The biggest casinos can count on him.

• Position: Gary Brown's company, GBA Systems, has designed a software accounting system for casinos

North Carolina is so concerned about the evils of gambling that it won't start a lottery, but that hasn't hampered Colfax software designer Gary Brown from making a nice piece of change from casinos.

They account for only 10 or 12 of his 1,000 clients, but he handles some of the biggest gambling houses, including Bally's in Atlantic City, N.J., Las Vegas and Reno, Nev., and Donald Trump's three Atlantic City properties: Trump Castle, Plaza and Taj Mahal. The Sands in Atlantic City and Caesars Palace in Lake Tahoe, Nev., are also clients. "Casinos have a tremendous amount of furniture, fixtures and gaming devices," Brown, 46, says.

Brown's ace in the hole is a software accounting system that enables not just casinos but hospitals, manufacturers, restaurants and even the Mormon Church to keep better track of their fixed assets.

"Our software is ideally suited to track a multitude of information," Brown says. It keep tabs on every asset a client owns, from one-armed bandits to church pews.

Brown left Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., with undergraduate and master's degrees in business administration in 1969. He worked in administrative services for Arthur Andersen & Co. in Charlotte before moving to Greensboro in the early '70s to work for a French textile-machinery company. In 1975, Brown decided to take a gamble.

He saw that computers were revolutionizing the way companies kept track of their far-flung operations and that the government was getting more strict on corporate accounting practices. Hoping to take advantage of these trends, he put up $500 of his own money to start Gary Brown Associates (now called GBA Systems) 16 years ago...