While Frank Russell was scraping together bank loans, some capital from his first start-up company and financial help from an angel investor to start GeoLearning Inc. in 1997, his West Coast competitors were being handed $50 million to $100 million in venture capital to start their training and education software companies.

Those companies went gangbusters, spending millions of dollars to battle through customers’ firewalls in order to install their learning software systems internally. Lacking such major venture capital support, but with a vision of the future, GeoLearning implemented a far different delivery model that put its learning platforms online and eventually pushed the company forward just when many of its competitors were going belly-up.

“As long as you can get to the Internet and you can access all of this capability for training and education, why do you want to have to go through the great hassle and great expense and great risk of trying to put it on your own internal systems?” Russell asked.

GeoLearning’s application service provider model, now known as the software as a service model (SAAS), was not only cost effective but a way to set the company apart from its competitors. The GeoLearning staff “became evangelists for that model,” he said, which has since proved to be on the cutting edge of technology. Last month, Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates called SAAS the next big revolution in software.

“We stuck to our guns and kept talking about that model,” said Russell, who founded GeoLearning with his wife, Linda. “Even if somebody paid us $1 million, we wouldn’t do it behind a firewall. We knew in the beginning that it was a small pond. But if we go in and capture the mindshare in the small pond and the pond grows, then we grow with that. And if we’ve already captured the mindshare there, it will be very hard for competition to come in.”

That level of innovation and forward thinking, which has resulted in great success for West Des Moines-based GeoLearning, has made Russell the Des Moines Business Record’s Entrepreneur of the Year.

That award is just the latest addition to a growing list of accolades for Russell and his company. In 2005, he was named Iowa’s Small Business Leader of the year by the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Des Moines district office, as well as the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Central Midwest region. GeoLearning jumped to No. 222 on Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in the United States, up from 367 in 2004.

The company is forced to continually evolve with changing technology, but remains focused on its core product: Internet-hosted learning platforms. Companies such as Dell Inc. and Nike Inc. use its GeoMaestro and GeoExpress Learning Management System Suites to improve productivity, accelerate business practices and drive performance. The company is currently working on its next major platform, GeoNext, which it plans to launch this year.

Russell, who set out to become a college professor before entering the training industry, admits that had he been handed tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, he might not be in the same position.“I probably would have squandered the money and wasted it like (my competitors) did,” he said.

Many business and community leaders in Iowa have criticized the state’s ability to attract venture capital for start-up companies such as GeoLearning. Russell believes greater access to venture capital within the state would produce more entrepreneurs, but being a start-up company in Iowa definitely has its advantages, he added.

“Having what I call ‘patient money’ is a very good thing,” he said. “And that’s one of the things we did have access to – people who weren’t looking over your shoulder saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t make this thing go in two years, we’re shutting you down and that’s it,’ giving it time to really grow and giving you time to sometimes make a few mistakes without killing you.”

There’s a strong entrepreneurial spirit in Iowa that Russell said has its roots in family-owned farms, where people are forced to take risks every day. Access to a highly educated and highly motivated workforce is priceless, he believes, as is the state’s quality of life.

But it’s required a lot of his sweat, too. To move a company like GeoLearning forward and to be successful, “you probably have to be a workaholic,” he said. And there really isn’t a separation of family life and work life. “If you’re an entrepreneur, it’s the same thing.” Each of the Russells’ five children has worked at GeoLearning at some time, though he said none of them would consider making it a career.

Russell and other company leaders will continue to weigh the future of GeoLearning as it struggles to keep pace with a changing industry. For a private, entrepreneurial company, the possibility exists to either merge with a public company or go public itself.

“But we do know that to get to either one of those places, we have to continue to grow, we have to continue to be competitive globally,” he said. “So we have to be very aggressive in terms of investing in new technology, investing in our people and investing heavily in marketing and sales to make these things happen.”