five employees. One of the biggest things in the early years is you can’t hire anyone—you’re not making enough money to hire anyone. So you’re doing everything. I remember my parents saying, “Hey, you’re working crazy hours, why don’t you hire someone?”
I can’t afford it right now. Can’t afford to hire anyone. That’s one stage where you’re just doing everything and then you finally realize, “Okay, I can take a gamble now and hire someone. It’ll help me make more money. I know it’s going to be a lot out of our pocket first, but let’s figure it out.”
So I hired our first employee. So it was three of us from 1993 to 1995. Then we added another one. So by the time we were in ’95-96, maybe we were five employees. That’s after six, seven years, right? That’s a long time. But the time flies by and you’re just trying to make a buck and you’re getting there and you’re building your reputation.
So I would say the early days are about as much as you can do—as much as you can take on yourself, you do. You should probably hire someone earlier than you think you can because you’ll be able to afford it; once you bring that person in, you’ll be more productive and you’ll be able to pay for that employee. Same thing with the next employees.
But it was also you had to pay someone—you got to hire someone pretty much entry-level because you couldn’t afford someone who’s really smart, who would afford a bigger salary. So now you’re hiring someone out of college, training them on what to do. Those were the early years.
1998 was when I bought out my original partner. We didn’t have the same vision, we didn’t have the same goals. I wanted to expand and he was very risk-averse. We just had—by the time we were in 97-98, we were fighting all the time about things and I was very frustrated.
So I said, “Look, I’m going to buy you out or if you want to buy me out, you let me know, but I think I need to buy you out.” That’s the way it’s going to go. And that’s the way it happened. It was a little tough and I had to pay more than I expected. Whatever—another business lesson: you always think your company is more valuable than the buyer does. Always.
Even when you’re both part of the company. So I was like, “It’s not worth that much,” and he says, “It’s worth much more.” We had to get someone actually to mediate for us. We had a mutual acquaintance who was in the business world for a long time—he’s a guy who was successful since the 60s, a very successful businessman—and he mediated for us.
Victor M. Braca: Interesting.
Jack Ades: He got the deal done. I paid a lot of money, got a lot of debt for it, but I knew it was going to be worth it in the end. A couple months later, I had a business associate that I met through the Great Plains partnership and we were exactly on the same page and we knew that we’d be great partners together. He had a business that was doing the same thing I had, and we said, “Look, we’re both in New York, we’re both driven, we both know exactly what we need to do. Let’s join our companies together.”
So we merged companies in 1998 and that’s when things really started to take off for us. We grew very nicely after that. We had some ups and downs—the 2000 crash. There was a tech—we call the “tech wreck” in the year 2000. Y2K was a big thing; everyone was spending money to get to the—what happened was, in the early days of computers, it was all about taking as little storage as possible because storage costs money.
Every date field had two digits for the year. They stored everything in two digits and then we went to 2000, you had to go to four digits because you had to be able to go beyond that. Everyone thought—and a lot of the products were not meant to be four digits—and so everyone thought that the computers were going to crash in 2000. So everyone’s spending money to get their computer programs up to date. So it was great for us; we’re making a lot of money selling a lot of systems.
But then when Y2K hit, everyone stopped spending. So we had what was called the tech wreck. All the tech companies had disastrous results; the bubble burst. And then you had 9/11 in 2001. Also, people stopped spending money on tech for like 9 or 10 months. Those were very difficult years.
Then you had to cut back. You had all the people that you hired and you were expanding; now you had to cut back. You had to fire people, you had to cut salaries. You go through these things as a business owner, which is the hardest thing.
Victor M. Braca: How do you deal with that? How do you detach your emotion from it and think logically?
Jack Ades: Very difficult. I still say as a businessman, firing someone is the hardest thing you can do as a business owner. Very hard.
Victor M. Braca: Wow, yeah.
Jack Ades: But you have to realize it’s in their interest, it’s in the business’s interests to move on. Let’s say you have 15 people and you have to fire four of them—which is where we were at at that point—you owe it to the 11 people who are going to stay. You have to fire those four people, and those four people were not as productive as they could have been because usually you’re not firing great people; you’re firing the least productive. So they’re not in their best line of work either; they deserve to find another line of work that’s better for them, that suits them better.
Victor M. Braca: I like the way you put it: you have to in your mind say, “Look, you’re doing it for the good of everyone here.” You have to let people move on in the case where they’re not as productive as they could be, and you have to save the company for the 11 people who are remaining. That’s the mindset that you have to go through while you’re doing it.
