Principal: Stephen Lublin, President
Address: 6490 Hazeltine National Drive Suite 100, Orlando FL 32822
Phone: 407- 658-1874
Web Site: www.cfoconsult.com
Established: 1989

Where it All Started:

My motivation for starting this company was that in 1989 I was recently unemployed. Being a CPA, I decided I could be a consultant to other companies that didn’t have CFOs. The original company name was CFO Management Consulting. I had zero revenue from that after four months. One day while reading the paper, I saw an ad about becoming a VAR (value added reseller) for another accounting software reseller. I contacted them and became a VAR. Shortly thereafter (April 1990), I became a Great Plains VAR.

Products and Services: 

We are a Gold Certified VAR for Microsoft Dynamics® GP and Microsoft Dynamics® CRM. We have some internal products that we sell nationally as well. One is GL Multi-currency Consolidations, originally written for Ripley’s Believe It or Not! The product creates foreign currency translations according to FAS 52, with approximately four simple keystrokes each month and allows customers to consolidate multi-currency companies into US dollars very easily. All 12 of our multi-currency customers have this module as an add-in, and every single one of them is a reference customer for us. It’s a very nice addition, and consolidations are completed in seconds instead of minutes or hours.

Another product is Company Defined Colors, which allows customers to change the background color of their homepage and other pages in Microsoft Dynamics GP. If a customer has one company with a canary-colored background and another with a peach background, the company he/she is working in/with is easily identifiable. A common issue is that people have the same chart of accounts in multiple companies, and they typically end up doing journal entries in one company when they thought they were in another

What opportunities are on the horizon for your company?

We just became a Microsoft Dynamics® NAV reseller and are in the process of becoming certified. We will become developers on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV platform as well. I think our current opportunities are assisting other resellers that don’t have Dexterity or .NET developers. Other opportunities are to take some of the products we have developed for different customers over the years, and turn them into products that we can sell nationally. We have a lot of great products that we use and re-use quite a bit, but it’s on a one-on-one basis. We’d like to make them more flexible to the point that they can easily be implemented for any organization.

If you could describe InterDyn – CFO Consulting in three words, what would they be and why?

Totally customer oriented. The reason I say that is because it relates to the “old days” when I was a controller/CFO who relied on outside resources for my ERP applications. I experienced great support and felt thankful and appreciative, and I experienced really terrible support and felt frustrated. Remembering those feelings guides my company and me to provide great support to our customers. Our focus is on meeting or exceeding our customers’ expectations in every support case and project in our organization. Not a day goes by that we have not addressed every support case that was called or e-mailed in.

What are some short and long-term goals for 2009?

The short-term goals for 2009 are survival, profitability, and growth. Our long-term goals are to continue to differentiate ourselves and grow our product line. Our company is more and more dependent on custom programming for Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It has been a great growth area for us in the last couple years.  We see this as possibly being another division in our company as it offers so many opportunities for revenue development.

How does InterDyn – CFO Consulting differentiate itself from other ISVs?

We own the source codes for Microsoft Dynamics GP for the core modules as well as the project accounting series. In all of our sales calls, we talk about our ability to make the product do exactly what the customer wants. We try to differentiate ourselves by saying, “whether you need that today or in the future, we are here for you, and we’ve got the experience to pull these things off.” We also do a lot of billing integrations to different billing packages that need to have a lot of data manipulated, tracked, and imported. When we share what we are able to do with a client who has a separate billing system, the sale is pretty much ours.

You were one of the first 100 Partners to represent Microsoft Dynamics GP. How do you think Microsoft Dynamics GP has evolved from when it was first launched to today? 

When we first took on GP, there were two modules: system manager and general ledger. I tell my new employees that I went through the initial training and passed the test on every single module. I remember in the early days, it took 14 3 ½” floppies just to load system manager, general ledger, receivables and payables; it is much better today. I remember that running a GL trial balance in The World Online would take seven minutes to print on screen during a demo.  It takes about two seconds today. One of the most important changes has been moving from c-tree and b-tree databases to a Microsoft SQL database. This has moved us light years ahead. Also, enhancing the dexterity development language in the way third-party dictionaries are handled and moving to e-Connect and .NET programming have been a big changes. As an ISV, all of those changes are making our lives much better.

What is the best advice someone has given you?

The best advice I ever got was to hire great people to work with and to delegate authority to them so that as a team you can fulfill your mission to your customers. We hire the best people that we can possibly find that fit our culture, enjoy a joke, and like to have a good time. We like each other, and we help each other; there are not any political issues here whatsoever. Surround yourself with great people and give them the authority to do what needs to be done within your direction.

Has your company faced any challenges? If so, how did you overcome them?

We almost went out of business at one point when we had two $50,000 credit lines. Both of them were completely used up, and we had to meet payroll and couldn’t do it. My wife and I went without checks for a little while. We had an employee volunteer to take a pay-cut, and we let him. We pulled through it, and about three weeks later, one of our biggest sales at that time, whom we had been negotiating with for months, came through. Their CFO finally said they needed to get going, and they sent us an $88,000 deposit – we started before we even signed contracts. We were about ready to tell our employees that we had no cash; we were about ready to close our doors…and then that happened. That was the point that completely turned us around, and we have never looked back.

What do you find is most important when building long-term customer relationships?

The most important thing is talking with the customer in-depth, helping them see a vision of where they would like to be, and then helping them achieve that vision. If you do that, you develop a great relationship. We also continue to visit with the customer to see how they are doing and determine if their needs have changed since the original implementation. Sometimes you will come in six years after the original implementation, and they have new employees and there are new modules or functionalities that they are not aware of. I like to find out what they don’t like about GP or the custom program we wrote. If they can tell me what they don’t like, I can tell them whether it is a training issue or something we can fix.

You have more than 30 years of experience in automating accounting systems. How has this knowledge and expertise contributed to the success at InterDyn – CFO Consulting?

We have more than 400 successful implementations, and we’ve had almost every type of customer profile imaginable. We’ve developed best practices over the years that allow us to repeat successful implementations time and time again. We have best practices on programming as well that allow us to reuse code or to, again, draw on our knowledge and make things happen quicker, easier, and at less cost to the customer.

How does partnering with other industry leaders help improve and enhance InterDyn – CFO Consulting? 

We are a small organization; we only have 12 employees. Partnering gives us access to trained resources that we can then use as if they were our own.  You can’t be everything to everybody.  You have to trust another organization that you have a good relationship with for these types of things. In addition, we have the InterDyn group, which we can always fall back on for resources.

What advice would you give to other ISVs?

A few things that we found very helpful are using Microsoft Visual SourceSafe® and having a development team that knows how to communicate with each other and can tag-team a project. I think the best advice is to hire great programmers who understand business, database manipulation, and management. If you are going to be programming around GP, NAV, and CRM, you need to have an understanding of what business is all about, what a sales invoice is versus a purchase order, what cash receipts are, and how to perform inventory adjustments. Programmers with those understandings are very difficult to come by and train. We actually send our new programmers and technical people to Microsoft Dynamics GP core training for two weeks so that they understand what a sales invoice is, what posting means, what happens when you post, and so on. I think an investment in the database understanding is more important than the programming skill sets.

Being an ISV has helped us to attract customers, to retain customers, and to make them happy. I don’t know how a reseller without resources like ours does it unless they partner with companies like ours. I think that it is a critical component in the sales process as well as for overall growth.

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