Eagan, MN: Following is the company profile of TempWorks Software: In the 1960’s, my father, started Manpower’s tech services division, and he taught me about spreads, contracting, and how big the staffing industry was going to be. But his bosses dismissed him as a gadget freak, and they got rid of him by giving him a franchise in California.

My Dad starts a staffing business In a few weeks he turned the Sacramento Manpower office from a dive into a nice place. Later, he bought one of the early microcomputers, and together we wrote a payroll program to replace the old-fashioned tag board system. We got really excited when weekly sales hit $2,000 for the first time. My first programming job After college, I couldn’t find a good job until I happened to tell a recruiter that I had programmed computers for my dad. The next thing I knew, Sperry Univac was flying me around the world to work on airline operating systems. While in Spain, I was consulting for Iberia Airlines and got fed up with the awkward programming tools on the Univac mainframe. I decided right there to write a diagnostic and training system, Supertrace, that would make programmers more productive. I hardly moved out of my chair for three weeks. The rise of Supertrace For months I drove everyone I knew nuts with attempts to sell it. After a year I realized three dark truths. First, I had no clue how to sell software. Second, powerful figures within Univac were blocking my potential sales because they wanted customers to wait for their competing product. And third, I was running out of money very quickly. It was back to contract software development contracts for me. When your competitor buys your product Then a miracle happened. Out of the blue, Univac called. They were in big trouble. They had abandoned their product and kept hearing about mine. Univac signed a big contract with me and eventually, Air France, Scandinavian Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Japan Air Systems, and a host of other airlines around the world licensed Supertrace. Several are still with me to this day. TempWorks In the early 90s, my brother, Mike, was running the family staffing business, and his computer system – an outgrowth of our original payroll program – needed a serious upgrade to meet the business’s growing demands. I found myself writing the first TempWorks module. When people heard that TempWorks had saved a $10 million temporary help account, other Manpower franchises wanted it. Thus began a sweat-equity stage during which I routinely worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, building invoicing, payroll, and front-office modules, and winning new clients. Former Manpower CEO tries to block our growth The Manpower CEO at the time was unhappy to be upstaged on innovation by a maverick franchisee. He kept us from selling to several Manpower franchises at a time when we could have really used the money. TempWorks began to market outside Manpower. We won a big contract with a group of Olsten franchises. David takes on Goliath Manpower’s board of directors pulled the plug on their software development project in 1999, after an embarrassing article about Manpower’s situation appeared in Forbes magazine (Forbes, January 11, 1999). Soon we had many Manpower locations joining our system. If you don’t cannibalize your own success, someone else will. In 2006, our development team rewrote my system using Microsoft’s WPF platform. Microsoft helped us market the product massively by showcasing it on their website and at industry conferences. In 2007, my son David, who had been programming with me since he was 12, started TempWorks Venture, a payroll funding and back-office processing business that has become the engine for fast-growing staffing companies in the U.S. 2015 & beyond Our relationship with the likes of Manpower, Sterling, Michael Page and other public staffing companies continues to evolve with solutions ranging from time clocks and onboarding services to best-of-breed integration. We also continue to take on new startup staffing companies for funding and payroll on an almost daily basis. That’s my story, our story, The TempWorks Story. In case of any query regarding this article or other content needs please contact: editorial@plusmediasolutions.com