Adilas Key Contributors:

Steve Berkenkotter - Main owner and business partner - original ideas, concepts, and training - sales, relationships, dreamer, visionary, custom code, coordinator, builder of the first industry specific skin, and the list goes on. Huge player in the adilas story and timeline. One of the original owners in Moring Star Automotive - where the system came from. There are three known Steve's in the system notes. Most of them are this Steve (99 out of 100 times). He won't admit it, but adilas was his brainchild.

David Berkenkotter - Steve's brother and business partner in Morning Star Automotive. David was a system user and helped us create the adilas quick search. He liked using that feature, the quick search, but it only existed on one page originally. He wanted us to put it on every page. That ended up being in the header. He was also one of the original partners in adilas. Power user in the system. Sadly, he passed away due to cancer.

Shari Olin - Commonly known as "Shari O.". She worked in the accounting department back in the Morning Star days. She has been somewhat of a mother hen to help all of us crazy chickens keep going. She helps with customer support, training, payroll, bill collection, and tons of backend office functions. Major power user. Just being silly, but she can have the mouth of a sailor but the heart of an angel. Part of the adilas admin team and a great friend.

Craig Leitner - Also part of the original Morning Star team. Craig was the automotive floorplan and bank guy. He is a power user in the system and does a lot of bank reconciliation and other tasks. He currently works with Steve and asks as the adilas controller (money flow guy).

Cory Warden - Originally an adilas rep and consultant. Cory become part of the team after being a rep for quite some time. She helps with customer care, client support, project management, and keeping the team on track. She also does all of the news and updates and other training material. Cory does tons of oversight type services for our clients. Power user and part of the admin team.

Sean Carlton - Sean was a manager at a Cannabis dispensary in Colorado that used adilas for years and years until they sold. Steve recruited Sean to help with sales, deployment, and training. Sean brings lots of usage experience. Often, he is one of the helpers if we need to send someone onsite to help with a deployment or training session. Power user.

Brandon Moore - I'm one of the guys that writes most of the developer's notebook entries. Originally, I was hired by Morning Star, the automotive dealership, to help with data entry, accounting, and website stuff. I ended up being one of the main adilas developers and architects. I build content, write code, help other developers and team members, and help with training. Helped start the project back in 2001 under the Morning Star name.

Chris Dunsey - One of the first adilas interns (developers). Helped with a number of projects. Ended up being somewhat of a consultant later on.

Shawn Curtis - Kinda a funny story. He was taking a developer's class at Bridgerland. He knew my brother Russell. He asked to join our developer class and became one of the first interns along with Chris Dunsey. Shawn ended up helping with payroll and other projects. Some of the photo galleries in the system came from Shawn's help. He also worked on the media/content (file upload) pieces. Later on, he did more payroll work and acted as a buddy to Brandon and did some consulting work. We worked together for years and years.

Russell Moore - Russell is my younger brother. Originally, he was added to the group because of his graphic skills. He ended up being a great backend developer and project manager. He has also acted as a trainer and mentor for Brandon along the way. Much of the current system came from projects and efforts that Russell was involved with. He has also been Brandon's AI tutor in recent years. Great help to the system. Huge contribution.

Chris Johnnie - He is an entrepreneur who teamed up with Russell to help create a company called "Adilas For Business" or "AFB". Eventually, both Russell and Chris sold their pieces back to adilas. They were honestly the first ones to really try to run as a white label of adilas. This was back in 2015 and 2016. Chris really helped to push the product to the next level along with Russell's help.

Danny Shuford - Longtime friend of Steve's. Danny helped with some website design, sales, and videos for adilas. He even got into creating custom PDF labels for clients. Light development work.

Marisa Shaw - She is Danny's daughter. Danny brought her to an adilas training event in Denver, CO. Marisa was the star student. She ended up helping with some graphics, flyers, marketing material, teaching, instruction, and planning. Power user. Very helpful.

Shannon Scoffield - Shannon is Brandon and Russell's sister. Her maiden name is Shannon Moore. Huge help and virtual assistant to Brandon. She has helped with training, project management, and content creation. Most of the major content sessions were or have been with Brandon and Shannon working together. When they, Brandon and Shannon, were traveling, Shannon was one of the primary adilas instructors. If she was teaching Brandon was taking notes. If Brandon was teaching, Shannon was taking notes. Power user.

Cheryl Moore - Cheryl is my mom. What an asset. She owns a small business and has owed a few different ones. When we were doing training sessions, she came to every one of them. She asked wonderful questions and was a great supporter. Sometime, I would use her as a test subject - can my mom do this? If yes, we are good. If not, we may need to keep tweaking it. Thanks mom!

Wayne Moore - Wayne is my dad. He was my hiking buddy and more than willing to talk about ideas and concepts on our walks and hikes. He helped out with video stuff and was a great coordinator for making other connections. He worked at Bridgerland (technical college) and helped us get setup with classrooms, computer labs, and other great connections. Huge cheerleader! There is another Wayne, Wayne Andersen, he is a backend developer, systems guy, and database guy.

