I Was Building SaaS Before Most People Knew What SaaS Was

I moved 6 times in 8 years chasing the retail corporate ladder.

By 25, I had three kids under the age of five and was running a $45 million P&L as one of the youngest General Managers in Best Buy history. Store 046 in Champaign, Illinois, Fighting Illini country. I was living the playbook: hit every number, get promoted, relocate, repeat.

But the ladder has a price. And the price was everything that wasn't work.

My wife and I made the call to move back to my hometown, Carroll, Iowa, population 10,000, to build some stability. To give the kids one school, one set of friends, one place to call home. To save our marriage.

That last part didn't work. We ended up divorcing anyway.

Chasing your dream and climbing the corporate ladder has a cost. Sometimes you don't see the invoice until it's too late.

But something unexpected happened in that small town.

The Startup Nobody Expected

I was surprised to find a software company in Carroll, Iowa. But there it was.

A local chiropractor, brilliant guy, true visionary, had built a software system for managing electronic health records. It was a server-client platform that ran in a contained system inside the chiropractor's office. He had a few local clients, a small office staff, support, and IT.

What he didn't have was someone to build the operational infrastructure to scale it.

The timing couldn't have been better. In 2009, President Obama signed the HITECH Act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, allocating billions in federal incentives for medical providers to adopt Electronic Health Records. Eligible professionals could receive up to $44,000 over five years in Medicare incentives alone. Every chiropractor in the country was suddenly motivated to go digital.

The product existed. The systems to scale it didn't.

That's where I came in.

Building the Machine

I went to work doing what I'd always done, building operational infrastructure.

SOPs. Customer support systems. Workflow documentation. I led a full NetSuite implementation to get the back office running like a real company, not a side project. We created the processes that would let a small-town startup punch way above its weight.

But we also made the classic startup mistake.

Early on, every time a customer wanted a feature, we built it. Every request became a new addition. The product got more complex with every client we onboarded. Patches stacked on patches. Break-fixes became a full-time job.

We were building a Frankenstein, and we didn't realize it until we were drowning in our own complexity.

Sound familiar? If you've ever run a business where you say "yes" to every customer request, you know exactly what this feels like. The product works for everyone individually but becomes unmanageable for the company. You're not scaling, you're sinking under the weight of a thousand one-off decisions.

The Hardest Call

So we made the hardest call a software company can make.

We scrapped the server-client model entirely and rebuilt as a true cloud-based SaaS platform. Stripped away the bloat. Simplified the architecture. Standardized the feature set. Made it scalable.

This was before "SaaS" was a buzzword at dinner parties. Before every LinkedIn post included the words "recurring revenue." We were making a bet that the future of software was in the cloud, a bet that seems obvious now, but felt terrifying at the time.

That single decision changed everything.

From Small Town to Nationwide

We grew 100% year over year. Went from a handful of local chiropractors to practices across the country. We built what became one of the largest cloud-based chiropractic EHR platforms in the United States.

Not from Silicon Valley. Not from Austin or New York. From Carroll, Iowa. Population 10,000.

I moved on before the exit. But the foundation we built, the operational systems, the SaaS migration, the scalable infrastructure, that foundation led to a private equity acquisition, a merger with the company's largest competitor, and ultimately the creation of one of the biggest retail healthcare software platforms in the nation.

The machine kept running long after I left, because we built it to run without us. That's the whole point.

The Lessons That Never Left

That experience shaped everything I build today. Every system, every product, every automation I design for operators comes back to what I learned in that small-town office:

Systems beat features. Every time. If you're building features faster than you're building processes, you're building a house of cards. The infrastructure has to come first.

Simplicity scales. Complexity collapses. The more complex your product, the more fragile it becomes. The companies that win long-term are the ones disciplined enough to simplify. It's not about doing less, it's about doing the right things so well that nothing else is needed.

Stop building Frankensteins. Every "yes" to a one-off customer request is a "no" to scalability. Learn to say no, or learn to love break-fixes at 2 AM.

The best software isn't the one that does the most, it's the one that works every single time. Reliability is the feature. Everything else is noise.

And sometimes the biggest opportunities are hiding in the smallest towns. I didn't go to Silicon Valley. I went home. And I found a company that would shape the next 15 years of my career.

Why This Matters Now

Today, when I build anything, I think about that chiropractor's office. When I add any features, I think about the Frankenstein we almost created. When operators come to me drowning in complexity, too many tools, too many processes, too much manual work, I don't just sympathize. I've lived it.

I was building SaaS before most people knew what SaaS was.

I just happened to start in a town of 10,000.

The lesson never changes: strip it down, make it work, then scale it.