As of October 2009, I have been self employed for 11 years. Before starting CompareHRIS.com, I owned a HR software reseller business for ten years. With that business, we sold, implemented, and supported other HR Information Systems vendor’s products. After ten years, I was getting pretty burned out. I happily sold the clients of HR Pay ‘n’ Time, Inc. in October of 2008. I enjoyed the work as a HRMS reseller but it just wears on you. Any problems, regardless if it’s the product, the consultant, or anything else seems to fall on the owner, which of course was me. More than anything else that style of business is problem solving and problem resolution. I’m thankful for the experience I gained and the knowledge I took from it but I was ready for a new set of challenges. Before my reseller business, I worked in sales for Sage Abra for five years. In total, I sold, supported, and implemented Employee Management Software and HRMS software applications for 15 years.
In the fall of 2007, I began working on CompareHRIS.com because after looking, I could not find a website that did, in my opinion, a good job of comparing and contrasting the leading Employee tracking Software systems on the market. Today we have twenty of the industry’s leading HRIS HRMS solutions on the site and soon we will hit our 100,000th visit to the site. I am thoroughly enjoying the work and am extremely proud of the results we have achieved. The HRIS vendors are great and I am truly appreciative of the fact that they all took a chance on my concept from the very beginning. With our HRM Software buyer’s tips webinars, I still get to communicate with the HR community who I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with for the past fifteen years.
The bottom line is that I love my job. Frankly, I think I’m too passionate about it to even call it work. Sure I work a ton of hours but is it really work if you love what you are doing? A friend of mine told me that when he first went into business for himself it was the greatest time of his life. Then one day he woke up and realized it’s just a job. After two years of working on CompareHRIS.com it’s still not a job.
When you own your own business, everyone regardless if they know anything about your industry and business or not, has advice to offer. I understand this and have seen it for 11 years now. The surprising thing with CompareHRIS.com, however, is that everyone seems to keep offering the same advice. The advice over and over again is that I need to work harder to substantially grow the business so I can sell it. One of my vendors calls CompareHRIS.com my baby. I can’t sell my baby. What would I do then? Would I sell CompareHRIS.com? Well, I am not one to say never so let me say the only way I would sell my baby and my passion is if an offer was large enough that I would never have to work another day in my life unless I decided to, which I would. I’m not even sure I would sell the business even then. I used to play golf and I really don’t like the game. I guess I could start another business but who knows if I would find the passion that I have right now for CompareHRIS.com.
There have been crucial times in my life that I have accepted the advice of others and often times I was extremely glad I did. This is not one of those times. I am pleased at the thought of running CompareHRIS.com for many years to come.