ABOUT THE AUTHOR

My name is Jari Davis. In 1969, I founded my first company. It started as a small startup proprietorship in a one-room office in Salt Lake City. The business was a secretarial service, "Automated Secretary," and it was a few years later it morphed into Meditech, Inc. It included a telephone-in dictation machine, a headset and foot pedal for transcription, and a typewriter to do the work. I did all the selling, typing and anything else that needed doing. Within a couple of months, my business had grown enough to hire another employee. Thereafter, it grew until a much larger office space was required, as well as all of the additional equipment to accommodate the workload. Medical work seemed to be in the greatest need of qualified people, so that became the emphasis of the company, and the business was incorporated.

By the '70s, technology had improved to allow us to do business much more efficiently and within a short time, most of my employees were working at home. Of course I found that those people who worked at home really loved it - no baby-sitting problems, no gas, and no clothing expenditures.

By the early '80s, word processors appeared on the first personal computer 8086 platform. We made the move to use them, incorporating the first WordPerfect software. They were a marvelous tool for us, making corrections, permitting editing on a screen prior to printing. WOW! It was a miracle! Computers also created latitude in the area of logistics, e.g., the work could be accessed and transmitted electronically by our contractors to a computer at our office, and client files then combined and printed for delivery.

In the early '80s our physician clients asked for help on billing (it had become more complicated than just sending out statements). We naturally responded to this demand by starting a medical billing service which initially was office-based employee business also; however, with the advent of true multiuser systems under UNIX, the data entry people could stay at home, access the central computer with almost any personal computer through phone lines and modems.

During the mid- to late '80s, we had nominal exposure to the Internet because we were using email for internal communication and moving documents around. By the early '90s we were using various primitive Internet protocols for information search and retrieval, and then came HTTP and HTML and thus the birth of the Web, which included ways to have graphical interface. It was during this time the demand for the type of services we provided had exponentially increased nationwide, necessitating more trained workers. The training was not really available anywhere, so I set up to do that too. My oldest son said the Web would take over within a few short years (this was 1994) and he asked that I write the training material that was all in my head and offer it on the Web. I thought he was nuts, but went ahead and got the programs prepared figuring that we could always sell printed versions. By 1996, we had the first on-line training courses in the United States, and not just in these medical support services fields.

The Web truly shifted the dynamics of learning and business into a totally new dimension.

During those now 40-odd years in business, I learned the basic rules of business the hard way, making "questionable" decisions, but learning an awful lot in the process. Overall, I spent thousands of dollars and some sleepless nights on judgment errors, worthless equipment, bad software, and poor business alliances. But perseverance, and an attitude of just placing one foot in front of the other, taking it a day at a time, always, and I mean always, pays off.

The bottom line is what I learned I want to share with others, which is the purpose of this Website.  As a group, we are committed to helping people better their lives and try to make everything as affordable as possible.

Onward!