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Software Metaphysician
Five days later, just two miles north of the temple, another group of devotees awaits Singer -- this time in the research and development park of Medical Manager Corp., the software company Singer founded in 1979. Some 30 shareholders sit not on pillows but in dark blue office chairs. They're here to approve a $1 billion merger between Medical Manager, which makes software that doctors use to organize their practices, and Synetic Inc. New Jersey-based Synetic, through a subsidiary, CareInsite, is developing technologies to allow Internet transactions among doctors, health plans and patients.
Medical Manager isn't some over-hyped Internet start-up with a gaseous balance sheet. In 1998, the company booked $15.7 million in net income on revenues of $135.9 million. Industry experts say the merged entity, which keeps the name Medical Manager (MMGR), is the company closest to developing what they consider the Holy Grail of healthcare information: a way for physicians, patients, insurance companies, pharmacies, labs and others to do business over the web with the ease and security of bank transactions. The technology could dramatically reduce inefficiencies in today's healthcare system that make up an estimated 30% of costs.
Private life
It's not easy to reconcile the hard-working chief executive who built one of the largest public companies in Florida with the soft-spoken guru who hasn't missed his twice-a-day meditations in 28 years. Intensely private, the 52-year-old Singer so dislikes leaving home that shareholder meetings are held not at corporate headquarters in Tampa, but at the R&D park in a remote area near his temple outside the town of Alachua. Now co-CEO and operations chief of the new firm, Singer also professes to care nothing about his personal wealth. "Success in life and in business is not measured in dollars," Singer says. "It is measured in the openness of heart and the sense of joy in life."
Easy to say, perhaps, for a man whose products are now in more than 120,000 doctors' offices, and who has become fabulously wealthy as a result: Singer is worth more than $275 million after taking his company public in 1997, and he picks up options for another 650,000 shares of MMGR stock in the wake of the merger. Even by the standards of the often-unconventional software industry, he and his company are anomalies. So what gives? Part of the answer is that Singer, however spiritually oriented, has always been both extremely intelligent and entrepreneurial.
Surrendering to life
Born into a Jewish family in 1947 in New Rochelle, N.Y., Singer grew up in Miami, where his father, a stockbroker, relocated. He earned his bachelor's degree in business from the University of Florida in 1969, and had an early marriage that ended in divorce in 1971.
While working on a Ph.D. in economics at UF in 1972, he read "Autobiography of a Yogi" and began to practice meditation. A "deep spiritual awakening" led him to move to property he had bought in Alachua. He rarely left the woods except to teach economics courses. But after tutoring fellow doctoral candidate Alan Robertson, then president of Santa Fe Community College, Singer began to teach courses on spirituality at SFCC, where he attracted a following. "Mickey was incredibly genuine in trying to find peace for himself and help other people," says Robertson, now retired to Fort Myers. "He was exceptionally bright and intelligent but also low-key and very modest."
Singer's economics dissertation -- which he turned into a book called "The Search for Truth" -- was more metaphysical tract than academic treatise. In it, Singer devoted 127 pages to a scientific and spiritual argument for the existence of God, and for the ability of humans to reach a higher consciousness. Only in the last 15 pages did he apply his conclusions to economics. UF's economics department declined to award him a doctorate. But its chairman, the late Irving Goffman, wrote a glowing introduction to "Search," saying it contained truths "so deep that they quickly find their way into everyday life." Published in 1974, the book is now in its 16th printing.
Singer has described each step in his personal evolution as a "surrender" to life. Seen a different way, he seems to have capitalized on every opportunity he encountered. When his meditation group burgeoned, Singer built his cedar temple. When people asked him to build them homes in a similar style, he founded his first company, Built with Love construction. Houses he built near the temple evolved into a small commune, which remains home to a few dozen people, including many professionals and some Medical Manager employees. Residents abstain from alcohol, cook vegetarian meals and meditate. Singer and his second wife, Donna, both live in the community in modest homes. The couple has a daughter, Durga, who graduated from UF last year.
"Surrender" also led Singer to programming. In 1978, he became fascinated with an early TRS model computer in a Radio Shack. Not content to learn to merely operate the machine, he taught himself the Basic computer language and wrote an accounting program for his construction company. Radio Shack was soon directing customers his way, and in 1979, two Florida doctors called him the same week looking for medical software. He spent the next two years writing what would become The Medical Manager.
Singer surrendered to Silicon Valley in 1982, when a software distributor there mentioned he was looking for a medical package. Singer's relationship with the distributor, Systems Plus, culminated in Medical Manager's 1997 IPO. Medical Manager acquired Systems Plus as well as three independent dealers of Medical Manager software. The offices of one dealer, National Medical Systems in Tampa, became Medical Manager's corporate headquarters and national sales office. John Kang, 36, the founder of National Medical, became president of the combined company, with Singer as chairman and CEO.
The elusive CEO
Singer's approach had been to let independent dealers sell Medical Manager. It was Kang's idea to buy them out, a strategy that worked for Singer in two ways: First, it gave his company a national profile and consistency in sales and service. Second, having Kang as the company's front man let Singer keep to the woods. Kang continues to shield Singer's privacy -- reporters' and analysts' calls are routed to the Tampa office. "Mickey would not have done the IPO if he couldn't have stayed in Alachua and stayed out of the limelight," says a longtime Medical Manager executive. "John gave him a way to do that."
The Synetic merger pairs Kang and Singer as co-CEOs with Martin J. Wygod, 59, Synetic's chairman and a healthcare entrepreneur. Wygod built Medco Containment Services into a $2.6-billion business before selling it to Merck & Co. for $6.6 billion in 1993. The merger makes CareInsite a subsidiary of Medical Manager and gives it access to the 120,000 physicians using Medical Manager software as it pursues the goal of putting healthcare transactions online. And it puts Singer to work on a new generation of Internet-based medical software. Someday, Singer believes, insurers will approve procedures and prescriptions over the Internet, while doctors file insurance forms in a keystroke and patients click on their physician's homepage to read material posted just for them.
The merger agreement stipulates that Singer remain at the R&D offices in Alachua, where he works with other programmers amid the gentle trickle of fountains. "We don't even call it work," says Singer. "It should be a beautiful experience to write medical software, a wonderful way to spend the day." Beautiful perhaps, but all the high-touch ambience -- Singer encourages employees not to work weekends -- has its practical side: Medical Manager has gained a reputation as one of the most most employee-friendly programming houses in the U.S.
Medical Manager's ultra-laid-back culture also hasn't fazed Wall Street analysts. "It works for him and it works for the company," says Cydney Kislin, an analyst with HCFP/Brenner Securities in New York City. "He has an incredible amount of focus." The same simplicity that characterizes Singer's lifestyle is even reflected in his product, says Michael Baker with Raymond James in St. Petersburg. While other medical software programs offer more bells and whistles than many doctors need, he says, Medical Manager is known for functionality. "He's building Hondas when others are building Ferraris," Baker says. "Ferraris are nice, but that's not what people are going to buy."
Singer continues to see it all as a higher calling to serve God by serving people -- whether doctors, patients, employees or shareholders. "It's all about doing the best you can at what's put before you," he says, "which also happens to be the way to live a spiritual life."
