Sue Small-Kreider
In Motion Staff Writer
Aim for perfection and accept excellence is the advice that a former teen-age guest on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” offered a crowd of approximately 350 students, faculty, staff and local community members at Daytona State College’s L. Gale Lemerand Entrepreneurial Speaker Series.
Jason Meyer, the founder of Synergy Billing in Daytona Beach, was the 17-year-old entrepreneur that went on Oprah’s TV show to talk about how he turned the offer to help fix a teacher’s computer when he was 14 into a $1 million-dollar business in three years.
His first business model was to go to friends’ and family members’ homes to fix their computers, but he came up with the idea to rent a booth at a flea market on the weekends. People would drop their computer off on a Friday and pick it up on that Sunday. Business picked up and he began to think that if he was homeschooled like the “Hollywood stars” were, he would have more time to focus on his business. He pitched the idea to his parents who agreed to let him try it for six months.
By the time he was 16 and purchased his first car, he was able to expand his scope to include business clients, many of whom were doctors’ offices. He taught himself all he could about computer networks. With low overhead costs, he had over $1 million in the bank by the time he was 17.
During his speech at the Hosseini Center, he recalled asking himself, “What’s so hard about this?” as he expanded into developing software. Inspired by Marc Benioff’s work with cloud computing and Salesforce.com, Meyer decided to design medical software. He had 20 people working for him and then the events of Sept. 11, 2001 happened. His services were no longer in demand. He ended up letting all his employees go and then he and his mother took to the phones trying to sell software.
“Nothing builds character like paying back a debt,” Meyers told the crowd, noting that he was a half-million in debt, had a General Educational Development diploma, but no college degree. His business was not thriving. But because his company had been working with doctors’ offices, he knew something about the billing process for health care. A new idea formed.
By 2006 he honed his business plan to focus on the billing process for nonprofit health centers, which he said aligned more with his personal values. This business became Synergy Billing ,which according its website provides “patient billing needs of Federally Qualified Health Centers and are experts on maximizing revenue and improving collections.”
Meyer attributes much of his persistence in business to Stephen R. Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and his mother’s teaching him that failure should never stop him. He believes in “Failing Forward” or using failure as a lesson.
In a 2011 Daytona Beach News-Journal article about Meyer, Mary Bruno, vice president for Daytona State’s School of Work Force and Continuing Education, said Meyer’s success is the exception, not the rule.
“You are always going to run into people like Walt Disney, Dave from Wendy’s and Bill Gates, who quit school,” Bruno said. “There are tons of examples of people who have become famous and didn’t follow the traditional route. Most who succeed have had a lot of failures.”
Bruno, along with Meyers encourages students to get a college education.
Like Meyer, Gale Lemerand, the individual who brought the Entrepreneurial Speaker Series to DSC, is a life-long entrepreneur. Maybe best known locally for his string of Stonewood Grill and Tavern restaurants, Lemerand is also the inventor of the Sanidoor, a touch-free, germ-free bathroom door and the former owner of the insulation company Gale Industries.
“Get a great education and have fun with your career,” Lemerand said to the students in the audience. “And always surround yourself with great people who are smarter than you.”
Prior to the talk, DSC president, Dr. Tom LoBasso and Lemerand presented three $1,000 entrepreneur scholarships.