Packy Hyland Sr. was a salesman at heart, promoting Hyland Software from a group of five techies in an office to the 1,000-employee, $150 million software powerhouse it is today.
His son A.J., Hyland Software’s CEO and one of Packy’s three sons, noticed it in the company’s early days.
The duo was attending a trade show to exhibit Hyland’s OnBase software. Their booth had two sides, each outfitted with a computer for demonstration.
A.J. was 23 years old, fresh out of undergrad at Georgetown University. “My side was always empty, and he would have five or 10 people crowded around him,” A.J. says. “He was surrounded with people, and I was talking to the janitor. I was like, ‘You want to ship a little excess over here?’ ”
Packy’s fearlessly outgoing demeanor drew crowds whether they were employees, investors or customers, A.J. says. And he pushed Hyland to sell to larger clients, sometimes before anyone else at the company saw that potential, remembers Bill Priemer, Hyland’s executive vice president and chief operating officer.
In the early years, when the company’s only clients were small community banks, Packy was setting up sales calls at places such as KeyCorp. “Packy was reaching for the stars,” Priemer recalls.
It paid off when Hyland Software landed an account with Sherwin-Williams, the company’s first big sale. “He said we could offer a good service to Sherwin-Williams,” Priemer says. “And he ended up being right even though it was a huge installation. That was one of the deals when we realized we can absolutely be selling to that type of customer. Packy wasn’t afraid.”
Packy Hyland Jr., who co-founded Hyland Software in 1991 with the sales help of his father, finds it amusing that people picture his father as the “gray hair” of the
operation.
“He was definitely more of a rebel than I was, particularly before we made money,” Packy Jr. says. “But he was also an amazing salesperson. Whatever you thought of him after you met him was whatever he wanted you to think. If you were a banker, you thought he was conservative. If you were a kid, you thought he was a rock star. That’s precisely what made him such a great entrepreneur.”
His persistence and eternal optimism got Hyland through some tough times in the early days of the business. The company didn’t turn a profit until 1999, and investors were hard to come by. When venture capital and private equity firms turned away the Hyland men, Packy went to friends and family to raise initial capital.
Although he was unsure at times where payroll was going to come from, Packy, president of the Westlake company from 1991 to 1997, stayed positive and kept the employees feeling the same way.
In those days, and even after his retirement, Packy knew the names of all the employees, who their parents were and where they went to school, Priemer says.
Friends remember him as the life of the party — outgoing, friendly and always ready with a funny story. He was the kind of man who forged strong relationships with people and kept them for a lifetime.
“His understanding of people really served him well because he knew what made them tick and what motivated them,” Priemer says. “He used it to successfully build relationships with clients and to make people work for him effectively.”
Packy was a hard-working salesman for almost his entire life. Before Hyland Software, he worked in a variety of positions selling products as diverse as personal computers and paper in Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas and Italy.
“We always joked that he was the white-collar migrant worker,” A.J. says.
But no matter how far he traveled, Packy was committed to being involved with his family. His strongest relationships were with his wife and five children.
“He was intensely supportive of his family,” A.J. says. “If we had something we wanted to do, he would stand behind it. I always really appreciated it.”
A.J. remembers countless occasions when his dad would drive for hours after a sales meeting to attend one of his basketball games before turning around to drive back the next morning.
Priemer, who lived next door to the Hylands, remembers one evening when Packy came home with four Big Wheels for the six boys in the two families.
From Big Wheels to something much bigger, Packy left his day job to help Packy Jr. — a high school dropout with big dreams of starting a successful company — raise money for a software program he was developing.
“He honestly believed he was offering the investment opportunity of a lifetime,” Priemer says. “It was like, five guys in a garage developing software, but he honestly believed it.”
As the company grew, the family remained close-knit; nearly all of Packy’s children have been employed there at one time or another, including Chris, the company CFO.
In 1999, Packy left Hyland Software to pursue other endeavors. He helped raise capital for Packy Jr.’s second business endeavor, Workflow, a technology and software company catering to the medical industry.
In 2007, he helped his son-in-law DeWayne Ashcraft found another Westlake-based software company called OneLink. But his support for small businesses didn’t end with his family.
He had a soft spot for entrepreneurs trying to start a business and devoted much of his time to supporting their ventures.
Often, he would seed entrepreneurs very early in the process, says Mark Brandt, the former head of Say Yes to Cleveland, a local nonprofit business-support group. Packy was on the organization’s board. “I would say, ‘You really want to back that guy?’ ” Brandt says. “But he was looking at personality. He wanted to see the drive and enthusiasm people had for their ideas.”
A number of years ago, Brandt and Packy took 36 Cleveland entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley to propose business ideas to technology professionals and investors. The idea was to engage people from Ohio who had left the state to work.
Packy spoke at a networking event at Stanford.
“I just remember he stood up there on that rainy Friday morning with a huge smile on his face and told the story of Hyland Software,” Brandt says. “He said, ‘No one gave us a chance in the beginning being from Cleveland, Ohio. But a few years later we had the largest booth at a San Francisco trade show, and we are the fastest-growing company in the sector.’ ”
After a weekend of seeing the city, visiting Pixar studios, attending an Oakland A’s-Cleveland Indians game and touring wineries, Packy chose to invest in a handful of the seven Cleveland startups represented at the event. Most of the companies on that outing are still in business today, contributing to Cleveland’s economy, Brandt says.
“Packy worked really hard to reach his level of success, and he worked really hard to give it away,” he says. Brandt recalls when Packy opened his calendar and said, “Look what you’ve done to me.” He showed Brandt a calendar filled with meetings “all for the good of the world,” he recalls. “He had points in his life when he didn’t have 2 cents to rub together, and when he did, he was 100 percent committed to sharing what he achieved right up until the last few months of his life.”
He had some successes in his various careers before Hyland, but he had a lot of challenges and failures, Priemer says. “He said that if you are prepared and never give up, you will succeed eventually.”
It’s something he passed on to the employees at Hyland Software, Priemer says. “We absolutely believe that we will succeed and reach our goals.”
A.J. agrees: “My dad was irrepressible.”