Welcome to My New Adventure with Traild, Part 1 in this 6 part series.
You can check out all 6 parts in this series by going to
www.AugForums.com/Traild
Back in the Spring of 2023, an opportunity landed in my lap with an Acumatica Customer here in Columbus Ohio. They had just implemented Acumatica and a couple of other systems, they had a lot of challenges, and the main person who guided them through the implementation had just been hired by a consulting company.
On my side, I thought it would be interesting to go into an office again everyday and work with people in person since I hadn’t done that in many years. I also thought it would be cool to get my hands dirty getting Acumatica to work in the real world at a client during the first year after go live.
So it was a good fit and we decided to pull the trigger on it. I took some time to wind down my work with existing clients so I could focus on this one client in Columbus, Ohio Mondays through Thursdays, leaving Fridays for other projects.
Initially we agreed to 6 months, but 6 months turned into over a year because we kept uncovering ways to improve processes and make people happier by removing drudgering from their jobs. By early Summer 2024 though, just a few months ago, they had run out of things for me to do and we mutually set an end date of Mid-August to give me time to wind up the things that I was working on.
My default was to go back to working with multiple Acumatica Clients again, which is what I was doing before, so I sent out a communication blast with an update on my Independent Acumatica Consulting services.
I took about a month to sort through the responses from that, get on Zoom calls with people, and start to get work lined up.
But I had another idea that was tickling the back of my brain. I am 43 years old at this point and, for some reason, going all the way back to High School, I always had a thought that maybe I would get into something that was more people-centric and less technology-centric when I was in my 40s.
That idea came to me one day as I was sitting in class in High School, considering how much of an impact one of my teachers had on me and contrasting that teacher with some other teachers that didn’t have as much of an impact on me. I thought that teaching would be a really cool thing to go into and I was considering how to become a teacher that makes a positive impact on others.
These are the random things that I would think about when I was bored in class.
I was considering the difference between those who go into teaching immediately after college and those who get into teaching after having first done something else out of college.
Now, I totally respect and admire anyone who goes into teaching right out of college because it takes a lot of heart to do that and I myself almost went that direction while I was in college. I even took the exam that you need to get credentialed as a High School teacher in the State of California. But I pulled back on that because I was reminded of this “thought exercise” that I had while bored in class one day in High School.
As I was considering how much of an impact my teacher had on me, I decided that I really wanted to get into teaching, but I wanted to do something else first and transition into teaching later so that I would have a greater variety of experiences to share with my students.
My analogy for this was something else that I had observed in High School which I learned from family relatives who had been in the military. They had taught me that there was a difference between those who go directly into a leadership position in the military, because they have a college degree, versus those who rise up through the ranks into a leadership position.
I had gathered that there was more respect and appreciation for those who had risen up through the ranks because they didn’t just have an academic understanding of things, they knew what it was like to be in the shoes of the enlisted.
Let’s now pull back from the admirable profession of serving in the military and come back to this boring Midmarket ERP Software world which I got into very much by accident after college because I didn’t even know that it existed prior to that.
I’ve been in Midmarket ERP for the last 20 years and it’s been a great fit for me. I see no reason to change my career path and I plan on riding Midmarket ERP into the career sunset.
But this experience in High School was tickling my brain as I was lining up multiple Acumatica Client work for mid-August and beyond.
I’m always going to be a technical person. I like to tinker with things, especially in the realm of Reporting and Business Intelligence. Actually, in my new role, which I will tell you about in a moment, I am definitely going to be pulling out Power BI and applying it to a bunch of shiny new data sources.
But, even though I’ll always be technical, I thought back to that day in High School when I decided that I wanted to be a teacher. That didn’t turn out to be the case for me, but, in a similar flavor, I thought that this would be a good point in my life to shift gears into a role that is more people-centric and less technology-centric so I could spend more time on phone calls and building business relationships and spend less time sitting quietly in front of my computer.
After chewing on that for about a month, I decided to take a step in that direction, in parallel with lining up more Independent Acumatica Consulting work. Once I decided to take a step in that direction, the next step was an easy choice.
There’s an Acumatica ISV product that had been on my radar for about a year and a half and I’ll tell you the story about how they got on my radar in My New Adventure with Traild Part 2.
It was an easy choice that they would be the first ones to reach out to and so I reached out to them. I described the type of role that I was looking for which was to help strengthen and further build out their Acumatica Partner Channel.
To my surprise, they had just created an open position for exactly that.
So I went out to Huntington Beach, California and spent the day with Adam Leski to hash out the details. We first went to a WeWork office, but it was kind of crowded, so then we went to Staples, bought a whiteboard, and spent the day hashing out details on the whiteboard in my hotel room. You can see a picture of us at the end of the day, after we had cleaned off the whiteboard, here:
We shook hands and made it official.
So I’d like to announce that I’ll be working with Traild Software to help them build out their Acumatica Partner Channel here in the United States.
Traild is a rapidly growing Acumatica ISV partner that, similar to Velixo, is one of only a handful of ISV products that are part of the Fulfilled By Acumatica program, which means that VARs can sell Traild and get credit for it, the same as if they were selling additional Acumatica modules.
Also similar to Velixo, Traild does something that pretty much every Acumatica Customer can use. Velixo does Financial Reporting, which pretty much every Acumatica Customer does, and Traild does Accounts Payable Automation and pretty much every Acumatica Customer uses the Accounts Payable module in Acumatica.
I’ve agreed to work with Traild Mondays through Thursdays, leaving Fridays open to continue my work on other projects and take care of a couple of existing clients in my capacity as an Independent Acumatica Consultant.
We also think that there could be some opportunities for joint events between AugForums.com and Traild so we’re exploring some ideas in that area.
I’ll explain more about why I decided to work with Traild in future parts of this 6 part series. There’s actually a lot more to it than what I described here. But I wanted to keep this somewhat short in the way of making an announcement about My New Adventure with Traild.
To learn more about Traild, you can check out their website at www.TraildSoftware.com, although I will say that Traild is very similar to Acumatica in the early days of Acumatica in that they have a pretty simple website because they put a ton of investment into their product and not much investment into Marketing, yet.
You can also reach out to me at my new email address which is
TimRodman@TraildSoftware.com