Oregon Public Broadcasting

We continue our Hard Times series with the story of  Chris Baker. He's a 43-year-old Portland entrepreneur, the founder of a medical software company a few years ago. When we first met Baker, the economy was in a free fall and he'd just cut most of his staff.

As Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, it's been a tumultuous year, but things are beginning to look up for Baker's company.

CrossCurrent is a tiny company based in a big old Portland warehouse.

It designs software that Baker says allows surgeons to easily bill insurance companies.  

In 2008, the company was going great guns with 18 employees and a bright future. There was all the fun, whacky stuff you might expect at a high-tech start-up. The software engineers had programed sounds into their testing equipment. So they'd get a warning if there was a problem.

SOUND -- siren

And if the software was working fine?

SOUND - “It’s alive!”

The software may have been alive, but Baker says all of a sudden markets across the world started to crash and the economy went into free fall. 

Chris Baker: “So we called a board meeting and said we don’t have any money. Essentially on Friday we told everyone, no one’s coming into work on Monday and nobody’s going to get a pay check. I mean we don’t people to work and not get paid.”

Baker says it was very difficult.

Chris Baker: “The first thing that comes is that it’s hard to believe you’re really at that point after working so hard trying to build something for years that a) the thing may have entirely failed on you, b) that you don’t personally know if you’re going to have a paycheck the next week and take care of your own family. And c) having to lay off friends and colleges that you’ve with for years, it’s  pretty overwhelming experience.”

The good news for the company was that engineers had just finished the software program -- so they actually had a product to sell.

Baker says they kept a core of four people -- reduced wages and started selling.

That was in the spring.

When OPB caught up with CrossCurrent again in the summer, Baker had made another cut -- the CEO.

John Valavanis had been hired out of Chicago. But Baker explained, it wasn't working out.

Chris Baker: “He was here to raise the money and he didn’t raise the money. And so we determined that we would be better off spending that money elsewhere.”

Back in Chicago, Valavanis said that the economy was so bad it was all but impossible to raise money. He also said he was having a tough time.

John Valavanis: “You know, there’s not a line of CEO positions opened up -- you go on a website to find the next CEO job. It requires an awful lot of networking as well as making sure that you’re the right fit for the job....On the other hand. I have a certain levels of transferable skills that should help me move on in my career and apply those in my next venture.”

Baker felt  the nationwide search for a CEO had taught him a valuable lesson.

Chris Baker: “As an Oregonian, we sit in a small city and think, gosh there are people out there that certainly must know better than us sitting here, about how to raise money and how to run things. And I would say one of the lessons I’ve learned is that that’s not necessarily true, that Portlanders and Oregonians shouldn’t undervalue their expertise and think that someone else can be your savior.”

That was in the Summer. By the fall, the economy was showing signs of stabilizing and Baker was anxious to start selling his software nationwide.  He still needed a CEO, who could raise large sums.

Kim Cox: “I think that this point that the company needs to do a minimum of a $5 million raise with probably a $5 million add-on.”

That's Kim Cox -- the new CEO and veteran Portland entreprenuer Baker hired. He helped turn around another local software company, Rentrak.

That was in October. Now, Baker is moving CrossCurrent into a new office space.

Chris Baker: “Here we' go, we're in."

Kristian Foden-Vencil: "Right so we've got a big empty office space here with some cubicles. It's actually a nice office building. It's got beautiful old beams up in the air."

Chris Baker: “It's class A office space at a great price. You know, here we are looking at some of the carnage of the bubble. Right, this was a big mortgage building and these people moved out leaving all of the cubes, a great phone system. Now it's ours."

Baker estimates he's paying about 40 percent less for the space than he would have two years ago.

Meanwhile, the obvious question is: has the new CEO been successful?

Chris Baker: “He's doing fine. We don't see a lot of him. He's out there beating the streets for money and that's exactly what he should be doing."

Kristian Foden-Vencil: "He said he'd have $2 million by Thanksgiving?"

Chris Baker: “Not yet, but we're working on it."

They're also working on landing a few more accounts.