It’s “All in the Family” for Ramsey-based Decusoft, CEO Robert Laurenzo Says

In September, Decusoft announced the appointment of  Robert Laurenzo as the company’s CEO, with brother Rick Laurenzo continuing as president. The company, which employs about 40 people (80 percent of them in N.J.), offers compensation and benefits administration software for name brand companies across the U.S., as well as application development services.

NJTechWeekly.com asked Robert Laurenzo about his transition to his brother’s firm, and what his plans were for the future of the company.

Tell me a little bit about your history.

My brother Rick was one of the founding partners of Computer Design and Integration (CDI, New York City), and he brought me into that company 16 years ago. In 2002, Rick decided to spin off Decusoft. … I stayed at CDI because I was always on the sales side, and Rick was always on the technical side. Decusoft became a strategic partner to CDI, helping them to do some application development and Microsoft-related things that CDI didn’t wish to focus on.

Last year, I reached a point in my career where I wanted to do something different and decided to assist my brother. I am more of a sales and relationship-building kind of person. Rick and I spoke about how I could help him. Our skill sets complement each other, and we also have another brother, Fred, who is a very successful financial person who had agreed to act in the background, helping us with the financial aspects of running the company. Between the three of us, I know we complement each other well.

Tell me about Decusoft.

Decusoft started out as an application development services company, but developed two products. “COMPOSE” software is for compensation and is sold in the human resources (HR) IT marketplace. It is a compensation product that is specific to complex compensation models for merit, bonus and long term incentive compensations processes.

We also have union benefit software called “EasyAdmin.” That product came about because unions were relying on older legacy systems and/or  spreadsheets. As unions evolve, they need to have more secure ways of operating than just figuring out benefit administration on spreadsheets. Many of our engineers and developers have a great deal of experience  in that space.

What are your plans for the company?

First, I have to accelerate my learning curve and increase what I know about this business as quickly as possible. Then I plan to leverage relationships to increase our client footprint. Beyond that, I want to develop some ancillary service offerings that are related to what we do. We will also evaluate how we can do consulting and help companies in the HR and benefits area. I want to be able to offer customers a service, whether or not they buy our product, and I want to build some partnerships that will enable us to do that.

On the applications development service side, I want to expand our reach into customer sites using our customer relationships. For example, they will ask us to look at processes or applications that they are not happy with (pain points), and we’ll help them. I have some ideas involving application performance mapping and data analytics.

My goal for our COMPOSE software is to build a much stronger partner and referral network than we currently have. We do have sources of referrals, but they need to be enhanced and increased. My responsibilities are to grow incremental revenue and to build a very strong bidirectional partner referral network.

How will you divide responsibilities at the company going forward?

Rick remains the president and is in charge of the overall running of the company. However, he will focus on the technical side, including product enhancement, developing the product roadmap, finding technical people to work with us, as well as handling operational issues that come with having a technical team. I’ll be focused on sales, marketing and business development. Fred will be behind the scenes as a silent partner, making sure we are running the company in a fiscally responsible way.

How do you think it will be, working with your brothers?

To me, it’s all about trust. We all trust each other. We are brothers and we have complementary skill sets. Between the three of us, we cover each other quite well and will be able to rely on each other’s strengths to take this company to another level.