So Y2K—what’d you call it? The tech wreck?
Jack Ades: Tech wreck in 2000. And then 9/11 was also a very difficult time for tech afterwards. I don’t think we sold a new system for like 10 months after 9/11.
Victor M. Braca: So what did you do?
Jack Ades: We had our existing customer base, we serviced the customers we had. Great Plains actually helped us out a lot; they helped us with cash flow. It was really amazing.
We applied for a small business, an SBA loan. There were specific loans that the SBA was giving for 9/11—if you were based in New York and your business was suffering because of 9/11. I think they gave us like $400,000 or something; it was amazing. Like, I signed for the loan, I was thrilled—that was great.
So yeah, you cut back salary, you cut back [on everything], you do everything you can to keep things going, and you just have to have faith that in the end, you’re going to get to the right place.
Victor M. Braca: And how did that feel? You had a family at that point?
Jack Ades: Had kids and yeshiva bills, medical bills to pay. I was very financially anxious for many, many years.
The thing with tech—I’ll say as advice to people out there—the story of someone in tech who makes big money in three or four years is very, very rare. It’s extremely rare and everyone wants that. Someone told me in Israel at the time—because Israel had those great startup stories—everyone in Israel wants to start a company and sell it in three years and make 200 million. Very low odds for that; that’s a very low probability situation.
What’s very more likely is you’re building a company slowly. The problem with tech is you’re always investing back into the company because you have to learn all the newest things. You got to keep up with innovation and then you got to hire the best people.
Now fast forward let’s say 10 or 15 years into this. Whereas my advice was you got to do everything—you got to hire people entry-level, pay them as low as you can to build the business—now once you get to a higher level and you’re dealing with better customers and bigger deals, you have to have the best people on your team. So now you’re paying more money to get the best people on your team.
And you want to hire people who are better than you. I was doing everything and I was the best—I was the best installer, I was the best trainer, I was the best developer, the best support person. But if I’m going to hire people who are less than I am, then I’m never going to get out of those roles.
So more and more, you start saying, “Okay, who’s the best at this? I need someone who’s the best project manager,” because I was a great project manager, but there are people who are trained in it better than I am, who have done it for years for bigger companies. Hire that person.
Then hire someone who can—I was running the practice, all the developers reported to me, all the installers reported to me. Everyone reported to me. So I had to hire someone who could do that better than I did.
Pretty much you’re hiring mid-level management that is better at each of the individual tasks than I could have been, and then that’s how I grow. Now I’m taking myself out of the day-to-day of the business and I can focus on the strategy of the business and building it. What vertical markets should we be approaching? What’s our marketing strategy going to be for the next 10 years? What are the top hires that we have to do to get to the next level?
So that’s what I was doing more; I was doing more the visioning. That became my style. I think that I learned that from Great Plains, by the way. Great Plains Software, which is an excellent company to work with, the CEO and President was Doug Burgum.
Victor M. Braca: Ran for President?
Jack Ades: Yes, exactly right. Doug Burgum is—if I have to pick one mentor, he’s my mentor. We just learned how to run our business based on the way Great Plains ran their business, which was amazingly run. It was a fantastic company and they had their own story that people who were part of it couldn’t believe what was happening. They were growing tremendously, they had great leadership, great vision, great execution.
We were a New York company, and New York in the 80s and 90s was like cutthroat business. You had to make a dollar, you had to do whatever you could to make a buck. Customer service wasn’t your top priority; you just wanted to make sure they were paying you. But they showed us that if you focus obsessively on your employees and customers, you’re going to build a great business.
And they showed us how to do it. So we really absorbed a lot of those lessons. We became a model for a New York company that was using this Midwestern company approach, which was very different than New York. It was a very different way of running a company in New York, but we were able to do that. I think that’s one of the things that I was most proud of—to bring this sort of corporate culture into a New York environment, which was not focused on employee satisfaction and excellence. It was more focused on making money and doing the best you could to make money.
Microsoft bought Great Plains Software in 2000. So starting from 2000, we were no longer a Great Plains partner; we were a Microsoft partner. That got us much more involved in the Microsoft technology, which helped us to grow the company as well.
Doug Burgum left after seven years; he left in 2007. Wound up doing real estate and investment in Fargo, North Dakota, which he felt could be built up much more than it was—which he did help to make that happen.
Then in 2016, we always thought he could go into politics. In 2016, the governorship became available. There was someone who was leaving the Governor’s office; there was an heir apparent from the Republican party, the State Attorney General, whose family had been in politics for very long. They thought he was going to get the nomination. Doug was the upstart, unknown candidate businessman, barnstormed through the whole state, and he was 20 points behind in the polls when he started. He won the primary by like 15% or something like that; he just rocked in the primary.
