First came the waiting. James Richmond and four colleagues had been sitting around for nearly two hours in a lawyer's office in Plano, Texas, hoping that the last, crucial step in the sale of their company, eServ, to Perot Systems would go through.

Then came elation: an e-mail confirming a wire transfer into eServ's account of $21 million, to be divvied among CEO Richmond, 39, and his fellow founders. They raced to the airport and boarded a Citation 500 jet chartered especially for the occasion.

Flying home to Peoria, Ill., Richmond and his team drank toasts and traded war stories, recalling all the months they had worked without pay while launching their engineering-outsourcing firm and how, more recently, they had worked around the clock to close the deal. Now the entrepreneurs could relax.

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