Leadership

Arthur Lacerte - Chairman / CEO
Art Lacerte is the founder of The Advantage Software Company. He started Advantage Software over 30 years ago and has been fully dedicated to serving its clients ever since. With his guidance and leadership, we’ve grown to be the premier advertising agency software provider in our industry. Among his other responsibilities, Art is committed to ensuring the continued success of our very unique Annual Users Group conference which has been operating continuously for over 25 years. This past April, we completed another successful meeting with over 300 participants from more than 125 agencies. This partnership with our clients has been a major contributor to our mutual success.

Ellen Coulter - President
Ellen Coulter grew up in Advertising as her father owned an Ad Agency in Orange County California and forced her to work summers in the office. She went on to work for his company full-time and after finding her joy in computers, moved to Advantage as a Software Support Representative over 20 years ago. Since then she’s served in many different roles at Advantage Software and has used her combined knowledge of the advertising industry and advertising agency software development to build a product and a company that continues to grow; and a team that is totally dedicated to its customers with training, implementation and total support.

• Advantage Software Company - 22 years - Various positions: Customer Service, Training and Implementation, Sales, Programming, Operations
• Galusha & Associates Advertising and Public Relations - 4 years - Accounting Manager and System Implementation Specialist

John Mendrin - Vice President / Hardware Division
John Mendrin founded The Advantage Software Company along with Art Lacerte back in 1977. In the beginning, he was a fiery tech guy who “burned the midnight oil” fixing failing computer systems and networks. His hard work was very beneficial during the development years of Advantage Software. After prolonged training, we finally settled him down and he now assists Advantage clients and prospects with their Hardware and associated Microsoft Software needs. John now speaks “computers” without the heavy tech accent. He has initiated and has direct involvement with the “Advantage Plug & Play Server” concept offerings to our clients.

Mike Byrnes - Vice President Finance

Mike has been around the block. He has a tremendous amount of experience as a CFO in various large agencies in Chicago and Los Angeles. We talked him in to becoming our CFO about 10 years ago and he’s helped us grow into a consistently profitable company with a very bright future. You can be sure you’re investing your time and money in an agency management product and company that is here to stay.

• The Advantage Software Company - 10 years - CFO
• Worked in several large agencies in Chicago and Los Angeles for more than 30 years prior to joining The Advantage Software Company

Tina Hussion - Director of Operations
Tina got her start in Advertising as a Controller over 25 years ago. She went on to become a consultant to advertising agencies and helped them to select and implement agency management programs. After all that experience, she chose to dedicate herself to Advantage and our clients. She manages a team of 6 who help our clients implement the Advantage system. We strongly believe that a good implementation ensures success!

• Advantage Software Company - 10 years -Training and Implementation, Director of Field Operations
• The Bottom Line Consulting - 18 years - (Advertising Agency Consulting), System Implementation, Controller. Consulted with Control G accounting system and other agency software clients
• Barnhart & Company - 5 years - Controller

Ben Lanza - Development Leader
Ben has a long history of developing software for advertising agencies. He joined the Advantage team over 8 years ago and serves as our Development Leader. Ben and the entire development team works very hard to ensure we deliver software that meets the needs of our clients; software that is sound and efficient and is delivered on time.

• Advantage Software Company - 8 years - Development Leader / Developer
• Ad Systems (AMPS) - 3 years - Lead Developer

Scott Byrnes - Chief Technical Officer
Scott began working for Advantage as a consultant at an early age. Being Mike Byrnes’ son, he was used to solve technical issues when Mike was still a client. Scott’s talents are clearly in computers and working with people. He has natural talent and focused his education on network administration and programming among other technical specialties. For the past 14 years, Scott has been our full-time technical “guru” and serves as or Chief Technical Officer. He paves the way for us (and our clients) to use Advantage with all the latest technical innovations; he’s established our ASP model; and he’s helped our technical department be the most highly rated in our industry.

• Advantage Software Company - 14 years - CTO / Technical
• BGM Advertising - 5 years - Network Administration and Application Support