So he became a two-term Governor. Excellent Governor, ran the state beautifully, same way you approach business: Vision. Make sure you have the vision, make sure you have the best people on your team to execute the vision. Look at the big picture all the time; don’t be in the day-to-day as much as you can. You do the things you need to do, prioritize, and let your team do most of the heavy lifting.
Then he ran for President, and he was this close to being the VP nominee for Trump.
Victor M. Braca: Oh yeah?
Jack Ades: Really close. Like, a week before Trump made the selection for JD Vance, he told his sons—and this is from an article that I read that was very well-researched—he told his sons, “I’m leaning toward Doug Burgum.”
They steered him away; they said, “Look, he’s not going to add anything to your campaign. JD Vance is the guy, you got to go JD Vance.”
I was praying for Doug to get it because if he made it, I was going to start working for him. I was going to work on his campaign. I sent him a text: “Doug, I’m running, I’m helping you if you get this nomination.” We became acquaintances and friends over the years, texting each other.
Anyway, so that’s the backstory with Doug and my tech life. And I hope you’re enjoying the episode so far. If you are, please leave a like, comment, subscribe. If you’re not, leave a dislike. But really, if you’re enjoying the episode, please share it with somebody who could use a little bit of inspiration. We’re trying to grow the podcast as big as possible; anything you could do to help with that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much. Let’s get back to it.
You mentioned hiring out and delegating, and that freeing up some of your time to focus on the vision. I’m wondering, when you hire out, when you delegate, do you really find that there’s more time to focus on the vision, or are you finding that you have to manage these extra people and you have to do administrative work?
Jack Ades: If you focus every day on the fact that you will not be in the day-to-day of the business, then it happens eventually. If that’s your intention and that’s in the back of your mind at all times, then you’re going to look at other areas where you can hire the best people.
I made a hire in 2014. I was looking for someone who would be an HR manager and a recruiter because I was still doing all the hiring and I was managing everyone. I found the perfect person that I hired. She was a great recruiter and a great HR manager; she had a Master’s degree in Labor Management. And of course, this is the same thing—someone who is much better than I could possibly be at that role. Much better recruiter than I was, much better HR manager.
Then she grew into that role where she created a recruiting team and she became the top HR manager. Just right there, you’re saying, “I’m not managing people anymore; she’s managing everyone in the company.”
My style has been—and it’s not for everyone, and not a lot of people can get there—you got to have a lot of holes in your calendar. If you have meetings scheduled from morning to evening, then you’re not delegating enough to people. Private equity firms want you to work 60, 70 hours a week if you’re CEO; they think that that’s the best way to get the growth. That’s not my style.
My style was: have holes in the calendar. I was a member of this group called Vistage. Vistage is a business networking company—you have 10 to 15 people in your Vistage group. Every month you meet for a full day and you talk about issues, you talk about best practices, you have speakers come in to talk about all different things. If you could not take off that one day in a month, then you weren’t being the right type of CEO.
If you were there and you were multitasking during the—while there was a speaker, you’re multitasking, you’re doing work at the same time—you are not clearing enough time in your calendar to vision, to look at the big picture, to be strategic.
Victor M. Braca: Got it. So you partnered up with Microsoft after they acquired Great Plains. What did things look like from there?
Jack Ades: Well, first of all, whoever the leader was from Microsoft, we were always networking with that leader and their team. That was like a main thing for us. We went to three or four conferences a year when it was Great Plains, and then it was Microsoft.
Doug ran that for seven years. Being very involved with Doug and his team, going to the conferences, being part of the culture there—that was always our mission: to get in as much as possible. When you partnered with them really closely, you got in with the engineering team. So if you had problems with the software, you knew who to call to fix software problems. Or with the customer support team—you’re very in tune with them.
When there are escalations, you know who to deal with. An escalation is what you don’t want as a partner. You don’t want a customer calling Microsoft and saying, “My partner stinks, they’re doing a horrible job.” You avoid that at all costs. So when something needed to escalate, we said, “Let’s get Microsoft involved early.” You don’t have to call; we have the best relationships.
When you’re totally involved in networking with that team, you know who to call when those things happen. You get sales leads. If you get the right people, you want leads—leads are the golden thing. So you’re always trying to find the right individual or individuals who can get you the leads.
