Lon is a thirty three year veteran of the computer industry, starting in 1981 when the IBM PC was released. The 80's were spent in UNIX, point of sale, accounting software, managing a support center, and managing programmers. In 1986, Lon was a beta user for a new software program named ACT! which created the Contact Management market. Contact Management morphed into Sales Force Automation and SFA morphed into Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Over the past twenty four years, Lon's companies did training, consulting, customizing, implementation, and ongoing support of salespeople, customer service, and small business owners. Custom and packaged solutions for businesses from SOHO's to Fortune 100 companies were sold to thousands of customers.  

In 2004, ACT! was badly rewritten and Sage chose not to fix it quickly. Lon moved on to Microsoft Business Contact Manager 2007 and authored the Outlook Business Contact Manager 2007 For Dummies book. BCM never gained the market share that Lon had hoped for so it was on to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online world.  

It was because of his reputation inside Microsoft and the relationships Lon formed that caused Microsoft to hire Lon's company in 2009 to work on a project to move small businesses into "the cloud". The result of this was the Dashboards+Sync for QuickBooks and Microsoft CRM Online software that connects QuickBooks to Microsoft CRM Online. It also inspired Lon to change the name of his company to Living Business Online Inc. with the slogan "We move small businesses' computer systems to the cloud". In addition, Lon wrote the Online Manifesto eBook to describe the changes happening to computing and why the "cloud" is a great move for small businesses to make.  

"This is the first time since the beginning of this planet that we are able to communicate with almost anyone, at any time, in real time. We can access data, exchange pictures and videos, and do it all from the palm of our hand. We don't yet know what we don't know - this will fundamentally change our societies in ways never before possible". It's an exciting time to be in the computer industry and Lon is well positioned to explain and implement it for small businesses.