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.

Meeting with Alan and Steve. We were talking about some new accounts and also helping with the accounting for these accounts (offering other services). The goal is to help fill in the gaps on the accounting side of things. Let them do what they can and then we fill in the gaps. Steve was reporting that a client was saying that they were happy to find us. They didn't know that we existed. Small talks about QuickBooks and how many people use them.

The main meeting was between Alan and Steve. I was there, recording notes, chiming in, and doing a little bit of driving (clicking on pages and reports). Here are some of my notes... Instead of being sequential, they are broken down into things that Alan said and things that Steve said. Good meeting.

Notes from Alan:

- Shifting our mindset a little bit

- What is working and what is not working

- Skating to where the puck is going to be vs where the puck is at right now

- Being proactive in our approach

- Running to the fire vs doing what is needed in the long term

- Say a budget of 30 hours - 15 hours working on big projects or using that time to do some prospecting, 5 hours communication stuff (emails, texts, recording time), 5 hours bug fixes, other 5-10 hours maybe using AI to help clean-up the system or refactoring older code

- Maybe some new dashboards

- AI is amazing when it works

- Using AI to help us modernize our interface

- Talking about time - not too rigid on timelines - we want to finish things... - everything takes time - we never tend to get to things

- Taking about proactive maintenance

- He (Alan) sometimes struggles with communication

- It is easier to just knock out projects at times, then talk to people and/or get distracted by different things

- Code fits into multiple areas - paid, fun, wow factors, etc.

- Taking time to work on their own projects (one of his wishes and/or dreams) - basically either continuing education and/or fun projects (what can we do to make it better) - fixing things that bug us (as devs) - making things easier for others

- Alan's been working on some refunds (card pointe and clover - merchant processing stuff)

- Talking about dreams and what would that look like

- Stuck in between what we want and what we have

- Fearing the slowly sinking into nothingness (an analogy about adilas - like a ship)

- Running in circles

- Chasing a ghost (phantom look and feel)

- Alan asking about the goal with the investors

- Talking about the size of the client that we are chasing... how big of a fish are we looking for? - we may be trying to get too big - who are we? can we handle that size of a fish? - what is our goal and how will we get there?

- Alan had some questions on pricing and what does our ideal client look like? how do we find that person/company?

- other sales related questions - how do you judge a company, size, needs, etc.? - what about customizing things? good or bad? - we don't have a big huge team - we have been burned with merchant processing and other 3rd party solutions

- Talking about adilas and where we are at financially

Notes from Steve - once again, not sequential, but just things that I wrote down that he was talking about.

- Learning to adapt - using AI - it is going so fast - we need to be in that race

- Talking about databases - yes, they are still really needed (good multi-relational databases)

- Steve was showing some of the AI stuff in his demos with some potential clients - that has been going well

- We are really bad at estimates (we have had our lunch eaten time and time again)

- Talking about client churn and companies falling off of the system - pretty normal - we are actually doing pretty good.

- Looking around in the system a bit

- Maybe going with $100/hour for development work and $65/hour for setup and oversight

- AI has sped up Steve's work - he is learning along the way - guiding it along - taking in small sections at a time

- Steve was talking about time budgets and not getting too tight on certain time blocks

- Some of Steve's projects are tiny and fulfilling - inch by inch and little dabs

- We need some firewood (sales and revenue coming in) - we are low on revenue

- Steve thinks that Alan needs a break - maybe getting out there and talking to people about what we have

- Sean has been helping with deployment - Cory is doing more client work

- Steve loves to figure out the angles (problem solving for clients and what they need)

- We have an MVP (minimal viable product)

- Finding people who are happy with what we have

- Investors tend to look at the reoccurring revenue - we are looking for an angel type investor who sees the vision and value and says, yes, let's push this thing forward

- We have gotten it this point without a sales team and without marketing... imagine what we could do if we get that going

- Big fish are expecting to be courted (wine and dined)

- They, our clients, have to be big enough to afford us

- Shooting for $400/month

- No big fish and no little fish (super little) - being able to offer our services and they pay for it

