B
BBCS
👤 Brian Forbis (Sold, implemented and ran products at BBCS for 16 years, then bought it from his mother in 2020. He knew every client first.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
Blood centers run what the FDA cleared. Switching means re-validating. BBCS has held this niche since 1987.
Will it work? · our read
Boringly durable. About $10M with 40 people and no investors, in a niche a rival cannot enter casually. But the buyer pool is fixed, so BBCS grows only as fast as blood centers do.
01How the money moves
Blood center must run FDA-cleared donor software
→
BBCS installs and validates ForLife or ABO Suite
→
Center pays licence + support; churn is near zero
02The numbers
About $10M/yrStatedannual revenue, 40 staff
2025-07
Reach and dates are first-party or federal; the revenue figure is the host's, not BBCS's. BBCS timeline
Nearly $10M a year, 40 people, no outside equity.
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Practical Founders #154 (Jul 2025) — host's show notes for the Forbis interview: 40 employees, "nearly $10 million in revenue", blood banks supplying 20% of US blood products.BBCS company timeline — incorporated 1981 as Software Brokers; first system 1987; FDA notice 1994; Beth Simon buys 1995; Forbis promoted CEO 2019, buys the company 2020.FDA 510(k) BK220790 — Blood Bank Computer Systems, Inc., Bonney Lake WA; decision "substantially equivalent" 17 Feb 2023.BBCS products and clearances — ForLife and ABO Suite with 510(k) numbers; "FDA designated blood bank software a regulated medical device in 1994".Haemonetics 10-K XBRL — $1,334.0M revenue for FY ended 28 Mar 2026 (rival anchor only).
Revenue is the weakest link here and we mark it accordingly. "Nearly $10 million" is Greg Head's wording in his own show notes for episode #154; the YouTube blurb for the same episode says "$10M ARR". Both are the host's summary of an on-air interview, not a BBCS statement, and the two disagree on revenue vs ARR. BBCS is private and files no accounts, so we lead with the conservative "about $10M", badge it STATED, and set verified:false: we never heard Forbis say a number. The episode captions are token-gated and we could not open them, so we do not assert what is on the audio. Everything structural is first-party or federal: the 1981/1987/1994/1995/2020 dates and the clearance numbers come from BBCS's own timeline, and BK220790 was read directly in the FDA database. Two corrections to the host: the show notes say Forbis's mother "created" the business in the 1980s, but BBCS's timeline says the company was incorporated in 1981 as Software Brokers and that Beth Simon purchased it in 1995; the notes also say he became CEO in 2019 "when he bought the company", while the timeline separates promotion (2019) from purchase (2020). We follow the company. That Beth Simon is his mother is [our read] — the notes say mother, the timeline names the 1995 buyer, and nothing we opened joins them. The 20% reach figure is also the host's, not BBCS's. We dropped a widely-quoted "800+ Epic-enabled facilities" for WellSky: it appears in search snippets but is not on WellSky's live blood pages, so we used WellSky's own "2,000+ hospitals" instead. Rival bars are our read of reach, not revenue. We never score you.