Wayne Andersen - This Wayne lives in Portugal and helps with all of the backend security, server, and code testing. Major skills, writes code, helps push all of us to new technologies, partially retired but loves to play with tech stuff. If you search for Wayne and it deals with concepts and coordination stuff, that's my dad, Wayne Moore. If you search for Wayne and it sounds like a master backend guy, that's Wayne Andersen.

Alan Williams - One of the lead developer's at adilas.biz. Alan joined us in 2015 and quickly came up through the ranks. Trainer, CTO, team lead, master developer, prototyper, and system architect. Alan has helped with many projects and features over the years. He also helped Brandon with some of the prep work for the adilas lite (fracture) plans and project. Sometimes called "Dr. Alan" by the other developers. Example: This might be a project for Dr. Alan.

Bryan Dayton - Bryan has been one of the most versatile guys on our team. Originally, he joined a development class out of curiosity. He and Brandon live in the same town and know each other from church. Bryan has done more custom code or small system projects than almost any other developer. He also joined the team in 2015. He helps with sales, custom projects, pushing on projects that he thinks will yield a return. Lots of work on the adilas lite and fracture project. Very hard working and versatile.

Dustin Siegel - Developer who helped with numerous cannabis and cultivation type projects. He worked directly under Steve to help with that business vertical. Many of the original pages that Steve built were taken over and remade by Dustin.

Eric Tauer - Developer and custom code guy. Originally, Eric knew Steve and lived in Salida, CO. As a note, adilas is Salida spelled backwards. Eric has a background in database work and data warehousing. Eric has done tons of custom systems for clients. Often, Eric would pioneer certain features or logic, as custom code, and then we would bring those features into the main adilas application.

Garrett Kirschbaum - Adilas intern and then full developer back in 2015. Stressful time of building and expansion. He and others helped run the adilas shop with Brandon's help. Garrett was a great developer and helped us standardize a number of tools and features. He was the first developer to work on sub inventory, back in the day. He also did other projects and helped with some developer management stuff.

Charles or "Chuck" Swann - Charles was an instructor at Bridgerland for web development. He builds custom websites, does amazing mock-ups, prototypes, and is a CSS master (styling a website using code). Chuck worked with Russell to help with redesign work, projects, and vision. Chuck worked fulltime for a number of years and now works and coordinates work done by a small hand-picked design and development team. Anything that needs some design loving gets passed over the Chuck and his small team.

Steve McNew - Friend of Steve Berkenkotter's. This Steve helped prep some whitepaper documents to help with getting adilas standardized and some internal audit type stuff. Mostly white papers and putting things down on paper. He ended up getting hired by the local school district and wasn't able to finish the process, but he got it started. He asked some great questions, and we had some good conversations.

Abby Elkins - Abby is Brandon's daughter. Her maiden name was Abby Moore. Abby, when she was little (10-12 years old) helped with some of the original concept artwork for adilas. Later on, she helped with content for the presentation gallery and then the adilas lite plans (fracture). Currently, she is working graphic artwork for different adilas pages. She's now in her mid 20's and has some awesome art and content skills.

Aspen Moore - Aspen is Abby's younger sister and Brandon's daughter. Aspen helped Brandon with some planning and counseling (mental help). Aspen also did some general business consulting with her dad Brandon.

John Maestas - Developer, backend server guys, and designer. John came to us through Dustin. John was uses as a jack of all trades on the backend and frontend. He did numerous projects, documentation, payroll, and page redesign projects. John was also very help to Brandon in working on the notes and comments on the SWOT analysis document. Many other projects as well. Good vision of the future.

Kiva Berkenkotter - Steve's wife. She helped Steve with various projects and planning sessions. At one point, she was in charge of paying commissions and collecting monthly reoccurring payments. Huge supporter to Steve!

Heather Moore - Heather is Brandon's wife. What a trooper. Cheerleader, support, ideas, and consulting. Huge asset to Brandon (me). Thanks Heather!

Jonathan Wells - Designer and mock-up guy. He helped to map out the system and created a number of deep mock-ups for adilas lite (fracture) projects. Great job catching the vision and putting those pieces into a visual representation. We still refer to his work when talking about fracture (future project for adilas).

Jonathan Johnson - Business consultant from Epic Enterprises. Met with Brandon and Steve in end of 2019 into 2020. Really helped us see some needs and opportunities. Later, helped Brandon with some other consulting when trying to define the fracture plan.

Calvin Chipman - Windows software developer. Calvin also did a bunch of web-based work, database stuff, label printing, and API socket stuff. Calvin was the first developer to use the adilas API's to create a native mobile app for a client. He also built a number of special developer tools used by some of our team to speed things up. He's the tool guy!

Cody Apedaile - Bryan Dayton's cousin, Cody helped with a bunch of JavaScript code and changes. He also spent some time working on the UML diagram for the adilas database. We didn't get things finished, but he was working on a new build your own interface (custom to you) for adilas. We ran out of funding. We want to get back to that project at some point.

Dave Forbis - Dave was the official "high tech gofer". He did a bunch of things. Graphics, project management, brainstorming, planning, sales, and helped with managing developers for the adilas shop. He was another great student. He came to a number of training courses and brought so much to the courses. He was also a big support to Brandon during some rough times.

