Maddux Report - Tampa Bay's Business, Finance and Development Magazine

Home Run
by Melissa Wells

Oakland A's and San Diego Padres team up with local company on new software that is all the rage n major league sports.

A COMPELLING PIECE OF ART DOMINATES the office of Richard Nicholas, president of E Solutions Corp. in Tampa. A large, real-life photo captures tumultuous ocean waves battering a lighthouse in the midst of a storm, and the lighthouse keeper, oblivious to any sense of doom, stands gazing out the front door. It is a metaphor for the high-tech firm, a provider of customized automated solu-tions that include application develop- ment, Web site design, hosting, network security and statistical reporting.

Partners Michael Morizio, vice president, and Richard Nicholas, president, at E Solutions Corp. in Tampa provide information technology services to global companies like Pricewa- terhouseCoopers. photo by:Tom Berndt

"That lighthouse is E Solutions," Nicholas says. "Everything is going on around us and we're rock solid."

Solid, indeed. With many of the com-pany's competitors disappearing in the downturn that has hit the technology sector in the past couple years, "our revenues have grown," says Nicholas. "We had a record year last year."

Those revenues were at $7 million in 2002, with profits of $1.2 million, and are projected to hit $8 million this year. That is up from starting revenues of $721,000 in 1998.

When Nicholas and a partner, who has since retired and is sailing around the world with her husband, formed E Solutions four years ago, they made a list of pro's and con's of the corporate cul-tures they had experienced in their pre-vious positions. "We had 60 or 70 items on that list," Nicholas says. "And we dis-tilled our core val-ues. We picked very well. They've held up and led to our success."

Along with pro-viding excellent compensation and benefits to employ-ees, the executives settled on three tenets to guide the company. "Most important is the customer comes first," says Nicholas. "We never leave our clients hanging and we always make them look good. Second is we only work in the field of our expertise and, third, we don't go overbudget, even if it means we work for free." That hasn't hap-pened often, Nicholas adds.

The E Solutions area of expertise as an IT consulting firm is IBM and Microsoft technologies. "We're experts at that," Nicholas says. "We're not hack-ers. We don't play with it until we figure it out. We understand this technology.

"This is a very competitive business," adds Nicholas. "Our only edge over our competitors has been our corporate cul-ture. All we've had to do is deliver what we said we would do. This has been an extraordinarily successful model. Our client base has remained loyal."

The firm's largest client is Pricewater-houseCoopers. "They have been invalu-able to our growth," Nicholas says. "They are a corporate mentor to our firm. With 150,000 employees world-wide, they're one of the largest compa-nies in the world and they expect a level of professionalism from us. We've for Price Waterhouse (before their merger with Cooper) and here we are four years later with a $7-million busi-ness. I love it here."

The ownership of E Solutions altered in January 2000 when his partner retired and Michael Morizio, a global account executive at Lotus for 13 years, joined the firm as a partner and vice president.

"I decided to pack up and come full steam with E Solutions," Morizio says. "We had worked together for two years and I came in as a partner with owner-ship. I had a wonderful career path with Lotus and had won enterprise rep of the year. I left that to come here and it has been totally exciting."

Morizio's contributions to the E Solu-tions team led largely to the selection of the firm by URS Corp. to build their employee intranet system, called the Sourse. URS, based in San Francisco, has 15,000 employees around the world using the Sourse for corporate commu-nications.

URS (www.urs.com) provides ser-vices as consulting engineers, architects and planners and opened its Tampa office in the 1960s to work on the mas-ter plan at Tampa International Airport, a project it still has at this time. Other projects include the airports in Orlando, Denver and Hong Kong.

"Our typical project on an airport might be 10 years," says Carol Justice, the firm's director of information tech-nology in Tampa.

It was the technical expertise that E Solutions offered in Lotus Notes that led to the contract with URS. "They're a Notes and Domino shop," Justice says. "They were uniquely qualified to do the work on our intranet system. This has been a fabulous success in our firm."

The system provides a common inter-face on the computer of each employee globally. "This application includes their e-mail, calendar and corporate documents," Morizio says. "The human resources and financial departments serve information through the portal. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 they were using this system for critical communications to employees. They all live and breathe in their portal."

"It was an absolute blessing to have that kind of tool to communicate with our employees around the world after Sept. 11," says Justice.

With such impressive clients as URS and PricewaterhouseCoopers, both Nicholas and Morizio agree, nonetheless, that their greatest challenge is acquiring new clients. "Once we have a client, they don't go away," Nicholas says.

When the firm did experience a slowdown last year, "it was hard," adds Nicholas. "We decided to hold on to them and now we're busy and about to get bigger."

"We're already seeing a steady increase month to month in our rev-enues," Morizio says. "We expect to hire significantly by year end. There is pentup demand for our services."

Part of that expansion is due to a new software package E Solutions has creat-ed for Major League Baseball teams. To date the Oakland Athletics and San Diego Padres have purchased the ScoutAdvisor software created by E Solutions (www.scoutadvisor.com).

"We did work for the Yankees a few years ago, enhancing their scouting system," Nicholas says. "We saw a need for this product in Major League Baseball. Their systems are so backward. We eliminate paper work and provide an advantage in time savings. This is not a shrink wrap package. Each team has a custom version."

"The program we've developed with E Solutions is tremendous," says Bill Gayton, director of scouting for the San Diego Padres. "Some of the charts we've built into the system have elimi-nated a lot of manual hours. This has made our lives easier."

"The system gives our scouting staff four to six hours back each day," says Danny McCormack, player develop-ment and scouting coordinator for the Oakland A's. "It eliminates hours of voice mail and mounds of faxes."

Nicholas and Morizio plan to market the software to other professional sports teams. "We can cross into football, bas-ketball, soccer," Morizio says.

In addition to creating software, the firm also hosts web sites. "We're hosting over 1,500," says Nicholas. "All the sys-tems we host have a secondary and ter-tiary backup. We have redundant every-thing. It is highly secure."

Along the way, Nicholas has gar-nered a special designation for the firm as an IBM premier partner. "There are only 400 of them worldwide," he says. "A company has to have customer ref-erences, revenue levels from IBM engagements and the ability to demon-strate efficiency in their technology."

As to the future direction of E Solu-tions, "we're getting into acquisition mode," Nicholas says. "These acquisi-tions will be a logical extension of our core competencies."

A deal is pending to purchase a 15,000-square-foot data center in down-town Tampa from Phoenix-based Fourthstage Technologies, which is in bankruptcy proceedings. "It's a $9.1- million data center," Morizio says. "The deal is consummated by both parties; it's pending closure by the bankruptcy court."

Just as the firm won't compete for projects outside its range of expertise, such as Oracle or SAP development, for instance, "we won't expand into areas we aren't experts in," says Nicholas, who appears to be happy with what he does know.

"I wouldn't trade my life with anybody. I love where I live, the people I work with and my clients. We've made good decisions. Our culture and ethics have paid off consistently for us."