Loren Harrell and the business of getting the paperwork out of the way

Loren Harrell’s early sales equipment included a portable computer large enough to deserve the adjective. In 1984, he was taking SoftPro into North Carolina attorneys’ offices, showing people how a machine could help prepare real estate closing documents. He had founded the company in a Raleigh garage. Getting out of the garage was part of the job.

One demonstration produced an unusually decisive customer. At the firm now known as Isaacson Sheridan, Marc Isaacson and a paralegal named Brenda watched Harrell’s presentation while another partner was running late. About thirty minutes into the meeting, the partner arrived and asked to be brought up to speed. Brenda’s recommendation, as Isaacson later recalled it, was to buy the software or find another paralegal.

The firm bought it. Forty years later, Isaacson was still telling the story. A sales pitch has done rather well when the customer remembers the supporting cast after four decades.

That encounter offers a way into Harrell’s career. The person writing the program had come to meet the people who would use it. There was paperwork to prepare, and the usefulness of the software could be judged against the work sitting in the office. No one needed a philosophical position on the future of computing to have an opinion about that.

A programmer packs the car

SoftPro began in 1984, when the personal computer was opening up possibilities for small offices. Harrell saw an application in the calculations and documents involved in real estate closings. Those were concrete tasks, repeated across transactions, with consequences for the people responsible for completing them.

In its first years, the company’s division of labor was easy to explain: Harrell wrote the software, traveled to sell it and provided support. Development, distribution and the customer’s next question all came back to the same person. The garage was a place to begin; the business required conversations elsewhere.

SoftPro’s founding principle gave customer support a place alongside the program itself. That matters in an office where a piece of software becomes part of a working routine. A sale creates an expectation that the program will continue to be useful after its creator has packed up the demonstration computer.

Before the garage, a queue

Harrell graduated from NC State in 1972, among the computer science department’s early classes. His student years involved punch cards and long waits for programs to be processed. He also worked thirty hours a week programming at GTE in Durham. Computing was already a job as well as a course of study.

The machines occupied a different place in working life then. Students submitted jobs and waited for results before making corrections. Later, a programmer could carry a computer into a law office and demonstrate an application to its prospective users. Across that change, Harrell’s own work moved closer to the customer’s desk.

After university, his employers included GTE, General Electric and SAS. His first business, Business Information Technology, supplied hardware and software to professional offices and association management firms. The venture did not succeed. It did put him in the position of having to understand both the program and the process of selling it.

A failed first business makes a less tidy opening than a successful garage company. It also makes the chronology more useful. SoftPro followed years of employment and an earlier attempt at entrepreneurship. The founder who went out to demonstrate closing software had already encountered the difficulty of turning technical work into a business.

A thousand places to answer the phone

In 1992, SoftPro added its thousandth customer site. That milestone came eight years after its founding. A thousand sites meant a product that had traveled beyond the founder’s original demonstrations, with an expanding population of people relying on it to complete their work.

The count is also a reminder of what follows adoption. Software has to be explained, maintained and supported. Customers bring different offices, habits and requirements. SoftPro’s early promise joined the application to the help behind it, an arrangement that becomes more demanding as the number of installations rises.

In 2001, Micro General / Fidelity National Financial acquired SoftPro. Harrell remained its President and CEO until his retirement from those roles in 2003. Founding, acquisition and departure were separate events, spread over a business life that began nearly two decades earlier.

The company continued under subsequent leadership. By its thirtieth anniversary in 2014, it reported more than 60,000 users at 14,000 customer sites. Its history page now reports more than 17,000 installations. Those figures describe a company that kept developing after Harrell’s tenure, carried forward by the people who followed him.

The next partner was already in the family

Matt Harrell graduated from NC State with a computer science degree in 2000 and worked as an engineer at SoftPro. He and his father later began MemberHub together, starting the venture in October 2007. The family had two graduates of the same department, twenty-eight years apart, working on a new company.

MemberHub brought membership management and group communication into an online service. Its work included organizations such as schools and parent groups, where maintaining records and keeping people connected were closely related responsibilities. An organization could have many smaller groups inside it, each with its own people and activities.

The contrast with SoftPro is interesting at the level of the work. A closing file and a membership list belong to different businesses. Both require information to be organized so people can act on it. Harrell had moved from one kind of administrative task to another, this time with his son as a collaborator.

“Our skills really complement one another.”

Loren Harrell, on working with Matt

There is pleasure in that description, as well as a division of responsibility. A founder’s second act can be discussed in terms of markets or products. Here, the choice of partner belongs in the account too. Building a company with Matt gave Harrell another reason to be involved in the daily work of starting one.

MemberHub later became Givebacks. The company now describes its work in school payments, fundraising and community giving, connecting tasks that can otherwise sit in separate systems. That later development belongs to the business’s continuing history. It also keeps the original setting recognizable: organizations with members, activities, records and money to manage.

For a parent-group treasurer or school administrator, the administrative work sits behind the activity everyone else sees. A calendar entry, an accurate record and a completed payment each help something happen. The original MemberHub venture placed software in that less visible part of organizational life, where keeping people informed and keeping information in order can occupy the same afternoon.

Back to the place with the punch cards

NC State remained part of Harrell’s professional life. He joined the Computer Science Strategic Advisory Board in 2011. By February 2014, he was its vice-chairperson; he also served as chair. The board brought people working in industry into the department’s planning, with meetings and participation continuing through the year.

His involvement extended to giving guidance and feedback to entrepreneurial teams working on Senior Design Center projects. He also provided MemberHub access to the student ambassadors program. These were practical ways for a graduate’s later work to return to the department: advice on projects and access to a tool his company had built.

In 2020, Harrell was inducted into the department’s Alumni Hall of Fame. The recognition placed his entrepreneurship alongside that of graduates working in research, corporate leadership and public service. His own account of his career credited his computer science education with helping make his entrepreneurial work possible.

The university connection runs through several chapters. It supplied his training, became the place where his future business partner also studied, and later brought him back into conversations about students and the department. A degree dated 1972 turns out to have a long working life.

Forty years after the demonstration

SoftPro’s fortieth anniversary in 2024 returned attention to the offices Harrell had visited at the beginning. Isaacson’s recollection preserved the portable computer, the late partner and Brenda’s firm conclusion. Another interview at Isaacson Sheridan added a view from the people continuing to use the product.

Jennifer Fowler, a paralegal at the firm, described software that had helped the practice evolve and support staff who responded promptly. She also discussed connected services that reduced the need to enter information again. The work had acquired new tools, while the value of reducing repetitive effort remained easy to recognize.

The firm’s continuing use of SoftPro belongs to many people’s efforts across forty years. Harrell supplied the beginning. Later developers, trainers, support staff and customers supplied much of what followed. That makes the anniversary a useful place to look back at a founder without assigning him every achievement of the company he started.

Harrell’s story crosses several generations of computing without losing that everyday setting. There are students waiting for a program to run, attorneys watching a demonstration, organizations managing members and graduates advising the next class. The machines and the companies change. Each scene has people trying to make something work well enough to rely on it. His career offers those ordinary tests plenty of room.

In the old demonstration, the verdict came from someone responsible for preparing the documents. Decades later, another paralegal described why the software remained useful. Between those two accounts sits a durable test for Harrell’s kind of business: whether the people with the work to finish want the program there tomorrow.