Josh - There are three Josh's. Josh Wheeler, Brandon's friend and developer. Josh Sagert, developer and adilas user (worked tons on the discount engine), and Josh White, Steve's friend from California. Josh White has brought us a number of bigger leads and bigger players, like franchises, and other higher-end clients. Anything recent is Josh White, from California. He helps with networking, sales, and dreaming of new things.

Suzi Distelberg - Sales, training, and deployment. She also worked with some custom projects and doing step-by-step user guides. She has helped with all kinds of projects and even gone onsite for setups and training. Great asset!

Kelly Whyman - Kelly is Dustin's wife. Kelly was single handedly the best independent sales rep that adilas had. She did training, consulting, and sponsored a number of custom projects. Kelly helped Steve and Brandon with reports, functionality, and other things. She got so good at things, state contracts snagged her up to work at state and multi-state level stuff.

Molly Hennessy - Molly was another independent sales rep and consultant. She had numerous clients and got into doing SOP's (standard operating procedures) and other high-end documentation and training. Molly was an entrepreneur and even started creating some of her own product and services. If you search adilas on google, some of the other results are from Molly. Super creative and a great consultant.

Hamid Karbasi - Developer - He has worked with Brandon doing small websites, training, and small tasks. He currently is a manager at a retail store and brings some managerial type skills to the table. Willing to talk about concepts and how they apply to retail and other environments. He is also lightly helping with some planning for fracture.

Gene Spaulding - Friend, entrepreneur, and businessman. Gene is an old college friend. We had a number of friends in common. He has been a small mentor to me over the years. Way back, before adilas, he helped me get my first business loan for a project that I was working on.

Sharik Peck - Friend, entrepreneur, public speaker, physical therapist, and businessman. Good influence and mentor in ways. Sharik and I used to exercise together back in the day. Many of fun walk, run, and weightlifting session. Learning some conference and training skills from him and his wife. They have done really well pushing their product lines and doing some marketing. Trying to get some ideas.

Bridgerland Technical College - Use to be Bridgerland Applied Technology College. Not a person, but a huge help. This is a local technical college in the Logan, UT, area. Brandon's dad, Wayne, worked there. Tons of assets. They provided classrooms, training options, computers, and even an small incubation spot (starter office space) for the adilas shop during the startup phase. Huge asset!

McCorvey's Pro Shop - Also known as Bowling World. Client that had multiple locations. The started out with around 30 and grew up to the 90+ location level, all using adilas. Long time client.

Emerald Fields - They were the first client that wanted their own fully dedicated box and server. They had multiple locations and requested some custom code, reports, and features.

Beaver Mountain Ski School - Client that we helped them track their ski school (snow sport) lessons. Students, instructors, classes, and schedules. Custom interface dealing with elements of time and flex grid.

Bear 100 - This was the first event or annual event client that we did. They used the system for about a week each year. They had 350+ runners and their families that would be on the site for multiple days straight. It was a 100 mile running race with 13 aid stations and a small social portal for the family and friends to watch their runners. This one was special as it had custom input options to upload CSV files to populate the database vs normal HTML form field entries. Records were sent in batches from remote places to adilas for storage and race progress.

High Valley Bike Shuttle - Online ecommerce and scheduling client. They also have a cafe and small retail store. Fun online scheduling and bulk flex grid projects.

Herbo - Mike Roundtree, owner of Herbo, was the first company to do a small white label of adilas. Mike has been a great asset to Steve and the two of them have worked on projects, plans, and dreams. Herbo also has a custom payment solution that they are trying to market and get rolling. Mike has been a great supporter for years. He is also a certified CPA and that credential helps us and him. We would like to get other CPA's on board as well. Thanks Mike!

Nxtlinq AI - AI assistant. These guys really pushed us to get an AI agent inside of adilas. Tons of development took place and lots of prep stuff. We wanted to do a 3-part plan for integrating AI. 1. Teach it how to navigate using the AI quick search (check - done), 2. Teach it all things adilas. and 3. Teach it how to be clear up at the consultant type level. We only got the first phase done. Lots of other plans and such, but we ran out of funding.

Grok AI - Steve loves using Grok. He has built a number of image generation options inside of adilas. He is also working with Grok to feed it data to help with analytics and AI insight. This is not finished yet, but we may end up using Grok as an AI assistant inside of adilas. We have simple and emerging connections available right now but need to really polish things up before going live with the AI assistant options.

ChatGPT AI - We have started using ChatGPT to help with code, explanations, explore resources, planning, and help with training and flow for people and other AI bots. Currently, Brandon, Steve, Bryan, Alan, Josh, Russell, Chuck, and Wayne are using AI in either ChatGPT chat sessions or some other form of AI. We have some using Copilot, Gemini, Claude, etc. AI is actually helping in many ways. ChatGPT is a big one for use. Anyways, they are earning their place in the adilas key contributors list.

There are so many more that I can't list. Developers, users, power users, reps, consultants, trainers, clients, accountants, friends, family, and even critics. They have all helped out the idea farming process and progression. Good stuff! We couldn't have done this alone. It takes a community to do what we are doing.

