IT’S TALENT NIGHT IN SANTA CRUZ, CA, at the annual offsite meeting of Bob Bowers’ Chicago-based Soliant Consulting. Bowers may pick up his Stelling banjo, or play Steve Howe’s “Mood for a Day,” or sing a duet with a colleague from Washington. A co-worker recites a poem she has written. A mixologist takes the stage and stirs drinks for the house before an opera singer performs.
One year a fire dancer demonstrated her skills.
“It was great.” Bowers smiles. “But that’s the last time we’re doing anything with fire!
“The first year we had no expectations, and everyone was amazed at the range of talent in the room. I’ve been amazed at how willing people have been to share that side of themselves, and at the support they give each other.”
What began on a whim has become a staple of the offsite.
“One of the things I’m most proud of is creating a great place to work,” Bowers says in a promotional video on Soliant’s Web site. The custom software developer and consulting service is a particularly good place to work for liberal arts grads like Bowers, a musicologist turned entrepreneur who carries his passion for music alongside his penchant for problem solving and a deep commitment to family.
“We solve problems by creating custom software appli-cations for all kinds of businesses, so you need many other skills beside the technical,” Bowers says. “In fact,
I find it easier to teach those than the ‘soft’ skills. We’ve done well with people who come from the liberal arts. We’ve taken those people with little programming expe-rience and turned them into great consultants.”
FOR BOWERS, THE TECHNICAL SKILLS CAME FIRST. The son of a Northbrook, IL, programmer and consultant grew up watching his father work at the computer.
“I knew how to program in Microsoft Basic when I was 10 years old, so that always came easily for me.”
But as a career choice, “it was also the last thing I wanted to do!”
He arrived at Wabash as an Honor Scholar in math and history, but his path veered toward English and music.
“My freshman year I took a 20th century experimental fiction class with Bert Stern, and that and the music class I was taking were so much more fun than the multivariable calculus class.”
He plunged into the College’s small but growing music department.
“I wanted to do everything, so I ended up joining the Glee Club, the first choir I ever sang in. I would never have had the temerity to join a choir any place else.”
The experience ignited a life-long love of singing even as the guitar player stretched himself to learn clarinet and violin from friends and joined the College’s band and orchestra.
“At a larger school I wouldn’t have got into any of those ensembles, but at Wabash they were happy for anyone who wanted to give it a try.”
Inspired by stories from FIJI fraternity brother Jeff Qualkinbush’s studies in Austria, Bowers spent his junior year in Vienna.
“I went a little native there; I redefined myself. It was an opportunity to start over. And the experience made me think I wanted to study music academically.”
He was studying for his PhD in musicology at the Uni-versity of Chicago when he took a part-time job with Cambridge Educational Services. There he was handed a stack of files for the schools he was supposed to contact for GRE, GMAT, and LSAT test preparation workshops.
“I thought, There’s really got to be a better way than using all this paper. I had just bought a new Mac from the campus computer store, and it had this program on it called FileMaker Pro. I started dabbling around in it and built my first database.”
Within two years he had converted virtually everything the company did into a database.
“It was a puzzle to solve for me, and it was a creative endeavor.”
About the time Bowers’ funding for grad school ran out, he was reading advice about Filemaker from Chicago consultant Chris Moyer on an online forum.
“Out of the blue one day I emailed him and said, ‘Hey, I’m curious: Can people actually make a living doing this FileMaker thing?’” Moyer responded and the subsequent conversation led to a job offer and the genesis of Bowers’ first entrepreneurial venture.
His first client was Apple Computer’s office in Chicago.
“Chris was starting on a project with them, so I drove out with him, thinking the whole time, What could I possibly have to offer Apple Computer about technology, and how can I credibly put myself in there as a consultant?
“Chris was very comfortable and confident. He told me, ‘As long as you know more about something than the client does, then you’re fine. You just have to stay one step ahead of them.’” Bowers laughs. “That was my first lesson in consulting.
“From there it just evolved one step at a time. For me, I guess it’s been more of following the path as it evolves as opposed to trying to make the path. There’s some shaping as you go, but it’s been more of an adventure to see where the path takes me.”
BOWERS SAYS HE AND Moyer knew next to nothing about running a business.