Doug did it for seven years, then Satya Nadella actually became the head of that group. Doug handed off to Satya, and Satya talks about Doug being his mentor as well. Satya Nadella was running the Business Solutions for about a year, maybe less. Steve Ballmer was the CEO at the time, and then Steve Ballmer put Satya in charge of Bing search; they needed search to be better.
So Satya ran that team, and then a guy named Kirill Tatarinov took over leading the Microsoft Business Solutions team. He ran it for eight or nine years. Again, you want to be as close to these people as possible, so we became very close with Kirill as well.
The problem with Microsoft at the time was Steve Ballmer was not really strong, I don’t think, as a leader for Microsoft. The thing that he did well was build the data centers. Bill Gates was on him all the time saying, “You got to build data centers.” Kirill tells a story that Steve Ballmer said, “I just got it. I understand there are going to be four or five companies in the world that have all the data centers, and we need to be one of them.” And that is actually what’s occurred now. You got Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, maybe a fifth one—
Victor M. Braca: Meta?
Jack Ades: Meta, exactly right. That’s the fifth one. Besides that, he was not a great leader; he was not the typical innovator. He almost lost the company, I feel. You know, he was telling to the media, “Yeah, Apple sure, they’re growing, but we still have 90% of the operating systems in every company.”
And that was going to turn. In a year that could have turned, and it almost did. Windows almost destroyed the company. They had a horrible—Windows was very buggy at the time and they were losing market share tremendously. Microsoft was stagnating.
That’s when Satya took over as the CEO of Microsoft. I knew when Satya took over that he was going to be the true visionary; he was going to take it to the next level. And he has; he’s done brilliantly at every level.
We were in the ups and downs with Microsoft during the late 2000s and the early teens. Investment in the Business Solutions was choppy; sometimes they would grow, sometimes would stagnate, and it was not a great business to be in. At one point we thought we got to get out of the business because ERP—I know I’m going all over the place, but what happened was this accounting software evolved into what we now call ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning. If you’ve heard of SAP and Oracle, Microsoft’s product now competes with them. It’s called Dynamics 365.
It used to be accounting software, small businesses on individual machines. Then it became ERP software, which is a much higher-level software product. And there was also CRM—if you’ve heard of Salesforce. Dynamics 365 has their own CRM software, which is the main competitor to Salesforce.
It became much higher-level software. It became enterprise-level software. And we were selling—instead of selling deals for $100,000, we were selling deals for a million dollars. Now our deals are five and ten million in some cases. Huge deals, all Microsoft technology. It took a while for Microsoft to get there. Their investment in that area was very slow and uncertain. There were times where we thought we were not going to be able to get to the next level.
Finally, in the late teens, 2017-2018, we saw some really good growth there in both CRM and ERP, and our company started to really grow much more rapidly. Still, you’re investing the profits back in the company. You’re not getting rich off this tech company; it’s not like that.
The tech company’s real growth strategy is to stay in business, grow as much as you can, try to be as profitable as you can, reinvest, and then you have to, at some point, take investment or sell. That’s really where you make the money in tech. It’s not going to be like a retail or wholesale business in the community that is generating cash and you can make a decent living off it and put some money away. Tech is much harder to do that. Eventually, you have to get private equity investment in or sell to a strategic competitor or company that’s out there. That’s where you’re going to make the money.
Victor M. Braca: Tell me about the journey of selling your company. Was that a tiresome long process? How was that for you?
Jack Ades: I’m blessed with having the best partner I could possibly have. Together, I think we work amazingly together. He was mostly sales and marketing—selling, building the sales organization. I was running mostly all the other things. Which sounds like, “Oh, well, I’m doing more work,” no. Selling is—if you can sell, you’re in business. They say “sales solves all problems,” that to me is still a very important adage.
We went through ups and downs, for sure. Then what happened was, in 2012, we did an acquisition. It was our first acquisition and it was handed to us on a silver platter. It was a company that was doing high-end ERP software implementations. It was doing what was called Axapta—AX—which was a high-level ERP product. We were having a hard time breaking into that area.
We were selling bigger deals, but Great Plains was still the product that we were selling. In 2012, 85% of our business was still selling that Great Plains product. We were selling it for larger companies, but really to get to the much larger companies, you had to sell this product called Dynamics AX. We couldn’t get in; we couldn’t build that organization. It wasn’t in our DNA; we couldn’t hire the right people.
So we acquired this company for a million dollars. Got a loan from the bank for a million dollars, acquired 16 people solidly doing this product. Before that, we were struggling to get in there; we had a few people on our team. Once we did that, we were solidly in there.