There were a bunch of us on the meeting this morning. One of the first topics was the passing of David Berkenkotter. He was one of the adilas founders and in the adilas ownership circle. He suffered a stroke last week and ended up passing away on Saturday, September 12th, 2020. We were all talking about it and thinking of ways to help out and just be there for Steve and the family. David was Steve's brother. We had Danny, Sean, Dustin, Eric, and I on the meeting. All expressed their condolences and thoughts. 

On a different note, the other time spent today was doing emails, clean-up, and working on small bug fixes. Pretty quiet this morning.

Danny checked in and said that Steve and David had to go to Denver for a family medical issue. Sean popped in. Eric and I had a great little discussion about operations and accounting and how to allow things to flex and bring them back together. Eric was coding some of the new ACV (actual cash value) changes for customer loyalty points. He was trying to keep the ACV and points proportional and that was getting tough. We came up with a solution and he will be adding it in. He was close already, he just needed that approval to be flexible with some of the math. Most programmers really like to keep everything as equal as possible. In a moving and dynamic environment, that is really tough. You can do it in a perfectly static environment, but life is not like that. It has to be able to move or flex.

Danny jumped in and reported. He was excited that he figured some stuff out.

Dustin jumped in and touched base.

Steve and I were chatting. He and Danny had a great meeting with a consultant/developer. His name is Grant. Talking about all kinds of angles and what does it take to get and keep a customer? Light talks about niche type arenas and areas. Where do you compete and what do you bring to the table? Back to supply and demand type scenarios.

- Is the world flat? That is a trick question... As technology increases and as business grows, things tend to flatten out (become normalized). Steve and I were using a GoToMeeting session to bridge miles and miles - all through technology.

- We are having different consultants and sales type persons talking more to us. Lots of management and motivational type consultants trying to help us out and getting things going. Lots of flavors and getting things moving in a direction.

- Steve is hearing a small bell ringing… somewhat of a warning bell of sorts. We need to change some things and work more on what we have and what we offer. Currently, we are all over the place and not fully focused.

- David and Goliath type scenario

- We really want to work on our own product and help refine it and make it better and better.

- Small talks about protection and how can we preserve that? We want to keep building and growing and we know that there are some risks out there.

On 6/27/19, Brandon and Shannon were working on some content for the adilas user's guide. As part of that, they went over a PDF document that was created back in 2011. See attached for the full document. Below is the basic text from the PDF flyer. This is the virtual road map of what happened and why... fun story!

SUBJECT: Start-Up History of the "adilas.biz" Business Platform Quick Overview

Adilas, LLC was officially created in January of 2008. The original partners were Stephen Berkenkotter, Brandon Moore, and a corporation called Morning Star Automotive, Inc. The Morning Star Corporation has since been dissolved (2010) in order to more fully focus on the adilas platform. The actual project began in 2001 as a custom write-up system for Morning Star. Originally, the application was created for the used vehicle and trailer dealership industry.

In 2006, the application went through some major changes when Stephen (Steve) came up with the concepts for adilas. At that point, it started to change from servicing just the dealership industry into a more general or open business model. By the end of 2008 adilas was servicing a number of new clients (besides dealerships) with the following business types: self storage, modular homes, construction, manufacturing, professional services, and retail. As of 2011, adilas has added other businesses such as: virtual finance companies, real estate companies, transportation, GPS tracking, computer services, alternative healthcare providers, fasteners (nuts and bolts), catering, consulting, personal accounts, home-based businesses, etc.

The application or platform is set up for future growth and is very scaleable. It is currently geared towards small to medium-sized businesses. The application is in a constant state of improvement. This includes adding and upgrading features and tools, building reports, and automating existing functionality. Each new tool and/or feature is developed and tested locally before being deployed to live servers. All new tools and features are assigned to a permission on a per user and per corporation basis. This makes it so that only persons and/or businesses that need the new tools turn them on and use them. All unassigned permissions and features are dynamically hidden until assigned. The existing core of the application has been developed and tested over a number of years and is currently on its seventh full version.

The adilas platform is web-based and set up on a series of commercially hosted environments with state of the art data centers and 24/7 support techs that monitor all servers and databases. The application is completely "cloud" based and only requires a computer or a device that can access the Internet. All application pages and web service calls are done over a secure socket layer (SSL) with many other security features in place. Daily back-ups are done from within the hosted environments. Current adilas clients may export their own data and save local back-up files at any time. Adilas also performs its own weekly back-ups and then securely stores files offsite. For more information about adilas, please visit - www.adilas.biz

Going back to the beginning…

Morning Star Automotive, Inc., one of the original partners in adilas, was founded in 1989 by Stephen Berkenkotter and his brother David Berkenkotter. It was a used vehicle and trailer dealership. Over the years, they did well over $100,000,000+ (hundred million) in sales. By 2001, Steve and David had been in business for about 12 years and had 5-6 locations in Colorado. Things were going well and they were quite successful. They were managing their used vehicle and new trailer inventories on a spreadsheet that Steve had created. All of their accounting was done on a separate software system called Peachtree Accounting. All sales were done on hand written tickets and then given to the accounting office for data entry. The accounting department entered all sales and inventory items into the PeachTree Software after the fact. The outlying store locations would save all paperwork and invoices and then send a weekly batch via FedEx or UPS to the accounting department. Morning Star's primary headquarters and accounting office was located in Salida, a small mountain town in central Colorado.

