AT THE HELM

Robert Eberle becomes CEO of Bottomline Technologies in November. Photo:  Michael McCord

For Rob Eberle, the president and chief operating officer of Bottomline Technologies, the challenges of corporate leadership were discovered during a stint with a company during the dot.com boom era of the 1990s.

“What would happen if nobody came to work,” he asked during one of his first days on the job. “It’s easy for someone to think that I do this and I run this. In reality, you don’t do anything.”

What is vital, he explained, for a corporate leader is to focus on what can be done well, including, like a successful athletic coach, putting employees in the best possible position to succeed while providing strong coordination and a sustainable vision for the company’s future.

“It’s a privilege and a responsibility,” Eberle said about leadership.

Eberle will have the opportunity to sharpen that vision in November when he succeeds Joseph Mullen to become Bottomline’s president and CEO.

Eberle joined Bottomline Technologies in 1998 after having first being an investor in the company. Founded in 1989, Bottomline is a public company which had more than $100 million in revenues for the fiscal year ending June 30.

Bottomline specializes in providing payments and invoice automation software and services to a wide range of organizations, including AIG, Liberty Mutual, John Deere, Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Canada. The company said its customer base includes approximately 60 of the Fortune 100 and has a network of about 4,000 law firms using its legal spend management solutions.

Eberle is a graduate of Boston University Law School who decided early in his legal career that he was “at the right table but in the wrong seat.” He wanted to be in on the business action and he got his wish in the mid-1990s.

“It was trial by fire,” he said about his early days at Irtonix, a Massachusetts company that specialized in making rugged notebook computers. “I didn’t know anybody. The first day was humbling.”

But the executive who still looks fondly back upon his earlier entrepreneurial adventures of delivering newspapers and catering clambakes, persevered and was part of a team that turned around a money-losing company.

Eberle feels his legal background will continue to serve him well in a growing company dealing with a wide range of investor and regulatory issues, including those dealing with Sarbanes-Oxley public company reporting laws and merger-acquisitions.

“For a public company of our size, (Sarbanes-Oxley) costs a lot,” said Eberle. “Those are real dollars lost that could be used” for investments into research and development.

He plans to continue a tradition at Bottomline of “having the conviction to do the right thing” for the long-term health of the company’s employees, shareholders and customers.

“We have already demonstrated the long-term success of the business,” he said. Sometimes that means lower quarterly revenues and not inflating the pressure of trying to satisfy Wall Street analysts.

“We are a much stronger company than when our share price was at $92,” Eberle said about Bottomline’s stock price at the surreal height of the dot-com boom. Those prices came back to earth and for the past year Bottomline prices have ranged from around $6.90 to $15.65 per share.

Eberle is also proud of a company policy called Employee Choice Charitable Giving Program that allows employees to give donations to a growing roster charities and nonprofits of their choice.