I was telling people in 2012, “Right now, you know Great Plains is 85% of our revenue. It’s going to go down to less than 10%.” People couldn’t imagine that, they couldn’t fathom that. But we’re going to grow the ERP and the CRM business where Great Plains is going to be a much smaller part.
That was the first part. Then in 2015, we acquired another fantastic acquisition—we acquired another 10 or 12 people. This company was divesting of that practice, and that grew our practice even more.
Revenue-wise, I’ll tell you where we were at. From about 2008 there was another crash, by the way. 2007-2008 was the biggest recession we had had in my lifetime. It’s still the biggest one. We forget about it now, but our whole economy could have tanked. We were really in a bad situation. They did a lot of stuff to restore the economy, but it was really difficult for us.
We stagnated around the $9-$10 million revenue mark from 2007 to about 2012. Then when we started making those acquisitions, we got to higher levels. We got to 14 million, then we made another acquisition, we got to 15 million in 2015.
Then 2016 we acquired a CRM-only company. Same thing: we were trying to build that CRM team, but it wasn’t our DNA. We knew ERP; we didn’t know CRM. We tried and tried, never got more than a few hundred thousand. Then we acquired a company that was doing $8 or $9 million in CRM, added that to our company.
Now we were doing 20 million, 21 million, 22 million. That’s really when we started the major growth. 2017 we had a little hiccup; we had to back off, do some layoffs. 2018 was a great year. 2019 was a monumental year. I mean, we knew all we had to do in 2019 was execute on all the stuff we sold in 2018, and we would have a top year.
We said, “Let’s sell off of that year.” You have to sell off of that year. Once you have that top year, then you go to the market and say, “What are you going to pay for us?”
The process is: you go to an investment banker. You find the right investment banker and that’s what they do—they help you sell your company. They help you market it; they go to all their leads. It was not a difficult process; it was actually a pretty solid process.
In 2019 we said, “Okay, we’re going to hire an investment banker.” We hired them and signed the contract in December. We closed our year 2019 with top financials. We closed pretty much mid-January; we had financials. Let’s start the process.
The process started in 2020. We went through it all and we were thrilled at the offers we were getting. This was the top of the market. There was never a time like that to sell an ERP/CRM software implementation company.
Then in February of 2020, the perfect offers were getting absurd. They were getting so absurd that we were willing to actually sell to a company that we didn’t think was even the right fit, but they were offering us ridiculous money. Why wouldn’t we?
Victor M. Braca: Were you staying at the company?
Jack Ades: That depends on the deal. Yes, depends on the deal. So now we’re in March of 2020. This is when we’re getting the real offers. March 13th, 2020—we were expecting bids to come in that week. That was the shutdown. That was when everything shut down.
We didn’t panic. We said, “Okay, what are we going to do? Are we going to stop the process or are we going to go on?” If we stop the process, we’re going to have a worse year than last year and our valuation is going to go way down. We stuck with the process.
Wound up with two companies staying in, but the offers came in much lower. They came in about 20% lower than we were expecting.
Victor M. Braca: Oh wow. Just after that one week?
Jack Ades: Even just after that one week, valuations dropped by 20%. But we had two very good companies involved. One was a Big Four accounting technology firm, and one was a company based in Europe that had a small U.S. practice but was not growing at all. They needed a real U.S. company. We were doing 35 million in the U.S. and they said, “This is the perfect platform for us to build the U.S. business.”
The other firm wanted us also, but the other firm’s guy who was in charge of acquisitions was a hard negotiator. He did them a very big disservice by the way he was negotiating. If we had gone that direction—which I thought we were going, they were giving us good money—I would be a principal in a Big Four technology firm. They would take me up and they’d pay me very nicely. But they would have fired all of our admin, most of our salespeople, all of our marketing people, and just kept the consultants and maybe a couple of salespeople. They would have pretty much broken up the company.
The other company said, “We want you exactly the way you are. You become our U.S. company. In fact, we’re going to fold in the U.S. company that we have; they’re going to report to you.” It was going to be like a reverse merger of between $6 and $8 million. So you merge them into you and then you run the U.S.
We’re doing the exact same thing we were doing the day before. They wound up having the best offer for us and we went in that direction. Like I said, lower than we were getting bids in February, but still a very good number—excellent number for our type of company.
That’s what happened. We closed in August of 2020. The next day I went right back to work doing the same stuff I was doing the day before—same running the company the same way, but now we’re part of a much larger company. We were able to invest more in strategic growth.
