When designing a point of sale software system, David Gosman found out firsthand what his restaurant and retail customers needed.
“I worked in customers”™ retail stores and restaurants ringing up sales,” said Gosman, CEO of PC America, a software company that serves restaurants and retail stores. “You learn that every half a second you can shave off a transaction adds up. Until you”™re in the line of fire, I don”™t think you can really appreciate what restaurants and retailers go through on a daily basis.”
The Pearl River-based company began as a reseller of software with four employees and has since grown to selling hardware and complete point of sale (POS) systems with 50 employees.
PC America prides itself on forward-thinking: in 1994, when most POS systems were DOS-based ”“ text , no graphics, no mouse ”“ the company started its own Windows package.
“People actually thought we were a little crazy for doing that, because they thought, ”˜who would want to use a mouse at their register?”™ But our philosophy was that Windows was going to take over, and our main philosophy at PC America has always been that you have to be on the cutting edge of things,” President Richard Rotbard said.Â
PC America does direct sales to stores and restaurants as well as reseller channels and distribution companies.
The company does work in “just about every English- speaking country,” Gosman said.
One of its bigger reseller partners is Dell, which combines its hardware with PC America”™s software ”“ the only restaurant point of sale package that Dell sells.
And a big difference between PC America and the competition is the remote services aspect, which goes along with more affordable pricing.
“They do everything on-site for you, which is a nice service, but it gets fairly expensive,” Gosman said. “The main approach we took was to make our system do as much as theirs does but make it much simpler to use and set up. All of our services are really geared that we can do it remotely at a much more affordable cost than our competition.”
Rotbard said a majority of customers buy the software and use the company”™s phone service along with an easy-to-follow user manual to configure their systems.
“When we have a recession, customers that still want to buy a system are even less willing to pay the higher prices of our competition, so we can actually pick up business during those times,” Gosman said.
Gosman said some of the biggest growth areas will probably be amongst chains: customers currently include Tasti D-Lite, Baskin-Robbins and Flowers Foods.
However, the company hasn”™t abandoned its roots selling to small, independent retailers.
“We made our software very scalable, not only does it serve the mom and pops, but we”™ve added features in there to handle chains of stores,” Rotbard said. “Since then we”™ve opened up our market to a much larger store or restaurant.”
The company recently introduced new software for Honeywell”™s EasyID software plug-in, whichparses bar code data found on government-issued identification cards for applications involving age verification or automatic electronic form population.
PC America”™s marketing strategy has changed over the past few years; the company brought in a third part to design a new logo, modernize its Web site and modify its user manuals for easy setup.
“We wanted to get the message across to our customers that this is an easy to use package,” Gosman said. “We”™ve really just worked on getting our name out there in a variety of ways and making sure our accomplishments are recognized by others.”
