How three friends grew Greenville's tech landscape - UPSTATE BUSINESS JOURNAL - Upstate Business Journal

It started with a stroll through downtown Atlanta in late 1973. Two young, hungry environmental engineers — Larry Blackwell and Joe Busby — were at a waste-pollution-control conference and, having known one another from their days in Clemson’s graduate school of environmental systems engineering, decided to take a walk and talk things over.
At the time, Busby, a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, was doing some consulting work for Celanese. Blackwell, also a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, was working for AMECO.
“Larry asked me what I wanted to do,” Busby remembers. “I said, ‘Start my own business.’ Larry said, ‘Let me join you!’”
Within a year, the two men had launched Environmental Dynamics Inc., an environmental-engineering company focused on water- and waste-treatment solutions and services.
“One of our first backers was Howard Suitt of Suitt Construction, who provided us an office,” Busby says. “He was an entrepreneur, too.”
The men chose to headquarter EDI in Greenville because, as Busby puts it, “it made sense.”
“I’d lived in Greenville before going to grad school at Clemson. And Larry made the gutsy decision to move down from Naperville, Illinois,” he said.
In 1975, George Fletcher, an engineer who’d studied with Blackwell and Busby at Clemson, joined them.
“They invited me to join as the third principal with a 10% stake,” Fletcher recalls. “By the time we sold the company eight years later, I had 25% and they each had 33%.”
Fletcher recalls how EDI bought a little-known software package used to run waste-treatment plants for $16,000 in 1982.
Its name? Datastream.
Fletcher says the software captivated Blackwell most of all.
“Larry was a classic entrepreneur,” Fletcher says. “Totally focused. He’d wake up thinking about how to make money out of Datastream.”
When EDI sold in 1984 to an environmental engineering outfit named RMT, itself a subsidiary of Wisconsin Power and Light, Busby and Fletcher stayed on in leadership roles with the new company.
But Blackwell broke off, later buying the Datastream software for $65,000 and going on his own.
“No one followed me into Datastream,” Blackwell says of his move. “No one else had any interest in it. They thought it was a dead end. But it was evident to me that everything was going to be computerized… particularly operations issues.”
“It was choppy, but after about ’87 on, we were doubling revenues every year,” he adds.
Key to Datastream’s success was Blackwell’s decision to hire John Sterling, a young Silicon Valley sales superstar whose father, Jack Sterling, provided the seed money for Blackwell to buy the software.
“Hiring [John] to focus on sales was a big lift,” Blackwell says. “We began to replicate his sales process across a larger number of salespeople. John was excellent at training and implementing a telephone-sales organization. We placed ads in trade publications and were getting 2,000 leads a month – people would cut the ads out and call us.”
Datastream’s pre-9/11 market cap topped $1 billion and, though the company’s valuation softened in a post 9/11 economy, they eventually sold to Infor Global Solutions for a little more than $200 million in 2006.
Now an angel investor — he’s invested about $6 million in 12 companies, he says — Blackwell is quick to offer advice to those thinking of starting a new business.
“It always takes a lot more money than you think,” he says.
His other advice?
“Never give up.”
Busby, who later became president of RMT (the company that bought EDI), commuted weekly from Greenville to RMT’s offices in Madison, Wisconsin, for years.
In time, the commuting got to him, he says.
An engineer at heart, Busby started OptiQuest Technologies, offering “mathematical modeling for artificial neural networks.”
He also did some consulting work with Fletcher.
When asked what made EDI such an entrepreneurial incubator, Busby says it came down to the people they hired.
“People we hired had a lot of ambitions and brains — like Kurt — he was a very bright guy,” Busby says.
He’s talking about Kurt Priester, another entrepreneurial-minded engineer who joined EDI in 1980 before launching Computer Dynamics in 1981 together with his wife Sue. By 1997, they’d sold to Total Control Products which in turn was gobbled up by GE Fanuc a year later.
Sue Priester says her late husband (Kurt was killed in a car crash in 1998) shared several traits with Fletcher, Busby and Blackwell.
