AtTask prospering after a shaky start

For Scott Johnson, success has been the result of hard work plus a whopping dose of courage and commitment.

AtTask, Johnson's Orem-based maker of portfolio-management and project-management software, was founded in 2001 to capitalize on Johnson's ideas to help companies manage workflow and communication.

Attention from venture capitalists and angel investors was sparse, so Johnson took out a second mortgage on his house to cover several months of payroll. He recalls sitting around a table, dividing up company revenues based on which workers were about to get kicked out of their homes.

AtTask's products began to make a dent in the market, but Johnson's management team wasn't satisfied with them. In late 2003, they made the difficult decision to "mothball" their platform and completely rewrite the software.

Somehow managing to keep most customers happy while they reworked the product, AtTask's team introduced an all-new product in 2006. It soon knew that the risk had been worthwhile: Since mid-2006, AtTask's monthly revenues have grown more than 600 percent.

Now, AtTask has more than 950 customers, including Apple, Amazon and Disney, who use the company's products to solve complex enterprise resource and management problems in a common-sense way.

The company has offices in London, Beijing and Armenia, with additional offices in Tokyo and the United States planned for this year.