Brandon Moore, another original adilas partner, had just graduated from Utah State University in Logan, UT, in December of 2000. He moved with his small family to Salida, CO in the summer of 2001. He originally moved to Salida to be a professional raft guide and kayak instructor on the Arkansas River that ran through the Salida area. As the summer progressed, work was slim and Brandon was scrambling to make ends meet and to keep he and his family afloat. He found a job listing in the newspaper doing data entry work for Morning Star in August of 2001. Brandon interviewed with Steve and his head accounting person for the data entry job. They offered him the job and he offered to help build the Morning Star website.

Brandon had graduated with a BA in Business Information Systems with an emphasis in Office System Management. Prior to that, Brandon had created a couple of small websites in college and worked as a computer instructor for a local technical college. The accounting staff began using Brandon to do data entry work for the parts department.

Soon after starting to work in the accounting department, the company website became part of Brandon's main job. He began gathering information on inventory levels and items for sale. With so many locations and inventory items being sold on a constant basis, it became almost impossible to keep up with the changes. To make matters worse, the company was constantly transferring a large floppy disk (100 MB zip disk) from store to store to make sure that each location had updated information. The process took about two weeks to make a full circle and then it would go around again. Each time a store would get the disk; they would update their files, add any new items, and send it via FedEx or UPS to the next location. This was a never ending loop with time being one of the biggest variables. Talk about a money pit and literally chasing your tail…

The first step in changing this process was to create a centralized location for the data. One of the sales managers in the Salida office would keep the inventory file relatively up to date by making phone calls and trying to record the data. Every couple of days, Brandon would post the file online with a date to let the other managers know how current the file was. Having the data centrally located sped up the time frame from a two week cycle to just a day or two and totally cut out the next day FexEx charges. Even with these changes, work and efforts were being duplicated. Different salespersons were selling items without others knowing about it and new web page files were being made for items that had already been sold. It became very frustrating as a salesperson would have a good deal on the table just to find out that the item was already committed and/or sold. Deals also went the other way. A customer would ask for something and according to the spreadsheet, it didn't exist, even if it was physically available at another location. Eventually, the need was great enough to drive both Steve and Brandon to come up with a plan to create a dynamic web driven application to track the main big ticket items called stock/units (vehicles, trailers, and toppers).

Brandon went back to Utah on a family vacation and was able to take a dynamic webpage class from the technical college where he previously worked. After the class, he returned to Salida and began working on his very first database web driven mini-application. Its only functions were to track the stock/units (big ticket items), stock items in/out, and mark them as sold (basic inventory tracking). Once completed, the timeline for doing a transaction went from the two days between updates to each salesperson making real-time connections and totally eliminating the old spreadsheet of inventory items. At that point, a number of concepts that are built into adilas started to form. These concepts are enter once, use many, and empower the users at the point of action.

Once the first mini-application was complete, Brandon terminated his full-time employment with Morning Star and became a sub contractor and independent web developer. He started working from home and started his own web-based business and began seeking new clients. Morning Star was still one of his biggest clients, but he no longer worked full-time for them.

As things progressed, more and more options, tools, and features were added to the system. It wasn't long before the operations side (sales) was walking circles around the accounting department. Communications improved, sales went up, and the sales staff loved their new tools. Meanwhile, the accounting department was getting buried and management was looking to add new locations because of improved sales.

Because of the load and stress, the accounting department began to ask for reports with specific dates, data, and totals. Prior to that point, the accounting department had had nothing to do with the inventory tracking system other than the fact that they could login and look at individual stock/units and their histories. A very distinct line was in place and operations could not touch and/or see any of the accounting pieces or functions. Each department only dealt with or played in their department and minimal crossover took place.

As the accounting department slowly began to ask for more and more reports, new tools and new features, the two departments slowly began to interact better. Communications, procedures, and flow started to develop. The commonality became the system. As a matter of fact, they even made the system be the "bad guy" to help spell out the rules and say "No" when needed. If management didn't like what the sales staff was doing, they had Brandon open and close virtual doors to accommodate the correct flow process. More and more permissions where developed to accommodate needs on both sides of the transaction. Real time problems and solutions were beginning to be addressed as they happened.

The operational interface began to lightly feed the accounting department certain values and date sensitive reports. Managers and operations folks began to see numbers and reporting that they had never seen before. A cause and effect cycle began to emerge. This may not seem very big, but it was the start of a huge paradigm shift for the entire company. Managers began watching expenses and taking pride in running a tight store and location. Inventory levels were being tracked, purchases made accordingly and accounting was getting their numbers. Things were starting to flow more smoothly. The entire development process was as follows: 1. Find a specific need 2. Figure out what pieces came from where 3. Take a step in that direction by releasing a new tool, feature, or report. The natural consequence of the user actions would then present the next logical step and management would be able to see where they wanted to go. In a way, the horse began leading the cart instead of the other way around.

