Award-winner works to serve entrepreneurs

Dick Stumbo is a repeat offender at retirement, and he doesn't feel any pressure to accumulate more earthly treasure.

But he's passionate about getting entrepreneurs the financial planning tools they need a passion to which Stumbo has devoted thousands of hours of work at a personal computer.

The result of that work is a pair of financial planning packages, the Felix Financial Planning System and Felix Jr.

for small enterprises.

And the work resulted, too, in a top honor from the federal Small Business Administration.

Stumbo, who earlier was honored with the Small Business Administration Financial Service Award for Nevada, now has received a similar award for the region that includes California, Arizona, Hawaii, Guam and Micronesia along with Nevada.

It's one of the few times perhaps the only time that a Nevada resident has won the district award.

Although Stumbo has counseled more than 800 businesses as a volunteer with the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE, for short), the development of the Felix programs played a key role in bringing the recent SBA recognition.

Before retirement, he explained last week, Stumbo developed sophisticated financial modeling tools for a railroad and then for a mining company.

As he began volunteering with SCORE, he was troubled by the problems many entrepreneurs face with the development of good financial projections, and he found the pre-packaged software solutions available from commercial suppliers too simplistic.

Stumbo decided to write his own software, a job that consumed a good chunk of the next four years.

The Felix programs, which are based on Excel spreadsheets, take an entrepreneur either one with an existing business or an entrepreneurial hopeful through a step-by-step process.

Some of the worksheets include:

* Estimating revenues

* Factoring price increases into the equation

* Calculating payroll and benefit costs

* Determining the costs of goods sold

* Analyzing working capital needs

* Projecting tax liabilities

The software is designed, Stumbo said, to allow for lots of what-if calculations.

Users can create projections for the next five years of their business.

If nothing else, Stumbo said, the software provides a checklist of factors that entrepreneurs need to keep in mind.

They may know that they want to advertise in a newspaper, for instance, but forget to budget the costs of Yellow Pages advertising.

Students in seminars taught by Stumbo did beta testing on the software during the past year or so, and it's beginning to find wider application through SCORE, the Nevada MicroEnterprise Initiative (Stumbo is on its loan committee) and the NxLevel Entrepreneur Course overseen by the Nevada Small Business Development Center.

Despite the hours he's invested in the project, Stumbo isn't motivated by financial returns.

The $25 cost for Felix and the $15 cost for Felix Jr.

essentially cover the costs of duplicating and packaging the CDs that contain the programs.

"I've priced it not to make money," Stumbo said.

"I want to get this tool out to the small-business people."

While the SCORE chapter in northern Nevada has handled distribution of the software in this region, Stumbo still is trying to determine how he'll widen the reach of the product.

That's likely to become a bigger issue in the next month or so because the national publication for SCORE volunteers plans an article about Felix an article that is likely to generate bigger orders for the software.

At least initially, Stumbo figures he'll distribute the software through his own firm, Stumbo & Associates Inc., at its current modest price.

He doesn't need the product to be a financial success.

Beginning his business career as an engineer with Weyerhaeuser Co., Berry Industries Inc.

and Plywood Fabricator Service, Stumbo later returned to school and restarted his career as a financial officer.

He worked for railroads and mining companies, retired from the corporate

world in 1994, started his own financial services company and sold it in 1997.

So why does the 69-year-old retiree need to devote this much effort to a product that won't bring him financial rewards? "It gives something back to a system that was pretty darned good to me," he said.