I stayed on for four years. My last day was July 31st.
Victor M. Braca: Oh wow.
Jack Ades: When we were acquired, we were at 35 million, let’s say. Now we put this other company in with us, maybe we’re a $40 million company. Five months later, we acquired another company in the U.S. also similar size to what we were. Now we’re an $80 million company. This year they should be doing 130 million in the U.S. Globally, they should be doing 500 million.
It was four years. I think the time was the right time. I was happy to move on. They also wanted to bring in other people. They want to grow to 500 million in the U.S. alone, and they want to bring in people from other companies that have done those kind of numbers before. They could say, “Hey look, you know Jack and Alan running the U.S. could get us there,” but you still have to sell that story to the private equity group.
Carlyle had bought into HSO in 2019. Carlyle, one of the biggest private equity firms in the world, was the backer of HSO. They want to do another transaction, so most likely they’re going to sell to another private equity firm. You got to tell the story to the private equity firm: “Hey, we’re going to quadruple in the U.S. and here’s how we’re going to get there.”
They tell the story: “We’re hiring this one from this company, we hire from this other company. They’re going to help us to get to that number.” I was fine with that. Four years with HSO—excellent. Learned a lot, did a lot, but time for me to move on into other areas. So that’s where I’m at now.
Victor M. Braca: We touched on your story, which I have to say, there’s a lot to learn from it. Very interesting to hear about your entire journey. I want to see how that translates into advice you might have for young people in terms of business, in terms of life advice, success, anything like that. Looking back at your career, what are some key business principles that have stuck with you?
Jack Ades: One thing is that when you are an entrepreneur, you usually start with something that you’re skilled at. In my case, I was skilled at software development and technology. But when you want to become successful and go to the next level, your job description changes to something else completely. You are now a leader; you are a company leader. That’s completely different than being a software engineer. It’s a complete different set of skills.
You can have some of that inherently when you’re growing up, if you feel like you have leadership skills, but almost all of it is learned. You can learn it. So you want to absorb as much of that as possible. I learned a lot from Great Plains Software, from Microsoft, from mentors in that company. When I was in Vistage, I was learning from speakers about how to hire, how to run this kind of department, whatever it is. You always have to learn and become a completely different role. You have to transition from one to another.
I think that being an entrepreneur today is different than it was when I started, and I don’t recommend it for everyone. In fact, my father’s advice was: own your own business. That’s the only way to do it, the only way you’re going to make a lot of money and be your own boss. I don’t tell that to my kids. To my kids, I say: learn something really well, do really well at it, and get your first job in that.
I would not have been able to start my company if I didn’t get a first job working for someone else. Still, the first thing is: work for someone else and do it really well and learn as much as possible. Your first few years, I think the more you learn, the better, and opportunities will present themselves to do other things.
I think it’s just as lucrative these days to work in a large company in the U.S. They pay very, very well. Get equity opportunities in that company, get promotional opportunities, and you’re getting paid really super well. You’re not struggling to make payroll, you’re doing something really well, you’re not struggling to grow the business and hire everyone. You’ve got people working for you, you’re building a great team, and you’re getting a lot of satisfaction out of it. Not for everyone, but I think that’s a very viable way to be very successful in this economic environment.
Victor M. Braca: You were mentioning before—you have a passion and you turn that into a business, then all of a sudden you have to take on all these other roles. What you’re saying reminds me of something I read in “The E-Myth.” It’s basically a book about small businesses, how to run a business. The author mentions that if you’re turning your passion into a business, you have to assume three roles: the engineer—the person who actually does the work; the manager—managing admin work, finances, books, accounting; and you have to be the salesperson. You have to be all three.
I find it interesting how—let’s say you like making coffee and you want to open up a coffee shop—it adds all of these things into the equation that you may not have expected. So how did you deal with that in the beginning?
Jack Ades: Luckily I took well to finance and understanding financial statements, and I took that on early on. But I learned on the job; I knew nothing about it. I remember using Platinum Software—which was the software we were selling—to run our own business. I’m setting up a general ledger, but I didn’t know what a general ledger was. I had to learn liabilities and equity and assets and what a P&L was.
I learned that and I think that’s super important to run a business. Super important. If you don’t have that ability, you have to have someone on your team who you completely trust who can do that for you.
I actually thought it was fun and interesting to run my company and run it on the software and know the finances. But like I said, in the beginning, I was doing everything. I posted every transaction, I printed all the checks, I printed all the invoices and sent them in the mail. You just have to take it day by day, know that you’re growing something, and know that you’re learning all the time.