The next phase of growth was changing from one corporation into multiple corporations. As the dealership grew, they took on different businesses and acquired others. Steve went to Brandon and asked for the exact same web application for some of his other companies. Each new system needed to be independent so as not to mix numbers and items between corporations. All that needed to be changed were names, locations, tax settings, colors, logos, permissions, and a few other minor tweaks. After adding a number of independent systems, Brandon told Steve that it was getting too hard to keep up with all of the different systems. A single update or change had to be tested in multiple places in order to make sure that it worked with all systems. Users were getting multiple logins to be able to work in different corporations (no cross over existed between the systems). An additional load was added because certain users needed certain functionality in one corporation but not in the other corporations. The current system permissions and roles began to morph into user-specific custom code and began to split the application. More functionality was added but upkeep and maintenance became much harder.

Brandon proposed that they pull back and try to put everything under one roof and build with growth and expansion in mind. This new system could include: multiple permissions that could be assigned to different users by corporation, any number of different corporations, unlimited locations within a corporation, and each corporation could have their own settings and virtual sandbox to play in. To top that off, a bridge or interface could be built to allow a user to switch or cross over between corporations without having to login under that corporation. The entire system would be built on a one-to-many relationship model. Steve liked these ideas and began to think on a more global scale. All of the existing systems continued with minimal enhancements for a number of months.

At this time, Brandon was very involved in a business he had started to teach people how to do snowboarding freestyle tricks and moves through an interactive CD-ROM. Most of his time was devoted to building his own business. He was spending very little time working for Morning Star other than minor special requests. Brandon was looking to have someone take over the work he had been doing for Morning Star as their web developer.

Morning Star needed help with Brandon heading out the door so they hired a new computer guy. Brandon agreed to stay on long enough to train the new guy until he could take over. This required Brandon to dive back into what was going on at Morning Star. About this same time, Steve was dreaming up the concept of creating a "super system" – a web application that could track all of the data for different businesses. He could see the potential of selling this web application as a service to businesses with a reoccurring revenue stream. Steve grabbed the bull by the horns and set up several meetings with Brandon and the new computer guy to share his dream and vision.

It was Steve's idea to begin pulling the operation side and accounting side together like the cogs of a zipper being zipped up until each piece fit in perfectly with the other pieces. Some of the functionality was already in place in a very loose sort of way. Steve had many business ventures (besides his dealerships) in real estate, transportation, small investments, etc. Steve was also in the process of finishing his degree with a dual major in business management and accounting from the University of Phoenix out of Denver. Because of his business knowledge, his entrepreneurial spirit, and experience, he knew that a large gap existed between operations and accounting.

He could envision a way that as he did his day-to-day tasks (operations) that they would automatically show up for roll call on the accounting side of the application. Data would be entered once and then passed along until all of its activity was complete. He wanted to track every penny from start to finish. He also came up with the theory of entering pieces on the operations side and then slowly having them become more firm values, solid dates, and eventually final numbers. He used the analogy of water droplets forming into ice crystals. The droplets start fairly loose (sales) and slowly become crystals, then slush, and then finally becoming completely frozen or iced down. This final output would end up being the actual accounting for the organization. Basically, this was the start of tracking a transaction from beginning to end through its life-cycle. Each key date or status change was flagged and dated and all prior steps were locked down according to user permissions. This became a running history of the objects and data as they moved over time.

About this time, Brandon had a small business loan or note that required a significant payment and funds were tight between trying to push his own products and make the note payment. He began to supplement his normal income by helping to train the new guy and diving in on Steve's idea of this business accounting and operations system (accopps). Within a year, the new part-time computer guy had some family problems and was unable to continue. By this point, Brandon had caught the vision from Steve and both were working almost full time on the project.

All of the existing online systems for the other corporations continued with minimal new enhancements as Steve and Brandon developed a brand new system from the ground up. The new system required a major rework and was purposely built with growth and expansion in mind. Every single page was built from scratch to incorporate the new fields and settings. Scripting and database platforms were changed, servers were added, and the goal began to move toward an open business model instead of just a dealership industry business model. Each new development step opened the vision even further. Ideas and concepts that weren't even possible began to become a reality as the process continued. Cogs of the zipper were slowly coming together from the bottom up.

It wasn't long and the new "Morning Star System" was created. All existing companies migrated from older standalone web applications and started to use the new system. Additional companies and corporations were added under the "Morning Star System" name. No marketing was done and all of the new companies were referrals from current system users. Brandon and Steve were working hard to come up with the next steps and still trying to figure out how to keep pulling the zipper cogs closer and closer together. There were no road maps for doing this. They were truly pioneering ideas and concepts with only a vision, brainstorming, and trystorming (planned experiments) to guide them. The deeper they got, the more they started to see that other companies had the same problems and frustrations that they had already worked through. New companies were ready to pay even though the entire application was not yet finished. A definite "need" was forming.

Steve and Brandon knew that the new system would need a name and would need to become its own company and entity. Over a lunch meeting in Salida, Steve proposed the name of "adilas" which is actually the name Salida spelled backwards. Up to that point, the entire application had been created there in the small mountain town of Salida, CO. The name stuck and an acronym was developed – "all data is live and searchable". As time went on and as each new development step was added to the system, the more this acronym became a living part of the application.

