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The Spokane Journal of Business
By Paul Read of The Journal of Business
September 18, 2003
JOHN JANZEN KNOWS databases. His software is used by Microsoft Corp. to test new lines of code--at speeds of 10,000 processes a minute--in the software giant's popular Office suite. Another of his applications is used by Sacred Heart Medical Center to create work schedules for the about 150 pharmacists there, based on such criteria as availability and expertise. A piece of software he's finishing up now will enable Spokane law firm Lee & Hayes PLLC to file complicated patent applications electronically.
What Janzen doesn't know, he says, is marketing. And he doesn't want to. That's why Janzen and his wife, Nancy, who own Maplewood Software Inc. here, want to begin selling off some of the products the 7-year-old venture has developed while performing custom software projects for its customers. "We've maintained ownership of all the products we've created, like a photographer who sells rights to use his photos but keeps the negatives," says John Janzen, the company's president and chief software engineer. The Janzens believe they have about a dozen distinct products--from about 50 projects they've done that could be sold to other software makers or distributors that have the capital and marketing muscle to take the applications national or international.
Among those products are the testing software used by Microsoft and various task and work-flow management applications used by such Maplewood customers as Inland Northwest Health Services, of Spokane, and a Japanese airline maintenance and components company called Jamco Corp. Maplewood is talking with a venture-capital and business-brokering company based outside of Spokane that might help market its testing software to potential buyers, and is talking with several national companies about taking on its electronic patent-filing software. They haven't reached an agreement with any of those potential buyers, however, and for now can't identify them publicly, says Nancy Janzen, who is Maplewood's CEO. The company might either sell its software products outright or sell the marketing rights to them for a royalty fee, she says.
For now, Maplewood wants to hold on to its worker scheduling software, which it is calling ScheduleMaster, and market the product regionally and perhaps nationally, primarily to hospitals and pharmacies. Even that software though, might be sold if the price is right, John Janzen says. The company has had a taste of doing product marketing before. As recently as the summer of 2002, Maplewood employed three salespeople, who at the time were marketing a document-management system targeted at financial-planning companies. At that time, Maplewood was on a surge, employing about 12 people, including eight programmers. But the company also was operating on borrowed time due to the soft economy, and as it finished up work on its biggest-ever contract--the 18-month run with Microsoft that brought it about $300,000 in revenue-- it suffered from the same decline that hurt many others in that industry, and began cutting staff. By March of this year, Maplewood was down to four employees--the Janzens and two programmers. When the company needs to bolster its work force again to meet the needs of a customer, it will do so first by hiring independent contractors, to avoid having to lay off its own employees, says John Janzen.
For now, the workload at Maplewood is steady and at a comfortable level, he says, declining to disclose revenue numbers. The company will tinker with marketing its scheduling software and will push to divest some of its products to companies that can market them more aggressively, but most of its emphasis will be on developing new software. That, says Janzen, is Maplewood's comfort zone. "We're really good at doing database things," he asserts. "We do things that people say can't be done--over and over again." Marketing the company is Nancy Janzen's primary job. The former teacher and freelance writer has immersed herself in local technology circles, networking with other companies and giving speeches and presentations around town. John Janzen also does some teaching at Spokane-area universities.
Word-of-mouth reputation has earned the company, most of its business, the Janzens say. About half of Maplewood's customers are locally based, the other half are mostly regional. Because some of Maplewood's software expertise is centered on technology used primarily by the nation's biggest corporations, it often has to look outside of Spokane for customers. Still, Spokane is where the Janzens want to keep Maplewood, which is located in the Holley Mason Building downtown. The Spokane natives returned here in 1995 after living in the Puget Sound and Portland areas. John Janzen took a job in the computer department at Group Health Northwest here, but also began doing some freelance programming work for others. The following year, he and Nancy formed Maplewood, and by 1999, he had left his job at Group Health to work at the new venture full time.
© 2003 - Journal of Business
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