Harmon Turns Sweet Idea into Golden Opportunity
by Sandie Taylor
Colby Harmon (BBA ’94, MBA ’96) knows firsthand that sometimes working for the man can lead to working for yourself.
As the CFO of Information Technology Systems at Wendy’s International, Inc., Harmon developed the idea for his Austin-based company, Sweet Data Concepts. While creating operational processes internally for Wendy’s, he observed that there was room for improvement—and he had the solution.
Just as any smart businessman would, Harmon saw an opportunity to market his own unique restaurant operating system and ran with it. But he didn’t leave Wendy’s behind. The fast food franchise was one of his first customers.
“I said to them, ‘If I do this, I’m going to give you better information and it’s going to cost you less than having me as an employee.’ That was a valuable proposition,” Harmon says.
In the summer of 2000, Harmon founded his company and made three sales within a week. Sweet Data Concepts and his corporation, Sugar High Holdings (stemming from Harmon’s fascination with anything sweet), offer restaurants a different approach to reporting metrics information, specifically as it pertains to food costs and operational methods.
“We fit the product to the way the clients operate rather than forcing them to fit our product, which is pretty much the way everyone else does it.” The company now serves about 1,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada and has eight employees.
Before his company demanded so much of his time, Harmon was an
avid triathlete and an adjunct accounting instructor at McCombs. He’d
like to take up both of those challenges again one day, and he’s
already back in the saddle training for competitions. “For the
record,” he admits, “I still can’t swim as fast as Steve Limberg.”
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