Adilas, LLC was officially created in January of 2008 with the first paying customers in June of that year. Shortly after that, the first paying international customers were added. All in all, there were close to 20 corporations using adilas before it even became an actual entity. All of these companies, from the various industries, had asked to be a part of the process. They were all using the service free of charge up to that point. Each company helped tremendously by providing feedback and ideas that were incorporated into the development process.

The feedback and suggestions from their clients became one of adilas' biggest assets (and still is today). The size and depth of the live test bed was another huge asset that they harnessed virtually for free. It would be nearly impossible for a small company to pay for a test bed of that magnitude. It would have cost millions in research, development, and staff salaries alone. Similar to the cream rising to the top analogy, the ideas and suggestions began paving the way to new features and functions. Over the years, hundreds and hundreds of people have chimed in and made a contribution in one way or another. When asked, Brandon said that "Even our most adamant critics have helped formulate our direction and plans. We are very grateful to one and all. The more holes they would find and point out, the more we just keep trying to fix the problems. It has been awesome!" People from all different walks of life from CPA's, attorneys, bankers, accountants, owners, managers, salespersons, data entry folks, entrepreneurs, and friends have all added their suggestions, ideas, and feedback. Literally hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of dollars have been put into this project. In a way it has become somewhat of a community effort or project.

In seven short years, from 2001 to 2008, adilas went from a mini custom write-up system to a multilevel business platform that is capable of bridging the gap between operations and accounting. The adilas guys have continued to pioneer the way and haven't stopped building. They are working on a master plan that includes a new way of doing accounting called "roll call accounting". This deals with tracking objects and data over time. Operations lead the way and the system is set up to catch and show cause and effect relationships of what was done and how the pieces are tied together. Along the way, each step is dated, flagged, and recorded. The entire story is being captured, mapped, and laid out for users to see. The "roll call" then happens when the user asks the objects and data where they were at any given point in time. The objects and data then virtually respond or report back to the user.

Clients currently use the system to track inventory, manage customers, showcase their products on the web, sell their items and services in an online point of sale system, run retail store fronts, pay bills, track receivables and payables, do their entire backend accounting processes, do payroll, scan and file documents (paperless office), schedule calendar events, run their business, and much more. New features and tools are released almost weekly and the system is gaining momentum and direction. A future training ground called Adilas University (adilasuniversity.biz) is in the works. This will be a dedicated place for training, video tutorials, step-by-step instruction, newsletters, upcoming events, new feature releases, along with a number of other different topics.

The entire application development process is fully paid for and has been through a number of full working releases. It has had hundreds and hundreds of people from different businesses pushing it to see what and where it will go. The story is still unfolding at an incredible rate. The adilas team is still adding new things every couple of days. With each new release, the vision opens up new doors and more options emerge. When asked, Brandon said, "You should see our tick list of where we want to go with this. I can see better training, faster reports, more automation, new custom settings, user defined preferences, and a more visual-type interface. I'm pretty excited about it!" So, it continues… as long as their users keep asking for the next logical step, they will keep building it better and better! The future looks very bright!

For more information about adilas, please visit - www.adilas.biz - If you would like to learn more about adilas, the system, the tools, the theory, the people, please get a hold of them for a free live demo. They welcome questions and love ideas! Contact them at: sales@adilas.biz or 719.439.1761 and ask for Steve.

--- additional contact info: support@adilas.biz - tech support line: 719.966.7102

--- as a fun side note... this document (text above) was created in 2011. Tons of new chapters have been added since then. Today's date is 6/27/19. And so it continues...

Project planning and scratching down ideas to help an assisted living center with multiple locations. Trying to use what I have and what I know.

This is a small note from this morning, while I was on a hike with Brian Stewart. These are some summed up lessons learned from King David in the Old Testament (David and Goliath).

1. Use what you have.
2. Take what you know.
3. Run to the fight.

Happy Halloween! As a fun side note, both Steve and Josh have Halloween as their anniversaries. They were able to chat and have fun talking about that.

Calvin popped in and we got some API stuff working on the adilas content server. He needs that functionality for the new adilas label builder app. Good stuff.

Alan, Dustin, Josh, Steve, and I were on the morning meeting. Steve had a couple of questions about some emails that were going around. We pulled in Alan and chatted about some database restructures, re-indexing of records, and full table rebuilds. We then talked briefly about a client that has a bunch of custom code but hasn't really been able to get things going. They are currently not paying their monthly bill and not responding to the David B. and Shari O. We have decided that we need to turn them off as it is costing our company trying to chase their company. If they want it, we can easily re-flip the light switch back on.

Wayne jumped in and we did some checking on his database migration code. We logged into the dedicated server and ran a couple reports. All of the data looks good and he will be contacting the client to let them know. This project has been ongoing for about 2 months now. Basically, we migrated about 10 corporations off of one of the shared servers to their own dedicated servers. Well, once we finished and released the new dedicated box, they came back and said, what about this other corporation that we had no notes and/or record of. Because it missed the normal migration process, and the new server was already live and consuming auto id numbers in the database, we couldn't do our normal migration process. Instead, Wayne had to write a new program that allowed for both servers to keep running at full speed and still be able migrate and copy database records across between servers. That may sound easy, but think of all of the auto id number and foreign keys based off of the auto id numbers that could get messed up. This was a very deep project. It looks great and seems good to go. That is awesome.

