In 1995, Jim Terrano started a company in his own home in Lincoln, Nebraska. He had two partners, Deb Larson and Becky Clarke, and the useful advantage of having worked with both before. TELCOR would be his third startup. The beginning had the scale of a household and the intentions of a business: three experienced people putting their names, their judgment, and their working relationships into something they would have to make last.
Even the name was a little partnership agreement. TELCOR combines pieces of the founders’ surnames with organization. Terrano gets the opening letters; Larson and Clarke follow. It is the sort of corporate naming exercise that can be completed without hiring an agency, renting a whiteboard, or claiming to have invented a new verb. The people came first. The name followed them.
By the company’s twentieth anniversary in 2015, more than 100 employees worked in Lincoln, and TELCOR had reached its fourth location. Those are physical measures of a software business. Code may be weightless; the people who write it eventually need somewhere to sit. Terrano’s home had become the first address in a longer story.
The interesting part of that beginning is the kind of work the partners chose. They offered consulting. A customer already had systems, procedures, and expenses. The founders would help make those arrangements work better. It was a business that began close enough to hear the complaints.
The customer gets a pencil
Terrano had studied chemistry and mathematics at Wisconsin State University and completed master’s coursework through the University of Minnesota. His later executive responsibilities included strategy, system concepts, and putting TELCOR’s business plan into practice. There is a continuity in that combination: thinking about how the pieces fit, then accepting responsibility for whether they actually do.
He, Larson, and Clarke had met as executives at an information systems company. Leaving together gave them an existing professional relationship to build on. At TELCOR, Larson and Clarke ran the two product lines while Terrano concentrated on overall direction. The founding story has three active participants, each with work to do. It resists being squeezed into a solitary founder’s silhouette.
Their consulting engagements exposed problems that could become products. The pivot to software grew out of that proximity. In a 2011 account of TELCOR’s mission, Terrano put durable products alongside employee satisfaction. A business plan with both obligations has to answer to two groups of people who can notice when its promises become inconvenient.
His stated mission included “to create products that maintain long-term viability and to provide high employee satisfaction.” Longevity is an unusually demanding product specification. A demonstration can last twenty minutes. A customer relationship has to survive the next version, the next staffing change, and the next awkward question about why something worked yesterday.
THE TWO-PART BRIEFProducts that last.A paraphrase of Terrano’s stated mission, 2011
People who want to stay.
There is an editorial lesson in this arrangement. Customers are allowed to hold a pencil. Their experience can amend the product. The founder still has to decide what to build, what to fund, and how to keep the whole thing coherent. Listening becomes useful when someone accepts the work that follows it.
The less glamorous kind of conviction
Moving from advice to software also changed the financial problem. A consultant can sell time. A software company has to spend time building something before enough customers are paying for it. The same three people can discover that they are now running a different sort of business, with a different appetite for cash.
Larson later described the founders choosing to build their own prototype after conversations involving Johnson & Johnson and Hewlett-Packard. Union Bank & Trust helped replace an early loan with a business line of credit. That detail deserves a place beside the code. Flexible financing gave a small team room to keep developing and deploying its product.
The bank relationship continued for nearly thirty years by the time of a July 2024 account. The same account offered a quieter glimpse of Terrano through chief financial officer Liz Wood: she valued the attention given to small operational frustrations as the company grew. Her team’s time-consuming check deposits became a problem worth fixing. A bank lockbox service took over that work.
This offers an alternative to the executive anecdote that requires a mountain, a race, or a conference stage. Depositing checks is work. Reducing the work leaves time for something else. A founder’s interest in efficiency becomes easier to understand when it reaches the people doing the repetitive tasks inside his own company.
The story also gives the idea of partnership some texture. Larson, Clarke, and Terrano had their working relationship. The company had its bank. Wood had a practical problem and a person to call. Business history often tidies these arrangements into a list of institutions. On an ordinary working day, they are people making one another’s jobs possible.
A philosophy with an operating cost
At TELCOR’s twentieth anniversary, Terrano described five principles: integrity with customers, customer success ahead of short-term profit, respect, persistence, and product quality. Any company can print a list. The difficult part arrives when a principle asks for money, time, or a frank conversation that would be easier to postpone.
His language was plain: “honesty is the best policy.” In the anniversary account, the company connected that belief to communicating about the unforeseen bumps in a product roadmap. The promise of a flawless journey is attractive right up to the first pothole. A customer who has arranged a working day around your software has a practical interest in hearing the truth.
Terrano also called the business one of data analytics. That description places the emphasis on what customers can understand and decide. Software produces screens, reports, and records; the customer still has a business to run. A useful system should help that person see what deserves attention.
In a 2013 discussion of billing software, he described online tools that made outstanding balances and previous interactions easier for staff to see. The operational idea was straightforward: give the person answering a question the information needed to answer it. Anyone who has repeated an explanation to a succession of departments can appreciate the attraction.
There is a family resemblance between that product thinking and the check-deposit episode. In each case, the interesting unit is a task someone has to complete. Where is the information? Who has to touch it? What makes the process take so long? Those questions sound modest until several people have to live with the answers every day.
- ListenUnderstand the task
- BuildMake the work easier
- ReturnHear what happens next
Twenty years before the growth cheque
In January 2016, TELCOR announced a growth equity investment from Accel-KKR. Terrano was its CEO. The company had been operating since 1995, so the investment arrived after two decades of building rather than at the opening of the story. There was already an organization, a customer base, and a product portfolio for new capital to support.
The announced uses were continued investment in existing products, new product innovation, and market expansion. The terms were undisclosed. Terrano described the partnership as support for the company’s strategy and future expansion. In his account of the preceding years, customer listening remained central to how the business had developed.
Accel-KKR’s representatives named all three founders when discussing the work ahead. That is a useful detail in a financing announcement: the partners were still visible as partners. The transaction added an investment relationship to a company whose story already contained a long series of working relationships.
An investment also places a company’s existing judgment in a new setting. The founders have reasons for the choices they have made. An outside partner brings another set of questions. The useful part of the arrangement depends on whether those questions lead to work the company can carry out. The announcement is a beginning for that relationship, even when it comes well into the life of the business.
Growth capital can make a fine headline. It also creates an unromantic question: what will the money let the company keep doing, and what will it let the company do next? TELCOR’s announcement answered with products and expansion. The cheque belonged inside the operating story, where its usefulness would eventually have to be demonstrated.
The name stays; the work moves on
Today, TELCOR lists Terrano among its founders alongside Larson and Clarke. Chris Terrano is president of its RCM business, and Nick Terrano is president of its POC business. The current leadership page gives those operating roles their own space. A company that began in one founder’s home now has a leadership structure extending beyond its original three.
In April 2026, TELCOR announced its acquisition of Sample Healthcare, adding AI workflow technology. The announcement described document processing and multistep work performed with human oversight. Chris Terrano spoke for TELCOR’s RCM operation. It is a later chapter in the company’s effort to make time-consuming administrative tasks easier to complete.
A founder’s legacy can be considered in those terms: the kinds of problems a company continues to take seriously. Terrano’s public business story returns to customers, colleagues, product decisions, and the practical arrangements that let work continue. The technology changes. The next person still needs an answer.
Back at the beginning were three colleagues and a home address in Lincoln. What followed required products, financing, larger premises, and people willing to keep paying attention. The company’s name still carries pieces of those original surnames. Its more consequential inheritance is the habit of asking what, exactly, is making somebody’s working day harder.