To me, when I’m learning, I’m in the flow. There’s something called the “flow state.” When you do something that you really love, and you’re really good at it, and you’re learning and growing, you’re in the flow state. Those 10 or 11 hours you’re working fly by because you get into that. That’s one of the things you want to look for. Find your passion, whatever it is, but find something that gets you into that flow state.
I was just talking about that with my son, who said he was doing something extra at work because he wanted to automate something so he could do it faster. He wrote these scripts and he said those nine hours went by like that because he was in a flow state. That’s a good place to get into.
Victor M. Braca: A lot of young adults nowadays who just graduated high school or college are worried about what they want to do, or they don’t think they’ll be able to bring in enough money. What do you say to these young people in terms of following your passion but also making sure there’s money coming in?
Jack Ades: It’s very tough for people graduating, especially if they don’t have a degree in something that they can actually get a job in. I think it’s one of the most difficult times in life. When they’re doing studies on stress and happiness, the mid-20s is the most stressful time because you’re graduating from school, so you’re not being taken care of anymore. You’ve got to find your place, you got to make money, you’re thinking about having a family.
I think the key is you want to minimize your stress as much as possible. It’s going to work out. For centuries, we’ve gone through this and we’ve somehow made it. Keep on learning, keep on networking—you got to build that business network.
I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn, by the way. I think it’s the way we’re building our business networks in the future. A lot of things to learn there. You got to just be persistent and you got to—look, you got to pray every day. It’s going to happen. God hears all your prayers and you’re going to be successful and you’re going to get the right job.
But you have to know that you deserve it. You have to be persistent. You have to go along the path. And once you start making money, you give away 10% from day one. You give away 10% and that’s going to help you grow. I tell everyone: if anyone asks me for advice and they’re making their way in the world, you got to give 10% because that’s really how you’re going to grow.
Victor M. Braca: Shifting gears a little bit to community involvement. You’re very involved in a lot of community organizations and your synagogue. Tell me briefly what you’re involved in and why is it so important to you.
Jack Ades: I started giving from—not so early in my career—I learned more about it and then I started saying, “Hey, I gotta start doing this.” When I started doing it, things started growing.
The things I’m mainly involved with are school—Hillel. From an early age when my kids were young, I was on the board. I still give a lot to Hillel; it’s a very important institution. My shul—Larchwood Shul—is a very, very important part of my life. I give to the shul and I give to a bunch of organizations. I’m proud to do that.
I was always looking for, what is the one I’m going to work on that’s going to be “the one”? I was involved with school for many years, but as my kids graduated, I was less involved. I wanted to turn to the next generation. Then AIPAC came to the shul. AIPAC was coming during the week; this woman was going to come speak about it.
I was traveling—I was actually at a Microsoft thing in Seattle—and I told my wife Debbie, “Go listen to what they’re saying and buy whatever they’re selling.” AIPAC—I know them since I was in college; I know they have a lot of influence in Congress. My wife is a huge Zionist; her brother lives there. She follows the news more than I do, and I’m a big news person. I said, “This is going to be our thing.”
She goes there, she calls me and says, “Okay, there’s this policy conference in Washington next month, they want to sign us up.”
I said, “All right, sign us up.”
I go to the policy conference and I said, “This is it.” What year was this? 2019. I was like, “This is a game-changer for me. This is what I’m going to get involved with.”
I told them right away—there’s Jackie Ashkenazi who runs the political network along with Freda Franco—I said, “I want to be the guy and I’m going to be heavily involved. I’m going to be side-by-side with you.” Since then, it’s been a major passion of ours.
I go to D.C. a few times a year. I lobby our Congressman. I have a specific Congressman that I’m involved with from Tennessee; I’m his AIPAC connection. I educate him and his team on the issues. He stayed over my house two weeks ago. I met 40 people from the community and spoke with them. I’m texting him whenever there’s a bill.
This last AIPAC was huge. You have to understand the ROI on your investment. AIPAC—great organizations we have in the community are all tax-deductible; AIPAC is not tax-deductible. You give to AIPAC, it’s not tax-deductible. So it’s 30% more than you’re giving to others for the same amount of money.
But we just got—AIPAC just got—$14.3 billion of supplemental aid to Israel a couple months ago. It was amazing. That’s on top of the $3.8 billion the U.S. gives to Israel every year. AIPAC has been on top of that and ensuring that that happens year after year.
By the way, when Iron Dome and David’s Sling protected Israel from the 400 missiles and drones coming from Iran, you had top members of the Israel military thanking AIPAC for this technology because AIPAC was spearheading all the funding for these things and educating everyone in Congress about it.