- Learning to say no

- Most companies pay around 3% for merchant processing... say we go less than that - say 2% of monthly revenue - start higher and then go down if you need to - if you are dealing with a big chain, we may have to negotiate with them

- Steve talking about numbers... say we have made $10Million from paying clients. If you take number and divide it by our total client count over the years, for us, it is around $12K per client

- We should be selling stuff - that is a super high number at around $12K per client

- Steve would like to get 5-10 new accounts a month

- Offer our other services - activation, deployment, and servicing the account

- We have done a lot of stuff for free... we need to change that

- Sales - can be broken down into three main things... they are like, trust, and respect

- Just tell everyone what you do (from Kiva)

- Do they have inventory? Do they need to track stuff? Great! - Nobody does inventory management like we do - QuickBooks is sending people to FishBowl and Shopify

- Being outside and out and about

- Helping people with their over needs - these are things that they can't get to - their over needs

- We could offer lots of other outside or inside services - we are $65/hour for those services

- We either do it or we don't do it, go to the next

- Stay on the good side of town

- On custom code, they, our clients tend to really like to dream and can't really afford it - we have been burned on doing too much custom - we are $100/hour, paid weekly, if yes, ok, let's go

- The bigger the lift, the bigger the pain (time and money)

- If needed, we could move forward with bigger teams - like a lawyer, we could work off of a retainer

- We can get lost in "custom world" or "custom land" - we need to steer clear of major custom

- Looking for happy clients - we have a bunch of clients who are not calling us, they are happy

- Trying to stay away from black box stuff - building settings or small bridges

- Being able to remove columns on reports (fracture or adilas lite stuff)

- Simple website stuff (easy hosting) - simple pages and some settings (landing page, contact us, and about us, plus adilas ecommerce)

- Trying to be around $1,000 and then a monthly (have to have an adilas account)

- Taking things off of their shoulders - they are already spending tons for all of these other services (mashups)

- Maybe look at some sport teams - other team sports

- Not trying to sell things, just doing some exploring

- Talking about sales and/or trimming things down a bit (financially)

- We may to stop or curve the development and really focus on sales

- Talking about the AI quick search - going beyond normal API endpoints (URL crafting, AI quick search, mini API, etc.) - Steve jumped into the test site and was showing Alan some of the AI agent stuff that we are working on.

Overall, a great meeting. Some good takeaways as well. Good stuff!

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Bryan ran this page through AI and got the following summary back

AI Summary:

Sales & Strategy Meeting Summary

Attendees: Alan, Steve, Brandon, & Bryan

Meeting Overview

The discussion focused on expanding Adilas’ service offerings, improving operational efficiency, refining sales strategy, and leveraging AI to modernize both processes and the user interface. The team emphasized the need to balance custom work with scalable solutions and to strengthen recurring revenue and client engagement.

Key Discussion Points

Alan’s Focus

• Encouraged a proactive and forward-thinking mindset (“skate to where the puck is going”).

• Suggested a structured time allocation for projects, maintenance, communication, and AI-driven improvements.

• Emphasized AI modernization for the Adilas interface.

• Advocated for proactive maintenance and allowing time for innovation and internal improvement projects.

• Discussed defining the ideal client profile, pricing models, and balance between customization and scalability.

• Highlighted challenges in communication and prioritization but emphasized long-term goals and clarity of direction.

Steve’s Focus

• Stressed the importance of adapting quickly to AI and new technologies.

• Acknowledged issues with time estimates and scope management.

• Proposed pricing structure:

  • $100/hour for development

  • $65/hour for setup/support

• Highlighted need to increase recurring revenue and attract an angel investor aligned with Adilas’ vision.

• Advocated for focusing on sales growth (targeting 5–10 new accounts/month).

• Emphasized charging for all services—move away from unpaid work.

• Encouraged avoiding excessive custom development to protect scalability.

• Recommended prioritizing sales and marketing efforts to drive short-term revenue.

Action Items

• Define the ideal client profile and align pricing accordingly.

• Increase focus on sales, marketing, and client outreach.

• Use AI strategically to streamline operations and modernize the platform.

• Improve internal communication and proactive planning.

• Explore investor options and sustainable growth strategies.