“All were engineers, all had strong personalities, and they believed they could do something better than someone else was doing it,” she says.
But more than that, she says, it was about the confluence of several critical pieces, most notably, melding environmental engineering processes with emerging technology.
For Blackwell, the confluence behind Datastream’s success was the advent of the IBM personal computer.
“Datastream really got going in ’86. But the IBM was the nucleus. The thing that made Datastream go was that everyone wanted to work on the IBM PC,” he says.
George Fletcher sits in the screened-in back patio of his Greenville home and spreads — what else — an 11-by-17 inch piece of engineering grid paper on the table in front of him. Pen in hand, he begins charting the daisy chain of startups that grew out of EDI: Datastream… Computer Dynamics… The Fletcher Group… all companies that eventually spun off other companies that morphed into other companies or merged with larger ones.
Fletcher says when EDI sold to RMT, he, Busby and Blackwell each had their own idea for what to do next.
For him, it was to build an engineering company.
“Busby became president of RMT in ’90 and I was a regional president based here in Greenville,” Fletcher says. And because RMT had the money to recruit and retain top talent, Fletcher built a formidable group.
“I hired people with master’s or Ph.D.s in environmental or chemical engineering from around the country and brought them to Greenville,” he remembers.
In time, Fletcher left RMT and launched the Fletcher Group out of his Greenville home in the early ’90s. The company offered consulting engineering, software and waste treatment.
“I hired one of RMT’s employees, and another, then another, then another,” he says. “I knew most of the environmental engineers in Greenville and could cherry pick.”
Fletcher ticks off the names: “Jim Clemmer, Ph.D. chemical engineer and former professor at Ole Miss; Kathy Webb, superstar hydrogeologist from Alabama; Mark Taylor, geologist with degrees from Harvard and the University of Michigan; Bill Husk, industrial hygienist; Joe Barron, civil engineer; Ruth Albright, chemical engineer; John Chastain, designer… good people who made a great company.’”
When the company pumped $400,000 into buying a Dow Chemical waste-treatment plant in Mauldin, another company was born: Piedmont Industrial Waste Services, offering waste treatment services to other companies.
In 2000, Vopak North America, an international chemical and liquid bulk storage company, came calling, offering to buy PIWS over a period of five years.
The Mauldin plant itself became VLS Environmental Solutions and was eventually sold to a private equity firm in 2017.
“That was as big a success story, eventually, as Datastream,” Fletcher says. “I mean, they sold for a couple of hundred million.”
And the engineering arm of Fletcher Group? It’s now SynTerra Corp.
Though Fletcher sold his share of the business to employees in 2006 and retired long before the VLS sale, knowing it grew out of what he began is a point of pride.
“I’ve had a good career,” he says. “I had good people and let them do their jobs.”
As for the entrepreneurial fire, Fletcher says it’s a mindset.
“There are people who can handle the risk,” he says. “And they’re in the minority.”
After being absorbed into RMT, the combined companies have become part of TRC Solutions, a 6,000-employee, global consulting and management company focused on environmental solutions like wind energy.
Source: George Fletcher
1974 – Environmental engineers Larry Blackwell and Joe Busby found Environmental Dynamics Inc.
1975 – George Fletcher joins EDI as third principal.
1980 – Kurt Priester joins EDI.
1981 – Kurt Priester and wife, Sue, found Computer Dynamics Inc.
1982 – EDI buys a little-known waste-management-software package called Datastream for $16,000.
1984 – EDI sells to RMT, a wholly owned subsidiary of Wisconsin Power and Light. Busby and Fletcher assume leadership roles within RMT.
1986 – Armed with $65,000 in seed money, Larry Blackwell launches Datastream.
1992 – George Fletcher founds the Fletcher Group which has since become SynTerra Corp.
1995 – Datastream goes public.
1997 – The Priesters sell Computer Dynamics Inc. to Total Control Products.
2006 – Datastream sells to Infor Global Solutions for $216 million.