CHAMP Software

July 1, 2006 Joe Tougas

Mankato-based CHAMP Software races at its own pace, on its own track, for its own prize.

Photo by Kris Kathmann

You have to know where you’re going to find CHAMP Software.

The office building of the company is like a little island, separate from the apartments, houses and other buildings in its Mankato neighborhood and, at first glance, seemingly located in the middle of an intersection.

You’ve driven by it plenty. For the past year, CHAMP has been housed in a small brick building with Minnesota Valley Federal Credit Union, right there at the foot of the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge. But it has no sign to lure drivers, let alone any flash of presence or corporate identity.

Indeed, you have to pull into the credit union’s parking lot, walk into the credit union’s entry way and make a point to not walk into the credit union before you enter the nondescript world of CHAMP Software—a few offices, desks and a family business for more than 20 years.

CHAMP Software is also an island in terms of traditional business desires of impressive growth and maximum profit. What CHAMP Software’s CEO Dave Rosebaugh has done in the past two decades is pace the small company’s progress so its growth is tempered by strong personal values—not the other way around.

It begins with the product itself: software to aid caregivers who tend to in-home patients, largely the elderly and mothers with newborns receiving public healthcare. The main customers are public health agencies that provide private home healthcare, largely serving elderly patients and young mothers. CHAMP software allows the caregivers a way to effectively monitor and follow pre-written healthcare plans assigned to the patient by their healthcare provider. It’s also a complete billing system, useful in an industry in which billing is notoriously behind the times and navigating Medicare and Medicaid can be cumbersome.

The corporate philosophy that underscores what CHAMP is all about comes from a classic tract on how to be a good and successful person: the Bible. When Rosebaugh talks about company values, that’s the playbook he’s using. And it is tempting to use a David and Goliath comparison when describing this business, which began with two customers and is now the largest community health and homecare software vendor in the Midwest. But Rosebaugh has no interest in conforming to any Goliath footsteps.

“Our values are more in terms of a comfortable working environment than heavy revenue streams,” he said. Which, of course, is one thing to say when all seems to be going well, but another altogether during times of uncertainty or visions of easy money. Watching the initial glee of the dot.com explosion, for instance, when startup after startup used their desktops to pan for cyberspace gold. Rosebaugh said he managed to avoid the near temptation of get-rich-quick by staying true to his core financial values—stay self-funded and don’t seek venture capital. He also wasn’t interested in outrageous growth.

“We were busy and sales were more than busy,” he said. “But it’s not about the bottom line, or the dollar. We’re having fun.”

With a father who was a Presbyterian minister, Rosebaugh moved so often as a teenager he attended different high schools for each year in California, Arizona and Ohio. He attended college at Iowa State University, majoring in urban and regional studies, and worked for a number of years in planning and management analysis for governments and non-profit agencies.

In the early 1980s, he and wife Deb moved to Minneapolis where Dave took a job as public health director for Isanti and Mille Lacs counties. Although having only one class in computers, he found himself drawn to the intrigue of computer code and software creation. For the fun of it, he enrolled in a self-paced class at a Minneapolis-area technical college, spending many an evening on his back porch writing computer code.

He remembers—with a Gatesean glee—his first computer. Purchased in 1983, it was a KayPro with no hard drive and a whopping 64 KB of RAM. He recalls the purchase date of the computer rather clearly. “We went out and bought a computer the day we brought our baby home from the hospital,” he said. It was the early stages of a family business, with the family expanding a bit ahead of the business.

Rosebaugh continued to buy books and educate himself on writing computer code until the point in 1985 when he offered to write software for his agency. That was essentially the beginning of CHAMP software, which made its first sale in 1986.

The early target markets for CHAMP software were public health agencies in Minnesota that had home healthcare as a component. With two customers to its name, CHAMP in 1985 was the smallest of five companies serving that market. Five years later, there were only two and CHAMP was the leader with 39 customers. Some of those customers were his peers at other public health agencies, to whom he offered free, no-pressure demonstrations of the software in their offices.

In the meantime, Rosebaugh recalled with a laugh, he had written himself out of a job. In writing a cost-saving analysis for the agency in 1989, he decided they didn’t really need his position. They took him up on the offer, although he was offered another position as public health director for an agency with 35 employees and a high salary. He turned it down, drawn by the potential in this quasi-job of writing software. He decided that would be his full-time, independent business pursuit.

“This was more fun, more exciting, the entrepreneurial thing,” he said.

From 1990-95, he pursued customers in Wisconsin, beginning with a small batch of mass-mailings. A few sales were made and more opportunities arose. This was the era of lots of road trips, offering customers simplicity, a great price, quality and support. The biggest selling point may have been his experience in their shoes. “It helped to have been in the field,” he said. “I spoke their language. I had an instant rapport.”

Rosebaugh discovered he wasn’t a fan of the mass-exhibit style of marketing, including convention centers with booths, noise, rote sales pitches and other facets of old-fashioned PR. At the same time, he realized, reluctantly, that CHAMP was professional grade software, even if he didn’t quite have the audacity to believe it himself. After all, he was a policy analysis major, not a software developer. Yet, he had good ideas (like customizing reports to match those required by counties in Minnesota and Wisconsin, boosting sales considerably) and an expanding one-man business.

In 1992, the Rosebaugh family moved to Mankato to be closer to their friends with whom they worshiped and shared fellowship at the non-denominational New Creation Church. The business, as in Minneapolis, was still run out of the home. But technology was accelerating at a rocket-fueled rate, and the computer landscape was changing with the growing prominence of Microsoft Windows. As computer programming made the gradual yet drastic shift from DOS systems to Windows, Rosebaugh knew he’d need to take on help navigating this new and essential path to survival. It meant taking on staff.