To me, doing that work—this congressman from Tennessee, great supporter of Israel, but the Republicans and Democrats were playing games with this funding. We needed this funding since October and it took them till March to even get the bill passed. The Republicans were on the fence; they were saying, “We don’t like that there’s $9 billion of aid in there for Gaza.”
They were like playing with the bill. We’re like, “We need this thing passed.” So they called me and said, “Look, you got to get on with your Congressman, he’s on the fence.” And I’m texting him, I’m sending him information, and he wound up voting yes for it. They thanked me and said, “Look, we might not have gotten that bill passed. You were doing your job.” That’s so cool. You’re making a difference.
Victor M. Braca: We went over your story and community involvement. Thank you for coming on again. I really appreciate it.
Jack Ades: Have fun actually? Yeah, it’s a good time.
Victor M. Braca: Is there anything else you want to tell the community, youth in particular?
Jack Ades: I grew up going to public school. My parents were part of the community from early on—my father was part of the community from when everyone knew everyone. He fought in World War II; he was on a Navy ship bound for Japan when they dropped the bomb.
At the same time, the community had its issues in the 70s and 80s; it was very materialistic and very competitive. I don’t know, it was not great values, but I appreciated it. Then when I moved to New Jersey in 1991, we bought our house and moved in and we got more and more part of the community.
Now I’m solidly in it and I think it’s the most amazing community. I’m saying it from a different perspective because I was not in it tremendously growing up, but I see it for what it is and it’s incredible. There’s nothing like this community on the entire planet.
What I’m saying to the youth is: you may have some hard times with the tuition bills and the competitiveness and anxiety over how you’re going to live and raise a family, but it’s truly incredible. It’s a story of how abundance is unlimited.
If you feel like, “How’s this going to happen? There’s only so much out there and other people are going to make it, I’m not going to make it,” no. We can all be successful. We can all have abundance in our lives. We have tremendous resources around us. Be proud of it, help it to grow, be part of it, leverage it in business.
It’s a source of tremendous—the relationships alone. Part of the problem in the world now is that people are not in relationships. People are working from home at their computer; they meet three people in a year. You hear people talking about it all the time. They are lacking relationships and humans need relationships. We have 75,000 to 100,000 people in this community and it is so good for us to have those relationships. It’s good for our health, our mental health, our making a living, it’s great for our kids. It’s tremendous stuff. I’m extremely proud to be a part of it. That’s what’s gotten us talking here.
Victor M. Braca: Yeah, on that note, the community is just amazing. In the research and the outreach that I’ve done to look for podcast guests, I just have a huge list of tens and tens of people who would be great. I’m talking with my father and this person would be great and that person would be great. So many people willing to share their insight and their advice. It’s really amazing.
Jack Ades: I’m looking forward to listening to some of the other ones. I’ll be a big fan of those.
Victor M. Braca: I’ll send you a link. You got it. All right, listen, thank you for coming on, Jack. I really appreciate it.
Jack Ades: Awesome, been doing the good work. Thank you.
Victor M. Braca: Thank you. All right, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Momentum. Jack shared amazing lessons about what it truly takes to succeed, like the importance of hiring people who are better than you to scale your business, and why donating 10% of your earnings from day one can change everything personally and professionally. He also drove home the idea that success comes from persistence, whether it’s sending out countless resumes, navigating tough economic times like 9/11, 2008, and COVID, or sacrificing personal milestones. I mean, Jack missed the weddings of his friends to achieve long-term goals.
If you enjoyed this episode, you would love my conversation with Avi Houllou. That episode is pretty much a masterclass in overcoming setbacks and obstacles. Avi lost his entire business, even going tens of million dollars in the negative, and he built it all back and then some. Avi now runs IBI, one of the world’s leading electronics distributors. You can find that episode on any platform—Spotify, Apple, YouTube—by searching “Momentum Avi Houllou.” Let me know what you think about that one.
Before I go, in case you didn’t know, Momentum is on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, and pretty much every other podcast platform. You can find the link to each platform on our website, themomentumpodcast.com. Also just check it out; it’s a pretty cool website, I made it myself. Let me know what you think.
With that said, thank you again for watching. Please be sure to subscribe, rate the show five stars—that really helps a lot—and share with a friend. Oh, also leave a comment. I’m almost getting too rich, too famous to respond to the comments, so now’s your chance. Leave a comment, I would love to hear from you. In all seriousness, thank you for watching. Until next time.
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