Owned by agriculture, not sold to it.
MASA is owned by the people who use it: mostly producers, along with an accounting firm that serves producers and the founder who started the company in the early 1980s. It carries forward work that began then as FBS Systems.
Why ownership changes the software.
The roadmap comes from operations
Priorities are set by people who live with the result of getting them wrong, not by a growth plan written for an investor.
Not venture-backed
There is no outside fund setting the timetable. MASA answers to its owners, and they are producers who run their own operations on this software.
Your data stays yours
A company owned by producers has no business model that depends on holding your operational data hostage, and no reason to sell it.
More than forty years with the same goal.
Norman and Cheryl Brown started FBS Systems in Aledo, Illinois. Producers were keeping their books in ledger books, and Norm taught himself to program so they would not have to. It ran on the kind of machine you bought at the local Radio Shack.
Many of the farm software companies from those years are gone. This one kept going, and what is in the system today is more than four decades of accumulated detail about how agricultural businesses keep books.
When Norm started thinking about retiring, the operations running on this software did not want to find out who would end up owning it. They bought it themselves. MASA was formed to carry the thing forward rather than let it be sold out from under the people who depend on it.
Since then the platform has been modernized, CropZilla machinery analytics came in by acquisition, and Connect, Intelligence and Labs were built on top of the ledger.
The name changed when the ownership did. The work did not.
Operational truth.
Our purpose is plain: help producers fully understand, control and improve the economics of their operations. Everything in the platform is judged against that.
This is the system a serious operation builds its financial life on. Keeping it worth that takes constant work, and that is what we spend our time on.
Who you would be working with.
We work remotely, from wherever each of us is. Most have been doing this a very long time.
The board.
Seven of the ten seats belong to operations that run their own books in this software. They decide what the company does with its money and its engineering time.
Ownership and being a customer are separate things. Most operations on this software are customers, not owners, and buying MASA does not give you a stake in MASA LLC.