Tim Elliott had a useful description of the early founder’s working day. You finished the work, and then, after six, you started the other work. The first shift kept the business moving. The second dealt with everything its owner had discovered he also needed to do. Entrepreneurship had apparently come with an evening appointment nobody mentioned.
He recalled that routine while discussing contractors with Davin Marceau in 2021. Eventually, he said, you recognized the need for help, perhaps only an hour or two a day. A permanent employee was one option among several. The immediate task was to recognize which work needed someone else’s abilities.
It is a modest place to begin a founder’s story. It is also an appropriate introduction to Elliott, who founded Access in 1999 and was still its CEO when Phreesia acquired the electronic forms business in August 2023. His public conversations repeatedly return to the practical business of getting work into the right hands.
A customer, then a company
Access began with a customer’s need. Elliott had grown up around his family’s multifunctional hardware business, and the forms opportunity emerged through another of the family’s companies. There was existing work to improve and an existing customer who needed it improved. The company followed.
By 2015, he had a compact explanation of its place in the software world: “We’re gap fillers.” Customers owned substantial systems and still had processes those systems did not quite handle. Elliott’s business occupied that untidy space. Purchase approvals and employee paperwork offered opportunities alongside the company’s principal market.
Customers also supplied ideas. Elliott described people discovering further uses for Access after an initial installation. That gave his account of product development an unusually crowded cast. The founder was there, but so were the administrators and users who understood what remained awkward in their own working day.
“They’re the ones that make us better.”Tim Elliott, on customers, 2015
For a business selling improvement, that is a consequential way to distribute the credit. It leaves room for the person receiving the software to help determine what it should become.
The form has somewhere to go
The product releases during Elliott’s tenure give that practical outlook a technical shape. In November 2014, Access released Formatta 8.9, adding web services autofill. Information already held in other applications could populate fields and lists in an electronic form. A person completing it had less information to enter again.
In February 2015 came Formatta 8.10 and web services autowrite. The direction of travel mattered: collected information could move onward into enterprise applications. The business was addressing both sides of a task, retrieving information and putting the completed work somewhere useful.
Elliott’s explanation of that release emphasized what happened to the data after collection. The form itself could look immaculate and still leave someone with another job to do. Access was working on the handoffs around it. The small bureaucratic object had an itinerary.
- 01Bring it inExisting information fills the form.
- 02Complete itThe user adds and signs what is needed.
- 03Send it onData moves into the next system.
There is a particular kind of patience involved in making that work visible. A customer may notice an attractive screen immediately. They may appreciate a vanished copying task only when they reach the end of the day and discover they have already finished.
Access carried the work onto portable devices. Its November 2018 EFR Mobile release made electronic forms and signatures available on tablets and smartphones. Elliott argued that enterprise users should benefit from the progress they already saw in consumer mobile technology. A working day should not require a different century’s equipment simply because it happens inside an organization.
The coach in the picture
Another view of Elliott appears in Access’s 2014 sponsorship of Cliff Lewis, the owner of CrossFit Heath. Elliott had begun training at Lewis’s gym about three years earlier. Access helped support Lewis’s trip to that year’s CrossFit Games.
The reason Elliott gave for backing him included his ability as a competitor, but it lingered on his behavior as a coach. He admired how Lewis encouraged the other participants and helped them work toward their potential. The beneficiary of a sponsorship could also be someone from whom the sponsor was learning.
That detail belongs beside the software story because it introduces a recurring interest: what helps another person do the work in front of them? A product addresses one version of that question. Encouragement addresses another. Elliott’s public life includes both, with considerably fewer forms required at the gym.
A microphone and a learning curve
By January 2021, Elliott was discussing the management side of building Access with Cody Strate and Marceau on The Upward Spiral. The conversation included work with consultant Barbara da Costa and the use of Kolbe and Clifton assessments to understand differences within a team.
Elliott spoke about learning how he worked, and about the difficulty of trying to change an organization’s culture. These were subjects requiring time and commitment. The conversation gave the founder a role that company biographies rarely allow much space for: someone still learning how to do his job.
“Holding on with ego is a failed mindset.”Tim Elliott, 2021
The microphone made those questions public. Elliott’s conversations with Marceau extended through the Access Points and Bobblehead podcast catalogue, turning business decisions into subjects they could revisit rather than conclusions permanently engraved beneath a leadership photograph.
They discussed contractors and the need to understand the limits of outside help. They also discussed the boundaries of an assignment and the trouble with leaving a statement of work open-ended. Anyone who has watched a modest request quietly acquire six new responsibilities can appreciate the appeal of putting the agreement in writing.
There is outside testimony to Elliott’s interest in helping other founders, too. In a 2023 post, Strate credited his mentorship while describing the development of The Upward Spiral Group. Strate also described working with Access on its Focus product. The account places Elliott in the less visible work of supporting someone else’s business decisions.
The podcast titles have their own appealing range. A July 2022 episode borrowed its starting point from Talladega Nights for a discussion of instincts and when to trust them. In April 2023, Elliott and Marceau continued a conversation about leadership and praise. A software executive’s reading room apparently had room for both management questions and Ricky Bobby.
Those choices make the public portrait more specific. Elliott was willing to spend time on the ordinary situations inside a company: recognizing someone’s contribution, choosing help, and deciding which judgment deserved attention. None of those questions disappears when a product ships.
The paperwork comes home
Phreesia announced the acquisition of Access eForms on August 14, 2023. It reported that Access collected more than 1.6 billion electronic signatures each year. A business that began with a customer’s forms problem was now handling a volume difficult to picture as individual acts.
Electronic signatures collected annually by Access, as reported by Phreesia. A company measure, not a measure of Elliott’s personal wealth.
Elliott’s stated hope for the deal concerned what Phreesia’s size and scale could make possible for Access’s solutions. The product would have a larger organization behind it. He also pointed to a shared characteristic: both businesses had been led by their founders.
His account of preparing the sale was more granular. Access’s financial adviser, Healthcare Growth Partners, helped identify potential buyers and articulate what made the company distinctive. Elliott wanted advisers who understood the business and could consider both strategic buyers and private equity firms.
Then came diligence. He described the support required to keep the legal, accounting, and administrative teams organized as requests arrived from the buyer. His assessment was that the adviser’s help had been necessary to close on time.
There is a pleasing circularity to this chapter. After years spent helping customers manage information, Elliott was dealing with the information required to sell the company itself. The transaction depended on people answering requests, arranging records, and completing work in sequence. Even the exit had forms to fill.
The conversations kept going
The sale did not end the documented conversations. In May 2024, Elliott and Marceau sat down with investment banker Chris McCord for a Bobblehead episode about business, childhood, and people. Later that month, Elliott and McCord returned to careers and parenting. In July, Elliott and Marceau published another conversation together.
That continuation is a useful final image. A corporate milestone supplies a date. A conversation allows the questions to remain open. Elliott’s public story includes the customer who needed a better process, the coach whose encouragement he valued, the colleague who credited his mentorship, and the advisers who helped with a sale.
Access gives those relationships a common setting. Its founder spent decades working around the places where an apparently complete system still needed somebody’s attention. The business grew there. So did the list of people worth listening to.