“I was the whole company for 10 years,” he said.

At a point in 1997 when concerned he’d have to write a nursing software product on his own in Windows, he received a call from Autumn Stewart, a former competitor from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. She was looking for a job and had a background in programming and, Rosebaugh thought, seemed a perfect fit. With the hiring of Stewart, Rosebaugh also moved the business out of his home and into the Graif Building in downtown Mankato. The two had different styles and approaches to programming, but in the end they produced clinical software (recording the exact extent of the nursing care, such as medication administered) for Windows that sold more than 30 copies the first six months. This brought on the need for support and training, both of which Stewart provided and provided well, Rosebaugh said.

In 2000, CHAMP was firmly nestled as the top software vendor in Minnesota and Wisconsin for home care and public health. But improvements were still needed, much of which involved fundamental changes in the software’s underlying platform. While those corrections were made, the company itself underwent, as Rosebaugh called it, a rebuilding of its very foundation.

They hired a secretary who was a computer science major, and he quickly moved from secretarial work to computer work. Microsoft hired him two years later. Rosebaugh continued to absorb software engineering literature, which brought him to understanding five levels of capability in software companies—from hacking (the lowest) to producing large-scale, bug-free code. Rosebaugh felt his company was too close to hacking for comfort, and he wanted better.

CHAMP Software today serves about 100 customers, including the majority of public health agencies in Minnesota and many in Wisconsin. He has, including wife Deb, ten employees with roles in sales and marketing, programming and support, implementation coordination, project coordination and training. He’s had as many as a dozen employees, and likes the business to be as home-oriented and personable as possible, and that means keeping its size “reasonable.”

The home healthcare market is ultimately a growing one, and Rosebaugh sees the company expanding accordingly. In the meantime, it’s comfortable, friendly and connected at CHAMP Software. Rosebaugh wants to see it have some national visibility, which will likely improve the local visibility beyond the small building by the bridge.

“We’re still small in the total scheme of things, that’s for sure,” he said.

One key to growth is to continue hiring employees who are imaginative, self-motivated, team players. It was one such employee who was responsible for a new product at CHAMP: the TouchPoint PDA, a hand-sized version of the kits many in-home nurses use.

“The PDA is the result of having people who are self-starters,” Rosebaugh said. For employees, he seeks out bright people who can get things done. “And we want people who share our values. A whole lot of companies expand too fast. We’re trying to avoid excessive risk. We’re not doing this to make maximum income, anyway. In the end it doesn’t matter if we’re 10 or 100 people. In fact, I think 10 is better.”

The Rising Rosebaughs

Dave and Deb Rosebaugh met in his parents’ home in the late 1960s at a get-together of friends and families, when Deb was just finishing high school and readying to move to northern Minnesota. “I came home from work one day and there she was in my living room,” Dave said. The two endured a long-distance relationship before marring in 1971.

Now CFO of CHAMP Software, Deb’s movement into the company was incremental.

“When Dave said it was just him, it was,” she said. “I was busy with babies.” For years, the business was based out of their homes. “Every once in a while, he’d ask for advice, but that was it.”

Once their youngest child entered school, Deb had more time to lend her business degree and experience in various human resources jobs. She started coming in for business meetings and took a stronger role in overseeing bookkeeping. Today as CFO, she’s still a lot more comfortable with numbers than computer language. “I can speak the lingo to an extent,” she said.

She and Dave maintain an upbeat approach to business and a friendly, people-first demeanor. But the business venture has not always been sweat-free, particularly in the early stages, when Dave decided to decline a fairly lucrative job offer in order to form his own one-man computer software company.

“I was pregnant with our third child. We had no health insurance, so to that extent I was somewhat nervous,” Deb said. “But God was faithful and we rode it through those times.”

Formulating Faithware

In 2003, Dave Rosebaugh wrote a booklet for employees outlining in passionate terms not only the company mission statement—To enable visiting nurses to better serve their clients through technology—and history, but also its internal and external core values.

Rosebaugh hands that book over to you the way some faithful hand a Bible, as if to say, “Here, this will explain a lot.”

It does. Some excerpted core values:

CHAMP recognizes that an employee’s priorities are first, to God, second to family and third to the company. Every attempt will be made to honor the efforts of an employee to serve God and family.
We will do what we can to establish a light-hearted environment, rather than a “nose to the grindstone” environment….The company will offer specific opportunities for employees to become friends and enjoy social interaction.
Recognize that there will be problems and pressures in everyone’s job, and that these are a primary tool used by God to grow us into maturity. When you are experiencing problems/pressures yourself, seek God for strength and wisdom. When you see others experiencing problems and pressures, be patient and pray for them.
We will encourage employees to expand their horizons in a manner consistent with their abilities and potential, and in a way that is compatible with the growth and development opportunities within the company.
When faced with significant “forks in the road,” a primary response at the highest levels of the company will be to pray for wisdom from God.
An invitation to take on management responsibilities is an invitation to adopt the role of a servant. Managers are not to “lord it over others,” but are to find ways to serve, strengthen, support, and encourage employees under their supervision. We recognize that this company exists to build the Kingdom of God on earth. Many of the value statements presented here are based on Kingdom principles.
Prices will be conservative rather than aggressive, sufficient to generate profits that can be plowed back into product development, but probably less than our competitors, who are aiming at returning dividends to shareholders and owners.
People are more important than anything else, including product and profit. People include our employees and our customers. We do not require our employees to put in 50-60 hour workweeks to get product finished to satisfy difficult deadlines, as many software companies do. We will treat our customers as we would want to be treated.
We will do the right thing, the honest, moral, ethical choice, regardless of the outcome.