We intend to use this same program (actual software we have to run on the physical servers) to help us migrate other clients off of shared environments and into either other shared servers and/or to their own dedicated boxes. That is a huge break through for us. Good stuff.

After that, I jumped in and did some emails and tech support stuff. Towards the end of the meeting, Calvin jumped back in and we made two of his permissions go live for the adilas label builder. We then did some light testing on the live servers. It still needs some lovin, but we had a successful live test between data 0, the content server, and Calvin's adilas label builder app. That is pretty cool. He was going to make a couple changes and then get back with me. Pretty cool and some great progress.

On the morning meeting with the guys. We started out with Wayne asking questions about payee/users and how they can and do criss-cross and how they can cross between corps. We talked about options and why we did what we did. We got in to migrating parts, items, and PO line items. We then has some conversation about splitting up databases, indexing, and other processes that could either optimize the data processing and data retrieval process.

Calvin and Alan popped in, they were working on labels on the content server. Alan helped Calvin wrap some of his code in a try and a catch. It was awesome and he was able to push the cfcatch variable. That allowed us to figure out what we needed to do to fix it. Super cool.

Steve and Alan - "We break things and then we fix them." Fun little saying.

Alan would like to rework the forgot password project. He wants to rework the security and how that process would work. He would like to beef things up a bit and make it more bomb proof.

Alan would also like to work with Wayne on breaking code into smaller blocks and working in a more MVC (model view controller) type model. Basically, making baby steps and making things into a more object oriented code base. Alan was talking about encapsulating and modularizing functions, data, and components. Lots of code reuse and minimal duplication. Question - Build new or build on what you have? We are leaning towards refactoring existing code vs re-writing new code. Adilas' goal is build as if for years.

We were talking about sub inventory and taking that whole new level and pushing it out into an object oriented model. We also talked about implementing Wayne's testing framework along the way with the new changes. The goal is trying to limit the number of times we are re-writing the same thing. We want to reuse code as much as possible. We talked about strengthening our foundation so that it could handle more weight and also allow for flexibility and fracturing, which will still occur, no mater what we do.

Light talks about black box code and who pays to keep it updated. There seems to be two different levels. There are critical updates and non critical (optional) updates. We need to figure out a standard procedure to deal with custom code and black box code. Sometimes, if we have a problem and we are forced to think about it, we can usually come up with a pretty good solution. If we wait too long, we are forced into emergency surgery and sometimes that is not the best approach. We want to be pro-active on our approach and on our development.

Steve and I were talking about some hanging projects... One is the invoice due dates and watching for outstanding receivables (David and Shari O. really need this). This was a Russell project that only got half baked. We need to finish it up. The goal there is for us internally, to be able to see what companies owe what and what the dating is. Then once it gets to a certain level, we could prompt for payment and/or be able to shut things off.

We also talked about how it takes a whole village to raise the upcoming generation. We are really trying to build the adilas community and adilas family. We have many talented persons who are playing the game along with us.

• Working with an intern on his custom invoice projects. Called clients and did some invoicing for new features.
• Emails and phone tech support.
• Helping another intern get started on his new project. I started working on a half page layout for a magazine and tradeshow flyer.
• Finished up the trade show and magazine layout (½ page ad). Sent the mock-ups to both Steve and David.
• Emails and phone calls.
• Working with an intern on the web/API documentation project.
• New logo and colors for clients. Posted files online for clients.
• Emails and answering tax setting questions.

• Inside of adilas recording notes on patents and copyrights into elements of time. I recorded things inside of adilas (time id = 866) and inside of adilas university (time id = 2774). Wrote notes about 12 main application player groups, photo galleries for all 12 groups, full content management for all groups and levels, business world building concepts (all 10 levels), recording and capturing the story, systems, permissions & settings, and API socket connections & customer interfaces.
• Writing an email to Steve and David about the copyright and the patent workshop that we attended.
• Working on database creation files and processes.
• On the phone with Steve talking about trademarks, copyrights, patents, and options. He is going to Washington state for a client meeting next week and just had some questions.
• Working on defaults and tables with manual sort orders. Adding indexes and changing default values.

• Registering for an intellectual property workshop (Copyrights, trademarks, and stuff).
• Emails and phone calls.
• Copying notes from loose pages to the adilas notebook.
• Working on icon menus for customer pages. Actually took a number of links off of some of the customer pages. Trying to simplify.
• Uploaded new pages for the customer section. Tested new pages.
• Research on how Steve, David, and our developer in Salida are planning on playing with deposits, flex grid, banks, and customers for an armored car (cash & security) demo.
• On the phone with our Colorado developer to go over options and strategy for making the process very simple.
• Small clean-up query to help a client. They just needed some costs updated in bulk for their financials. No charge.
• Working on a problem loading in a CSV (comma separated value) file into the live production servers. Spent time on a tech support call, research online, Google-ing options, and playing with code. Trying to figure out a way to pull the data from an outside source.
• More research on other ways to read in CSV files into Cold Fusion.