License to deal.

• Author: Wittebort, Suzanne
• Position: Q+E Software - Company Profile

Our Entrepreneur of the Year's software company got where it is by riding piggyback on other people's products. Now it's ready to go its own way.

At a California computer trade show a couple of years ago, the conversation among newly rich, highflying software executives from Silicon Valley and Boston turned to cars. In a litany of repair-sho woes, one executive complained about his Jaguar, another about his Ferrari. Someone asked Richard Holcomb, president of Q+E Software in Raleigh, if he had car problem. Nope, he said. Never been in the shop. "What kind of car do you drie?" he was asked. "An F-150 pickup truck," he replied. "You can't haul manure in the back of a Ferrari."

In fact, four of the top five officers at Q+E, one of North Carolina's fastest-growing companies, drive pickups. When the company changed its name last May from Pioneer Software, "we wondered whether we should just call it Redneck Software and be done with it," Holcomb jokes.

For Q+E, the country road has proved a fast track. Revenues have shot from $1 million in 1990 to $7.2 million last year. They likely will top $15 million this year, Holcomb says. Named to Inc. magazine's 1993 list of the 500 fastest-growing companies, 7-year-old Q+E was ranked by Soft Letter, an industry newsletter, as the nation's 80th-largest and fourth-fastest-growing PC software company. This year's revenues will probably catapult it into the top 50.

The Triangle's Council for Entrepreneurial Development, which says that the state's 900 software companies will generate about $3 billion in revenues this year, dubbed Q+E its growth company of the year, and co-founder Holcomb, 31, was named North Carolina technological entrepreneur of the year in competition sponsored by Ernst & Young, Merrill Lynch, Inc. and BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA.

Q+E has prospered on royalties since 1989, when it licensed its data-base access technology to software giant Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash., Microsoft's plans to end the arrangement by the end of this year could have left Q+E high and dry. Instead, it has used the Microsoft deal as a launching pad for licensing to other companies and for inaugurating a bold effort to market new products directly to corporate customers. For his keen business sense in making the most of technological expertise -- and a dash of good luck -- BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA names Richard Holcomb its Entrepreneur of the Year.

Early on, Holcomb demonstrated the entrepreneurial qualities of hard work and a distaste for regimentation. Born in Norfolk, England, where his father was serving in the Air Force, he moved at age 3 with his family to his father's native Whiteville, where the family raised hogs. A few years later, his father, who had been studying engineering at night, moved the family to Conway, S.C., where he worked for a crane manufacturer.

Young Richard grew up working tobacco on relatives' farms. His first entrepreneurial venture -- reselling candy bought at a local convenience store to first-grade classmates -- was quashed by the principal when she learned he was the source of forbidden chewing gun. At 16, he took a job at a North Myrtle Beach McDonald's and was quickly made assistant manager. He couldn't stand school, which he viewed as boring and geared to the mediocre. Public education is "basically a waste of time," he says. "It's just like jail. You serve 180 days, and then you move on."

A confessed smart aleck, he sped through Conay High in three years, focusing on work and marching band, in which he played John Philip Sousa marches on the saxophone. After a year at the University of South Carolina at Conway, he...