The co-founders of the Cary company, Kent Hudson and Lee Prevost, say that's been the key to the company's continued growth even as its customers - school districts and colleges - are struggling with severe budget cuts.

Boosting productivity is more important then ever, they say, at a time when school employees are trying to do more with less.

Prevost, SchoolDude's president, calls the 12-year-old company's suite of applications "the Microsoft Office of the operations department."

And although SchoolDude doesn't enjoy Microsoft-like dominance, it's a force in the educational market. Its 5,000 customers educate about one-third of the nation's students. About 70 North Carolina school districts use the company's products.

SchoolDude offers 15 different software applications over the Internet - a business model called software-as-a-service - that help school districts manage their facilities and information technology operations. That includes functions such as streamlining and processing maintenance requests, tracking utility costs and managing inventories.

"It's very user-friendly," said Jamie Stottlemyer, director of facilities and transpiration at Warren Woods Public Schools in Warren, Mich. "We rolled it in with very little training and people just picked up on it. It's very intuitive."

The district superintendent recently called Stottlemyer wanting to know how much it costs each year to transport athletes. Thanks to the data tracked by SchoolDude, Stottlemyer had the answer - $28,000 - in about 90 seconds and also was able to produce a 48-page report listing all the trips.

"It really makes our department look good," Stottlemyer said.

Stottlemyer said in recent years his department has eliminated two supervisors and a secretary without missing a beat because of the efficiencies enabled by SchoolDude.

"We've had comments our department is operating more efficiently than ever," he said.

Chuck Linderman, director of business affairs at Great Valley School District in suburban Philadelphia, said that people who want to rent a school gymnasium or auditorium for an event can now do it themselves online with SchoolDude's facility scheduling software.

"It saves us a lot of time," he said.

The average customer pays $3,500 to $4,000 a year for three or four applications. But the range extends all the way from $500 - "We have a client in Alaska with 20 students," said CEO Hudson - to $100,000.

Growth in recent years has come both from adding new customers and persuading existing customers to use more applications.

The privately held company's revenue last year totaled $21.3 million, up 13 percent. That double-digit growth pales compared to the 31 percent jump the business enjoyed in 2009.

The company's goal for this year is to hit the $25 million mark, which would be a 17 percent jump. But Hudson added that target may be "a little bit of a stretch."

Hudson said SchoolDude, which has never raised outside funding, enjoys positive cash flow but has been consistently operating on a break-even basis overall in recent years as it plows its cash into expansion efforts.

That includes a steady stream of hiring and adding new space at its headquarters in Cary's Regency Park.

Since the end of 2009 the company has added 48 workers locally, giving it a total of 142 in Cary and 175 company-wide. SchoolDude also plans to hire 15 more workers by the end of the year.

The hiring has produced overcrowding, which led to leasing 11,550 square feet of additional space, on top of the 35,000 square feet it already occupied. The company expects to move into the new space in November.

In the meantime, "we kicked our VP of sales out and put three people in his office," Hudson said. "That will teach you to have a big office."

SchoolDude also has ventured beyond the education market. Four years ago it launched FacilityDude, which features applications similar to its flagship software but geared to local governments and health care institutions.

Hudson said FacilityDude got off to a slow start because the company teamed up with the wrong marketing partner. As a result, last year FacilityDude accounted for just 5 percent of the company's total revenue.

But this year the company signed up a new marketing partner, Johnson Controls, a Fortune 500 company that makes, installs and services heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems.

The new partnership has kicked off a sales spurt. Today FacilityDude has 570 customers, up from 300 at the beginning of the year.

"Our hope is that it will be a very meaningful, substantial part of the business - and that is the track it is on," Prevost said.