Software- division chief refreshes legacy product
Alison Forsythe was skeptical when she was contacted by a company from the Netherlands about a potential executive position. Then she realized the role being offered by Exact was the position of a lifetime: leadership of a legacy brand with a reliable offering in need of a refresh. In four years, Exact, Macola division, has a new look, a startup feel and an optimized product that was put out 12 months after her arrival.
Q: What is the history of the Macola software?
A: Macola was founded in the early ‘70s. Actually, in Marion, Ohio. We were founded as an ERP (enterprise resource planning) software company. In its simplest form, it’s very sophisticated accounting and back-office software to run a company’s business. If you think about most companies, when they’re in a startup phase, they might start with maybe a QuickBooks-type accounting package that manages their business, then as they grow and they mature, they will migrate to more sophisticated software. … (But) software’s hard. There’s a lot of competition in today’s market — much more so than there was in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Macola’s history was we were the leader in the marketplace. After the Exact acquisition in 2001, there was increased competition in the marketplace from a lot of different companies and, like a lot of acquired companies, we kind of lost our way a little bit, and so that’s why I was very grateful for the opportunity to come back and re-establish our footing and reinvigorate the brand and product. Alison Forsythe is CEO of Macola, a business-software company founded in Marion, Ohio, in 1971 that now is a division of the Dutch company Exact.
Q: What was your experience being recruited by Exact?
A: My first interview was a Skype interview with our CEO of the holding company (Exact), who’s in the Netherlands, and I said, ‘Look, I’m intrigued … but you need to allow me the autonomy to run the business the way I want to run it; Macola has such great brand recognition in the Americas market, but Exact does not. Please allow me the opportunity to reinvigorate the brand the way I think it needs to be done in order to accelerate this business.’ Kind of the
rest is history. My boss has held true to his word and has let me reinvigorate the brand.
Q: What was Exact asking you to do?
A: My job, when I came in four years ago, was really to reinvigorate, not only the brand — because Macola had such a legacy history here in the Ohio market — but also, ‘How do I reinvigorate the brand and the product at the same time in this day and age of so many startups?’ One of the things I really focused on when I first started was the product, and how do I bring a
new culture of developers to the company?
Q: What was your vision for the Macola software brand?
A: I really wanted to be viewed as this cool ‘startup,’ and I wanted to attract talent in the local market, so if students coming out of OSU didn’t necessarily want to go to Silicon Valley (they could work here).
Q: How have you made sure the product itself remains trustworthy yet innovative?
A: We recently announced Macola Labs, which is our innovation team that’s part of our development organization here in Columbus. We’re testing new technologies like facial recognition, and a lot of different things are coming out of that that will hopefully eventually make it into the code.
Q: What makes you proud of the Macola division?
A: We’ve really come a long way, if I look at where we were four years ago with having not released a product in 10 years, to releasing our first new product in my first year that I was here, to the end result of Macola Labs and getting involved in the community. It’s been a really big transformation.