“Early on, I studied our clients, and as we turned into a real company, I tried to learn from them and emulate them,” he recalls. “I was just fascinated by the variety of businesses that were out there.”
He read books on leadership and management, including the Darden School’s The Portable MBA,
a gift from his lawyer.
“He gave copies to both of us. I think he realized that Chris and I were not very good at this.”
Bowers learned the basics from his own accountant.
“Over lunch he would explain to me why I couldn’t do what I was naively trying to do and how accounting worked. I probably had the most expensive business school education that one can have, considering all the mistakes we made.”
After he and Moyer dissolved their partnership in 2004, Bowers co-founded Soliant with former MacWEEK managing editor Scott Love and software developer Steve Lane. The company employs more than 50 with offices in Chicago, San Fran-cisco, and Philadelphia and a wide-ranging client list that includes Apple, Citibank, Volvo, the Uni-versity of Chicago, the State of Nebraska, the Old Town School of Folk Music, Wabash College, and The Gap.
Along the way, Bowers also became an expert Filemaker Pro developer; he’s written seven books and trained thousands on the program.
And the learning continues, most recently at the world’s largest producer of baked goods, Grupo Bimbo, in Mexico City.
“I love going out and having the initial conversation with somebody and learning about their business.
“It’s just fascinating the things you learn, the systems you see. But at some point, you realize that there are many similarities between these things as well. The things that I’ve learned from 100 projects in the past, I can apply to this project.”
VISIT SOLIANT’S HEADQUARTERS on the second floor of a seven-story red-brick building in Chicago’s Greektown neighborhood to get an idea of Bowers’ management style. The inviting open-concept loft was renovated for Soliant’s purposes. Many interior walls are transparent, including Bowers’ decidedly nonexecutive office that looks out on the rest of the workspace. The corner office with a view went to the Controller.
“I like seeing people coming and going,” says Bowers, an introvert happier practicing guitar or focusing on programming than leading a company meeting. “If I’m not careful, I could sit in front of the computer all day and not remember my real responsibility. But at some point I realized that my goal wasn’t to learn how to be a better programmer: What I needed to do was learn how to make a company grow.”
That turning point came soon after his marriage.
“Until then it was fine to have it be just a fun thing here. But I married Rebecca, and our first child, Nate, was born in 2003, and I realized that if I fail at this, it’s not just me who fails. There are people who are counting on me and they’ve put their trust in me. Their mortgages and their kids’ college educations are dependent upon me, and I owe it to them to make sure that I was doing the best job I could, that I would learn as much as I could, and be as successful as we could.
“You’ll hear the term ‘servant leadership model.’ I like that responsibility. It’s also one very rewarding: I’m able to provide not only for my own family, but to create an environment where our employees have a nice place to work and a good living.
“There’s not any particular philosophy behind all this, other than trying to be genuine. I try to figure out what’s the right thing to do and what’s the right way to do it.”
Bowers slides a book across the table: The Trusted Advisor, by David Maister and Charles Green. Every new employee gets a copy.
“We all have examples of trusted advisors in our lives, whether it’s a mechanic, an accountant—that person that you can go to and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about this. What do you think about it?”
Inducted into the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in 2008, Bowers offers his own list of trusted advisors: At Wabash, it was music professor Nina Gilbert. UBS advisor Bernie DelGiorno helped him make the transition from grad school to the business world (“He’s half stock broker, half father to me”). Brother-in-law David Moore introduced him to an executive forum that’s been a wellspring, and his energy and focus inspires Bowers.
“With every new employee I try to follow up with a conversation about the book over a cup of coffee, just to see what they got out of it, because it has become a blueprint of what I want the business to be. We strive to be more than just a vendor; we’d like to become trusted advisors.”
FLY BACK TO THIS YEAR’S offsite in Santa Cruz, after a team building scavenger-hunt and the talent show, when a day of community service became part of the event.
Senior Developer Martha Zink’s recollection would bring a smile to a Bowers, whose motivations boil down to “telling the truth” and “doing the right thing.”
“I love my work,” Zink writes on the company’s blog. “I help clients solve work problems, which leads to a happier work life for them. It doesn’t get much better than that. That is, until I realized that I work with some of the most amazing people out there.
“We had a blast getting to know each other better. These aren’t just my co-workers. These are the best in the industry, these are my friends. And we get to do a little good in the world together.”