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BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE: Business Week ebiz | |||||||||||||||||
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Micro Modeling's Boss: About to Become a Big Shot? Roy Wetterstrom has steadily built his software consultancy since 1989. Now, he's a nominee for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year On Christmas Day 1989, Roy Wetterstrom and his wife, Emily, finished packing their car on a snowy street in Minneapolis and headed off for New York to chase a dream -- building a software and consulting business out of Wetterstrom's fledgling application for financial modeling and forecasting that he had crafted while programming computers at First Bank Corp. But success didn't come overnight. Teamed with partner Andy Mehring, the two-person outfit toiled inside the second bedroom of Wetterstrom's Battery Park apartment, operating on little more than the $15,000 monthly contract fee from the firm's lone client, Merrill Lynch. While Wetterstrom coded, Mehring pitched the software and consultancy to the cream of Wall Street. Even though they were outsiders, the duo offered something competitors didn't: easy-to-use PC software that ran on top of Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program. Others built their consultancies on mainframes and mini-computers. It was different enough to get them established in business. "We were building custom Windows solutions for everybody," Wetterstrom recalls. Fast-forward 10 years. The two-person, card-table-and-chairs outfit called Micro Modeling Associates has grown into a consultancy with more than 300 employees, 10 offices nationwide, and close to $60 million in revenues. MMA is no longer focused solely on the financial sector. Today, it's building everything from pharmaceutical systems to E-business applications to get companies up and running on the Internet. And while MMA might not have the name recognition of Arthur Andersen or other Big 5 consultancies, the world is taking notice: Wetterstrom, 34, has been named a finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of Year competition -- an accolade given to the likes of Dell Computer founder Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com. This year's winner will be announced in November.
Wetterstrom's ability to understand complex issues and find a solution quickly has proved to be the key to MMA's success. In the late 80s, when few corporations considered Windows a platform for business computing, Wetterstrom saw Windows and Microsoft's first versions of Excel differently. He made Excel an important analysis tool for corporations -- allowing financial managers to graphically display current and future earnings. "There was just nothing else like it that could let you build something quickly that had the power that Windows and Excel did," he says. That belief in Windows led MMA to develop a tight relationship with Microsoft, starting in February, 1990. "We walked in to the New York office as a two person company with a shingle...and to Microsoft's credit they supported us along the way," he says. COMING OF AGE. In 1993, Wetterstrom "bit the bullet," as he calls it, and moved out of the office space he had been renting from Merrill Lynch to a 4,500-square-foot office nearby. But the move was more than just a change of addresses. It also signaled the coming of age for MMA. Less than a year later, Wetterstrom took the first steps outside of the comfort zone of financial services and opened offices in Washington, D.C., and Morristown, N.J., to launch the company's expansion into telecommunications and pharmaceutical technology consulting. Increasingly, Wetterstrom found himself winning accounts against the Big 5 info tech consulting firms. "We were more focused on solving specific problems than they were," says Wetterstrom. That was something the Big 5 came to recognize too -- so much so that they started hiring MMA to help them with their own computing projects. With the departure of Mehring in 1995 and the addition of an executive team to run the day-to-day business, Wetterstrom now finds himself as more of an overseer and less of a hands-on manager -- even though his title is CEO. Despite the recent success and accolades, Wetterstrom hasn't forgotten where he came from. Earlier this year, MMA embarked on a new business of helping Internet startups. Called Venture Technology, the effort gives fledglings technology and consulting help in exchange for equity. Five have already signed deals, including atyourbusiness.com, which will go live in October with a site that provides small businesses with a range of services, including human resources and payroll.
Still, he's working hard enough and moving fast enough to sustain a thriving boutique consultancy in a business dominated by giants. Moeller, who writes about software, is based in Business Week's Silicon Valley bureau _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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 Roy Wetterstrom, CEO of Micro Modeling Associates | ||||||||||||
