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The Beginning...
In 1986 Allen & Mary Beck formed Beck Consulting in Fresno, California. They were newlyweds, had just purchased their first home, and had decided to stay in the area after their employer, Price Waterhouse, had closed their local office. The business focus was on business planning, troubled company workouts, and technology/software issues. One of our fist clients, Danish Creamery Association (which has become California Dairies, Inc. and is still a client), engaged us to find new ERP software for them. After making a recommendation, they found that there was no local support and prevailed upon us to get into the software business. The rest is history....
The Fresno Years...
The software we first represented, Macola, was well received in the Central California market and the business grew quickly to over 100 clients. A large portion of these clients represented food processing and agricultural-dependent businesses. Because the service area was large, we acquired a reputation for being willing to travel, as well as taking on complex businesses. This lead to new opportunities outside the region and further geographic diversification of our client base.
San Francisco Bay Area Move...
Central California’s economy was hard-hit by the recession in the late 80’s, especially in the ag-related industries. All of the new client opportunities were being generated in the Bay Area. After taking on a major implementation at Ghirardelli Chocolate, which was requiring onsite presence for most of every week, we determined that it made more sense to relocate the business. We were able to do this without abandoning our Central California clients, because of our implementation and training methodology; a large number of those clients are still with us. The business continued to grow in the Bay Area and develop outside the state because of our ability to take on remote sites. We continued to represent Macola software, but during the transition years to Windows and the Y2K concerns, they stumbled badly. We could not see upgrading clients to this kind of situation, so we began a search for more modern enterprise software....
Today
As a result of a two year search, we became a Navision partner in 1997. At the time, Navision was little-known in the U.S, but the largest software publisher for the small/medium business market in Europe. This product provided tremendous growth for us starting in 1998. Navision was later acquired by Microsoft, eventually becoming the Microsoft Dynamics NAV product of today, with well over a million users worldwide.. We now emphasize our focus on the food, manufacturing and distribution business and have developed specialized applications to address the unique aspects of these industries based on our decades of experience in these areas. Stay tuned for the next chapters...
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