I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since Oasis first opened its doors for business ! A lot has changed in those years with the industry and the world in general. We started out in Middletown, a suburb of Louisville, in a 1 room executive suite. My partner, Carl Sievert and I did all sales, demonstrations and support. Our first customer was Southern Tire Service in Louisville. They were referred to us by their CPA. I will never forget walking into their office and seeing the green sheets and ledger books that were used in those days. It was a lot of manual work. Just an FYI—Southern Tire is still a customer using MAS 90 ! It’s changed a bit since then, but still works for their business.
In 1991, the price of a laptop was roughly $ 5000. As a start up company, we couldn’t afford that, so we would strap a regular computer and a monitor (no, it was NOT a flat screen !) to a cart and go out and do software demonstrations. Oh, those were the days. And the internet? Believe it or not, it was non existent for a small company. All transactions were handled by phone, fax or snail mail. Waiting for information was common place and really not all that stressful.
We hired our first employee in 1993. Karen Roberson (she is still working at Oasis !) came on as a support analyst and she brought a background in programming. We decided that we wanted to become Master Developers for Sage. Karen also possessed the unique ability to make customers feel at ease and has the patience of a saint! One story I will tell about Karen is that when she was with us only a few months, she accidently wiped everything off my hard drive ! We were not networked at the time so it was just my stand alone computer,however, all the billing for the company etc was gone. The really bad part is that I had not backed up to my floppy disk, yes, I said floppy disk (5 1/4 “ I believe) so it was all lost. Take note and do your backups ! One story she would tell on me (there are many but I will tell the first only), she and I were going to a customers and I was driving. I had a bad habit of playing with the buttons on the windows. She had her window down and her hand out when I “accidently” rolled up the windows on her fingers ! Anyone that knows Karen knows that she just politely, asked me to roll the window down. We still laugh about that ! BTW—I did the same thing to my dog’s neck. But she was not as kind. Ahhh-those were the days.
Our first official brochure included me, and my sister as “trainers” at the photographers office. Seemed pretty professional at the time. See if you can find a copy of that brochure on our website. Thankfully, we have grown and progressed since then and have a great brochure to display. In case you are wondering, my modeling career did NOT take off !
There have been a lot of things that have happened in the past 20 years. Watch our blog regularly for more stories and answers to other daily questions (hint,hint)