This month, QQ Solutions celebrates a big milestone: our twenty-fifth anniversary as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. While QQ Solutions is now among the top three agency management system providers nationwide, our team still stays true to our roots – developing technology that puts people first. Although we now serve more than 22,000 users, we never forget our humble beginnings, which started at the University of Florida.
I was in my senior year as a Computer Engineering major at UF when I was assigned a senior class project to write a software program for any business of my choosing. As my father, Gerry Malis, owned an auto insurance agency, I decided it would be the perfect opportunity to create a program that would help expedite the everyday tasks that bogged his agents down.
At the time, I wrote the program, called AutoFile, on a computer that was considered a “laptop” – if you had really strong quadriceps (it weighed more than 20 pounds). I designed the program by hand on grid paper, and then stored the source code on 5.25-inch floppy disks.
Once my father’s insurance agency started using AutoFile, the response was overwhelming. Agents were able to automate tasks that they were once doing manually, from writing letters to printing renewals. We realized that this program could significantly increase agency productivity, saving owners both time and money. As a result, we started selling the program to other agencies for only $250 a year.
After graduating college, I continued to develop the agency management system, as well as a comparative auto rater called QuickQuote. I remember spending long days and late nights coding software, sometimes until 3 am. Once word spread about AutoFile and QuickQuote, our phone started ringing off the hook, from new product orders to existing customers requesting new features. I would literally hang up the phone, make the updates, write the program to a floppy disk, and send it off in the mail.
Whereas software updates initially meant sending out a few new disks to a small number of customers, that number quickly grew to several hundred. I soon realized that we were on the cutting edge of something big: a technology boom. That realization really started to sink in when my dad and I attended insurance tradeshows in the late ‘90s. We would set up a computer in our booth to burn copies of AutoFile or QuickQuote on the spot. People would crowd around our booth. Some were there to order our products, but most came just to see our computer. They had never seen one before.
Mark & Gerry Malis at the 1998 FAIA Convention
As technology evolved over time, so did our products. Both QuickQuote and AutoFile were transitioned from DOS to Windows and advanced features were added. AutoFile was renamed QuickFile, adding QuickBooks integration and document scanning, while QuickQuote added bridging and binding. As we moved to the Web, our rater was completely rewritten and renamed QQ WebRater. Later, we replaced QuickFile with QQ Evolution. As our product suite grew, so did our need for more people. So, we added additional developers, testers, sales people, and product support representatives to our team.
In 2009, we rebranded our company as QQ Solutions, reflecting our greater mission to provide answers, and to never stop asking questions. Throughout every new initiative, I always sought out feedback from our team and our customers. I knew that, while we were writing the programs, insurance agents were the ones actually using them. Their insight was critical to our products’ success. Today we are on the cutting edge of technology – recently having introduced QQ Catalyst™, an entirely new web-based agency management system that is truly revolutionary.
I recently read an interesting fact – ninety-percent of companies can grow for one year, but only eight-percent do it five years in a row, according to Grant Thornton LLP, one of the world’s leading independent audit, tax and advisory firms. QQ Solutions has done it twenty-five years in a row!
Today, more than 22,000 people use our agency management and comparative rating systems. We are obsessively customer-focused, offering independent insurance agencies the industry’s best customer service supporting the most innovative, continuously-improving agency management system — QQ Catalyst. While we’re proud of our innovations during our twenty-five years, our biggest accomplishment is really the team we’ve built. It’s our people – not just the technology – that got us where we are today. We never stop building, growing and trying new things. As a result, we don’t get caught up in the day-to-day. We’re already looking ahead to see what’s next.
