The Tempworks Story

Eagan, MN Updated February 2008

by Gregg Dourgarian, CEO of Tempworks

I love to hear from my clients how their companies got started. It makes for the best stories - stuff you can't make up or find in a book. One started her company as an off-shoot from a baby-sitting gig. Another when she sent her secretary out to bail out a friend's company. Another when he got laid off from a national staffing company. Many got started with Mom and Dad at the helm, back when $1,000 in sales made for a big week.

Swapping stories about how the fear of failure drives you to succeed makes for great bonding. Here's my story on how TempWorks got started.

The Beginning

In the 1960s when my father ran Technical Services for Manpower Inc., he taught me about spreads and contracting. He talked about how big the staffing industry was going to be.

He was a guy that could never sit still. One day he built a photography lab in our basement and taught us how to develop our own film. Another day he bought a chemistry kit, and we went around taking samples from the Milwaukee River documenting how industrial pollutants were threatening its habitat. He also built a typing instruction machine of assorted mechanical gadgetry.

This typing machine would interpret the letter pronounced by a voice and light up the corresponding key on a mock keyboard display. My Dad wanted Manpower to adopt it and make training a component its business. His bosses at Manpower did not think much of the project.  This led in part to his disenchantment and eventual decision to leave Manpower and start his own franchise in California.

This happened when I was 16, and boy was I glad to leave cold, wet Milwaukee for sunny Sacramento. I got to spend a lot of time working with him in those first 18 months of business.

He wasn't much of a sales guy, but he wanted his employees to work comfortably. and in a few short weeks he turned the office which had been a Manpower branch from a dive into a nice place with new carpeting and well organized offices. Later, he bought one of the early micro-computers, and together we wrote a payroll system to replace the old-fashioned tag board system.

Making money was a struggle and a difficult change in lifestyle, especially for my Mom.  We moved from a nice big house in suburban Milwaukee to an apartment in Sacramento.  I think my Dad worried more about finances than he let on. If you can imagine, we got really excited when weekly sales hit $2,000 for the first time.

After college, I couldn't find a good job until I happened to mention to a recruiter that I programmed computers for my Dad. The next thing I knew, Sperry Univac was flying me around the world to work on airline operating systems. Later, I landed a programming contract with a French airline cooperative and went on to form a small consulting company.

One day while in Spain on a consulting assignment for Iberia Airlines, I got fed up with the awkward programming tools on the Univac mainframe and decided right there to write a diagnostic and training system, Supertrace, that made programmers more productive. Spain made for a great place to do this because the Spanish are laid back - they drink wine and smoke in their computer rooms!

They didn't seem to care what I was working on or that I hardly moved out of my chair for three weeks. When I completed Supertrace version 1.0 and showed it to Iberia, they were impressed enough to let me keep the rights to it provided I add a few additional features. And with that, Supertrace went from being a quick hack to being the genesis of a new company.

The Rise of Supertrace

I was very excited about the possibilities for Supertrace. The Spanish really liked it, and I wanted everyone else to like it too - Mom, Dad, the postman - everyone! It's all I could talk about.  For months I drove everyone I knew nuts with attempts to do demos and to do anything I could do to sell it.

After a year of this I realized three dark truths: 1) I didn't have a clue how to sell software, 2) powerful figures within Univac were pulling the rug out from under my potential sales because they wanted customers to wait for their diagnostic system, and 3) I was running out of money VERY FAST.

The situation got bleak especially since I had a wife and two small children to think about. Fortunately, my wife won a medical school scholarship, and we were scraped by. Most people in my life thought me a buffoon with my Supertrace, and eventually I did run out of money to market it. It was back to contract software development for me.

Then the miraculous happened.  A year had passed when out of the blue Univac called.  They were in big trouble. They had abandoned their product and kept hearing about mine from the Spanish. This was my big break!

Their programmers had been trying to repair an airline software bug for weeks, and they risked missing a release date if they couldn't fix it. I walked into their shop with Supertrace and found the bug in a single evening. Univac then licensed the software from me and signed a big contract with me to train their programmers.

The Univac director that fought most against Supertrace was ordered to market my product to airline clients as a way to solve software development problems. Back then, it was common when you called an airline to get a recording saying that they couldn't help you because the computers were down. 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 to resolve glitches in their systems. Periodically, I still travel to these airlines to perform upgrades to their software versions and to train new programmers.

TempWorks Version 1.0

Although my Supertrace business was going strong in the early 1990s, I predicted (erroneously) that mainframes would gradually disappear and my market would eventually disappear. So, I started poking around to find something new to do. Coincidentally, the Air Force transferred my wife to Sacramento, CA, where my brother, Mike, was running the family franchise (my Dad, having another stroke of genius, decided to retire and play golf every day). Mike had grown the business and his system which was an outgrowth of our original payroll system needed serious upgrading. Soon, I found myself writing the first module of TempWorks.

News of the system's success spread quickly with Mike's help, and when the word got out that Tempworks had saved a $10 million temporary help account, other Manpower franchises started buying in. Thus began a sweat-equity stage during which I routinely worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, building in invoicing, payroll and front-office modules and cutting over new clients.

This all probably sounds rosy, but I encountered my share of despair, particularly from the Manpower CEO at the time who was very unhappy to be upstaged by a maverick franchisee outflanking him on technology. Just like the Univac director who made it his mission to block sales of Supertrace, this CEO successfully kept us from selling to several Manpower franchises at a time when we could have really used the money.

He undertook a $120 million dollar project with Ernst & Young to build a competing system, further locking out potential franchise business. Although the E&Y team outnumbered us almost a hundred to one, they continually missed deadlines as TempWorks began to market outside of Manpower.  We won a big contract with a group of Olsten franchises.

TempWorks eventually prevailed with Manpower franchises as well, and finally 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 (see Forbes, January 11, 1999).

It's odd that with both of the companies, Supertrace and TempWorks, a very powerful opposing figure emerged - the Univac manager for Supertrace, the Manpower CEO for TempWorks - that tried desperately to keep us from competing. I hope I never keep someone from doing good.

Update 2009: Silverlight, I-Phone, Payroll Funding and Processing

They say that in business, if you don't cannibalize your own success, someone else will. In 2006, my development team rewrote my system in Microsoft's new platform (WPF/Silverlight).  Microsoft took note of our effort and made it part of their massive marketing effort that included a special showing at its Mix conference in Las Vegas of 2007 and 2008.  

Every day we get dozens of visitors from around the world that come to see the possibilities of the Silverlight platform.  You can check out a video clip of it here.

In 2007, my son David started TempWorks Venture, a payroll funding and back-office processing business that has become the engine for fast growing staffing companies in USA.  My daughter Maria also joined the company as a software developer and is now watching the cash as company controller.

In 2009, we came out with our Social Media Suite and an I-Phone based recruitment system.  We're software developers at heart.  It's fun to work hard when you love what you do.