The first acquisition supplied Edward Solomon with a lesson that no purchase agreement could enforce. Net at Work bought a business. Soon afterward, half the acquired employees quit. The founders had completed the transaction; the people expected to make it work had reached a different conclusion.
Years later, Solomon could describe what those employees had lacked: knowledge of what was happening, a sense of control, and a voice in the decision. It is a bracing opening to a conversation about building a company. Most founders can supply a growth chart. Eddie Solomon has a story about the people who walked away.
The episode matters because of the kind of business he and his brother Alex built. Net at Work advises companies on technology and helps put that technology to work. An employee’s departure can take experience, context, and a client’s confidence with it. A customer list may remain perfectly intact while the relationships behind it become fragile.
“Talent is all we have.”
Edward Solomon
That short assessment carries the weight of a long education. By his May 2025 podcast appearance, the brothers’ acquisition experience extended beyond 40 transactions. The early mistake had become part of his explanation of the business. There is something useful about a leader who can locate a turning point in the moment his plan disappointed everyone else.
The quarter-sized ambition
Before enterprise software entered the picture, there were baseball cards and arcade games. Born in Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn, Solomon remembers running childhood businesses to finance both. A quarter had an immediate purpose. The customer paid, and the entrepreneur could go and play.
It is a modest, pleasingly unpolished origin story. No retrospective claim to having anticipated the cloud while still at school. He wanted things, found ways to earn money, and bought them. In his own account, the appetite for enterprise arrived early, with rewards small enough to fit in a pocket.
His subsequent career passed through commercial and investment banking. At Republic National Bank, his work involved real-estate accounting; at NatWest Markets, restructuring the chart of accounts. He earned an MBA in finance at Baruch College. These are useful credentials for someone whose eventual customers would need their technology to produce numbers they could understand and decisions they could trust.
In 1996, Edward and Alex founded Net at Work, initially offering IT and network support with an emphasis on service. The brother partnership has remained at the center of the company: both are identified today as co-founders and co-CEOs. A shared surname appears twice on the leadership list; the company’s responsibilities have spread considerably further.
The knowledge walks on two legs
Net at Work’s services eventually came to include the systems businesses use to run accounting, customer relationships, and people operations. Edward also co-founded businesses around adjacent needs: Docutrend for office equipment and print management, Cloud at Work for hosting, Pixafy for ecommerce, and Swype Payments for payment processing. Swype was acquired by FortisPay in 2021.
These are the less theatrical corners of business technology. A payment needs to reach the right place. An online order needs to connect with the system recording it. Equipment needs to work when someone uses it. There is plenty of room for ambition here, although the ambitions usually wear sensible shoes.
The brothers’ recognition in Accounting Today’s 2021 Top 100 People highlighted their Partner Alliance Program. Member firms could draw on Net at Work’s technical expertise to serve their own customers. It was a practical extension of the company’s model: relationships could carry work beyond the boundaries of a single firm.
That same year, Edward’s short personal questionnaire contained a less corporate detail. His recent viewing preference was rewatching Game of Thrones. Alex chose The Last Kingdom. Apparently, even technology executives occasionally prefer their organizational disputes to involve a castle.
The recruitment problem was already on Solomon’s agenda well before that interview. In a 2022 discussion of the search for consultants, he described several approaches operating together: internal recruiters, specialist recruiting firms, employee referral bonuses, and adding talent from other countries. A services company needs a supply of expertise, and expertise rarely arrives on a convenient timetable.
The company also had a First-Year Associates program, giving college graduates a year of rotating training and mentoring, alongside leadership development intended to fill positions from within. These details make the talent argument concrete. Hiring experienced people and helping less experienced people become useful are different jobs. A growing organization has reason to do both.
By May 2023, Solomon was a panelist in a DyNexus webinar asking how ERP partners recruit talent. The subject was the shortage of consulting, sales, and leadership employees. For someone selling business systems, an evening devoted to recruiting might look like a detour. In this line of work, it sits close to the main road.
A mentor with a raised eyebrow
Ask a colleague about Solomon, and a different sort of management vocabulary appears. Adam Goldschmiedt has described him as a longtime mentor and friend, someone able to provide blunt feedback, encouragement, or perspective as the situation requires. His account includes a small collection of sayings that have survived repeated use.
One concerns the familiar surrender, “It is what it is.” Solomon’s reply, as Goldschmiedt tells it: “Usually it isn’t.” Three words, and the meeting is suddenly back in session. The appeal lies in the invitation to examine what everyone has already agreed to tolerate.
Goldschmiedt also credits him with an emphasis on earning compensation and on making accountability clear when delegating. Together, the recollections suggest a mentor interested in the practical consequences of language. Who owns the task? What is being assumed? What, precisely, has been earned? Those questions can make a conversation uncomfortable and more useful.
Solomon responded to the tribute with a joke about getting old when people begin quoting you. It is a good answer to a public compliment: acknowledge the affection, puncture the ceremony, keep moving. His colleague’s memories do more to convey a working relationship than a tidy list of leadership adjectives could.
Giving other people the controls
In his conversation with Rob Levin, Solomon discussed the tension between entrepreneurial initiative and the structure a larger organization requires. He recalled how closely he and Alex once controlled the business. Growth forces that arrangement to change. A founder cannot personally carry every decision without eventually making the company wait for him.
The issue also appeared in his January 2025 conversation with Deborah Fell, which explored working with family, entrepreneurship, and encouraging initiative inside an established company. Building with a brother offers a continuing relationship at the top. Building a larger organization also requires authority and opportunity to travel outward.
Remote work adds another complication. The May 2025 interview addressed a workforce then described as 450 people, along with the deliberate effort needed to keep dispersed employees connected and help managers develop. That figure belongs to the interview’s moment. The underlying management problem persists whenever colleagues cannot rely on sharing a room.
An earlier glimpse of that effort came through a company initiative Solomon shared in 2020. The “What Makes Me Happy” project offered a daily look into a colleague’s personal life at 3 p.m. The premise was simple: people separated by their working arrangements could still learn something about one another beyond their assignments.
The next deal, the familiar questions
In September 2023, Net at Work received a growth investment from Lovell Minnick Partners. Financial terms were undisclosed. The announcement set out plans to support acquisitions and investment in the business, and Edward connected the partnership to scaling the company and serving customers. After 27 years, the brothers were bringing another participant into the growth story.
The acquisition program continued. In June 2026, Net at Work announced its purchase of Millennium Accounting Solutions, already a longtime alliance partner. The relationship preceded the transaction. That detail makes an interesting companion to Solomon’s first-acquisition recollection: familiarity gives people something to work with before the ownership documents change.
By October 6, 2026, the company was announcing the acquisition of the business of Cloud 9 ERP Solutions, extending its Acumatica work. The calendar keeps producing new deals and new management responsibilities. A founder’s earlier lessons have to survive the ordinary pressure of doing the next thing.
Solomon’s recent public reflections on AI return to the concerns of business owners: better visibility, more useful decisions, and less friction. The technology has changed enormously since 1996. The expectation that an advisor should understand the business and answer for an outcome remains recognizable.
That is where his career becomes more interesting than a catalogue of software platforms or acquisitions. A child earns money for a game. A banker learns how the accounts fit together. Two brothers start a company. An acquisition goes badly, and the founders have to reconsider what they thought they had bought. The learning continues in the space between a transaction and the people expected to live with it.