He Sold His Software Company. Six Years Later, He Bought It Back.

The first version of Sam Saab's software had an audience of one: Sam Saab. In 1985, he was a consulting firm compressed into a single person, driving around the Washington, D.C. suburbs to help associations and small organizations make sense of their new IBM PCs. The clients had mailing lists, membership records, and paper cards. Sam had appointments, invoices, and more work than one head could reliably hold. So, in the evening, he wrote a program to run the business he was busy running all day.

The program kept track of the practical debris of work. It remembered people, dates, and obligations. Within roughly a year, an insurance company saw enough value in its list-management abilities to bring it in-house and support custom development. The private tool became a commercial product. Long before customer relationship management earned its three-letter acronym and a conference circuit, Results was already doing the unglamorous thing software does when it matters: giving a small organization control over its own information.

The engineer before the executive

Saab was born in Lebanon in 1948 and left at 19. His sister was pursuing a master's degree in the United States and helped him come as a student. At San Francisco State University, he completed an engineering degree. The computing was decidedly physical. FORTRAN programs traveled to a mainframe on punched cards, an arrangement that makes today's instant deployment feel slightly indecent. Sam discovered he was good at programming, enjoyed it, and became the classmate who helped others.

That helper instinct followed him into consulting. In the Washington area, many associations and nonprofits could see the promise of personal computers but could not afford mainframes or large consulting engagements. They needed someone to translate the machine into their work. DPS Consulting, which Saab established in 1985, sat at that translation layer. The job was not to worship the PC. It was to make the mailing list behave.

The same work also introduced him to Mayya, who became his wife and business partner. Sam was managing information for a national conference held by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Mayya and her family were volunteers. They noticed each other amid the conference work. Later, friends could be talking around a dinner table while Sam drifted into the interface of his next module. Mayya remembered those quiet departures into software design. One suspects she learned to recognize the expression.

“Know what you like to do. Know what you love to do. Know what your passion is about doing.”Sam Saab, on starting a business

Seven years to trust someone else

The founder's first scaling problem was not technology. It was trust. Saab relied on subcontractors and partners, yet waited seven years before hiring a full-time employee. He worried that a client who had hired him personally would feel abruptly reassigned. Care had become both the virtue of the practice and its ceiling.

Mayya supplied the counterargument. If every relationship had to pass through Sam, clients were being denied the capacity of a larger team. The first new consultant received new accounts rather than inheriting old ones. Existing trust stayed intact while the company learned how to hand off responsibility. After that first hire worked, the second came faster. Processes existed. Sam could step back from billable hours and think about margins, staffing, and the design of the company itself.

It is an appealingly slow lesson. Delegation is often described as a personality upgrade, as though a founder simply wakes up less controlling. Saab treated it as systems work. Decide which relationships can move. Create a clean boundary. Watch the chemistry. Ask the client. Then repeat. The engineer had found another workflow to map.

When the laptop needed a reason

By the early 1990s, Sharp was bringing laptops to market. Portable computing had novelty but needed a convincing answer to the question every new machine eventually faces: what shall we actually do with it? Sharp's sales force was already using Results CRM. At a conference, the hardware company displayed the software on its laptops, turning each product into a demonstration of the other.

No elaborate sponsorship was required. Sharp could show practical business software away from a desk. Results could appear on hardware that made mobility visible. Saab called it a true partnership, a fit built around reciprocal usefulness rather than money changing hands. The scene captures his favored terrain: the join between two systems, where each becomes more legible because the other is present.

In 2000, he applied the same logic to his own organization. The consulting practice and software business had grown into different creatures with different clients, goals, and workflows. DPS focused on larger consulting engagements. Results Software took responsibility for the commercial product used by smaller businesses, including companies working in Outlook and QuickBooks. Separating them clarified what each was for.

An acquisition intended for growth

Abacus Data Systems acquired Results Software in 2017. Saab has described the deal as a growth strategy, not an exit strategy. He joined AbacusNext as executive vice president of product to guide the transition. By the end of 2018, however, the acquiring company had shelved the ResultsCRM product line in favor of another acquisition and ended the partnership. In early 2019, it rejected Saab's offer to buy Results back.

He was not ready to retire. A non-compete restricted what he could do in North America, so he respected the boundary and changed the map. In May 2019, he established DoMore as a self-funded, Dubai-based technology company. Randy Johnston, an industry veteran and a mentor to Sam and Mayya, joined as co-founder and chief technology officer. Together they built a mobile-first, cross-platform system that could support tailored and branded business products.

DoMore was employee-owned and global by design. By 2022, Saab wrote that the company had 19 people working across three countries and six time zones, with three minority investors. Its platform was deployed under different brand names for different industries. The constraint had produced a structure that was less attached to one product name and more capable of becoming the operational spine beneath many of them.

Buying back the name

In 2023, the loop closed. Saab reacquired Results Software and moved DoMore to the United States after the non-compete expired. The new technology became the foundation for a rebuilt Results platform. Mike Honig, Jessica Solis, and Paul Salemi, the three directors who had run Results before the acquisition, returned in their earlier roles. This was not nostalgia dressed as product strategy. The name supplied continuity; the platform supplied a fresh chassis.

There remained the delicate question of old promises. Results customers had lived through two acquisitions, and some held perpetual licenses to an earlier version. The relaunched company offered those customers full credit for what they had paid, applicable to the new subscription product. Saab framed the policy in moral rather than promotional terms: it was the right thing to do. A license, in this view, was not merely an artifact of an obsolete pricing model. It was evidence that someone had trusted the company before.

“We're a software company with a heart because we care about who we're doing business with.”Sam Saab

The revived Results now combines customer management with projects, field service, scheduling, documents, billing, inventory, reporting, and QuickBooks integration. Its partner program leans on consultants who understand the complicated operations of small and midsize businesses. In 2024, the company named its founding master partners, including firms with deep QuickBooks practices. Saab praised their ability to help clients sort through hundreds of software choices. The product may be technical; the distribution strategy remains personal.

The long memory of useful software

Saab's career stretches from punched cards to progressive web apps, yet the central problem has hardly moved. A business has people, promises, inventory, documents, appointments, and money flowing between systems that rarely volunteer to cooperate. The founder keeps returning to the connective tissue. His vocabulary is full of integration, visibility, workflow, and relationships. These are sober words, but businesses are mostly made of sober things.

His advice to would-be founders is equally free of fireworks. Know what you love doing. Do not chase a market merely because money appears to be waiting there. The work will take too long, and the difficult periods will demand a source of energy sturdier than fashion. It is guidance earned across several cycles: the PC revolution, the cloud turn, an acquisition, an enforced geographical detour, and the chance to put an old sign above a rebuilt shop.

There is wit in the corporate sequence even if no one planned it: Results produced DoMore, then DoMore made new Results possible. The verbs form their own tiny management philosophy. Deliver something useful. Learn to share the work. Remember the people who trusted you. If the product returns, make sure it comes back carrying more than its name.