Recondo Technology CEO Featured in Denver Business Journal

George “Rick” Adam Jr. is back on familiar ground as an entrepreneur.

Almost two years after he left Adam Aircraft — the experimental airplane company he founded — he’s once again running a fast-growing software company, Recondo Technology Inc. He’s also a founding investor in AdamWorks, a company manufacturing parts from composite materials for defense and civilian industries.

Combined, the companies feature more than a dozen employees who were with him at Adam Aircraft or his larger, 1990s high-tech venture, New Era of Networks (NEON).

“I’m essentially back to my roots with Recondo,” Adam said, noting that 10 employees there worked at NEON. “We’ve pretty much got the old band back together.”

Adam, 62, started Greenwood Village-based Recondo Technology in early 2007 to design billing and collections software for the health care industry. He left Adam Aircraft that summer as the 500-employee, very-light jet maker began to struggle. It slid into Chapter 7 bankruptcy a few months later.

Today, Adam describes Adam Aircraft as “a brief dip” away from his true calling.

“I’m a lifetime software guy,” he said.

Adam wrote his first computer software when he was an 18-year-old college student at West Point. He later managed technology systems for the Air Force space program, then ran a massive information technology group at Goldman Sachs after retiring from the Air Force. He branched out on his own in 1994, launching NEON in Englewood.

That company integrated different software systems for businesses. It grew to be one the area’s largest dot-com-era employers. It operated in 30 countries, traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange and employed 1,500 people in 2001, when it was sold to Sybase Inc. in an all-stock purchase valued at $373 million.

Recondo started with just Adam and some contract employees in February 2007. It quickly became a staff of 10 and some part-time workers.

Today it employs 80 people, 65 of whom work out of Recondo’s Greenwood Village offices. Adam doesn’t expect much more growth this year, but he predicts Recondo to be profitable by year-end and to double its staff in 2010.

The technology is designed to solve the complicated interaction between hospitals, insurance companies and patients that results in the health care industry spending $360 billion a year on billing and collections, Adam said.

Recondo’s SurePayHealth® service is meant to figure out a patient’s bill, reconcile that with their insurer, and often make it possible for the tab to be settled before the patient leaves the hospital or clinic.

Most existing methods of billing for health care involve sending patients streams of statements of benefit notices and, often several weeks after their hospital visit, a final bill with figures that don’t match earlier statements, said Terry Truman, vice president of marketing for Recondo. The confusion results in many patient tabs being left unresolved, causing more unnecessary and expensive work for hospitals, insurers and patients alike, he said.

“They’re well-intended, they’re insured, but they end up not paying the bill,” said Truman, who worked with Adam at NEON.

Recondo’s system is used by 40 hospitals, including ones in Boulder and Vail, and at Duke University. Hospitals using Recondo systems handled $1.1 million in billable services in March, which was twice as much as in February, Adam said.

His other investment, AdamWorks, uses expertise assembled at Adam Aircraft in designing and manufacturing things made from composite materials, such as carbon fiber and wet fiberglass.

Kim Burquest is the majority owner of the 18-employee company, which makes parts for unmanned reconnaissance drones built by a major defense contractor, lightweight trailer sidewalls for trucking companies, windmill blades for alternative energy companies and other products.

It’s located in a 12,000-square-foot space a short distance from Adam Aircraft’s old headquarters. Burquest ran human resources for the aircraft company prior to leaving in 2007, and before that she handled human resources for NEON.

AdamWorks formed in October 2007. It was delivering parts to customers by February 2008. Today it has six clients, mostly in defense-related work that she said she can’t discuss in detail.