The Columbia Daily Tribune:
Jim Ries sits on the floor with his laptop and watches his 10-year-old daughter’s dance class rehearse.
That is, he watches when he’s not working.
Between applauding leaps and offering encouraging smiles, Jim responds to e-mails, drafts technical documentation and programs software applications. It’s both the joy and the bane of his existence.
“When it’s your business, you never leave work,” Jim says. “You’re always thinking, always improving, always communicating. We love it, but there is no closing the door at 5 p.m. I think about it all night; sometimes I work all night. It goes everywhere with us.”
The other part of “us” is Allen Mavel, who with Jim owns Enginet Technologies and Assessment Builders, two companies formed from the two programmers’ passion for code, product development and entrepreneurship. Their signature product is Assessment Studio, a customizable software package that allows users to modify, tweak and individualize assessment instruments for a wide range of uses. The versatile product has superior applicability for human resources, education, health care, educational research – and more.
Located in India, Ecole exclusively provides the product to the vast IT industry in that country and throughout the Middle East. Thousands of firms in that part of the world need to certify their workers. The best tool is Assessment Studio. Jim and Allen are paid every time someone takes an assessment, which enables them to meet one of their personal goals.
“We wanted to make money while we slept,” Allen says. “And we do.”
Further, in contrast to the economic phenomenon of U.S. companies taking work offshore, Ecole literally is sending work from overseas onshore to Central Missouri.
Photo by EngiNet Technologies.