In 2000, just as CEOs across the land were beginning to sweat in the rising heat of the corner office, recently unemployed Todd Wille hoped for a new shot at a top job. A CFO by trade, Wille had just gotten a taste of running the show at FRx Software, a Denver company headed by a technologist who was happy to come into the office only a few days a week. Wille stepped into a kind of de facto COO role. “By the last year, I was running sales and marketing — basically everything but development,” he says. When FRx was sold for a tidy profit, Wille left Colorado for California in search of bigger challenges.

The opportunity to serve as CEO would come swiftly — though certainly not as expected — in the form of a rescue mission for his former employer, Unify. The Sacramento company, which provides database and product development software, was reeling from a scandal involving securities fraud, overstated earnings, and insider trading that landed CEO Reza Mikailli in prison. Because Wille had served as the company’s VP of finance and CFO in the mid-1990s, well before the irregularities began, the board thought him a natural for the job. He was familiar with the company, its financial model, and, perhaps most importantly, its people. He would need that credibility to boost a sorely demoralized staff.

That would be the least of his challenges. The books were a mess, the company was losing money quickly, the stock had plummeted from a high of $42 to $1, and fed-up customers were turning away. Still, Wille did not hesitate to take on the job. When Steve Whiteman, then a board member heading up the search (and now the company’s chairman), told Wille he believed he had the right stuff for the job, Wille replied, “Let’s go.”

The new chief was shocked to hear what Unify’s former management had been able to perpetrate in the two years he’d been gone, but even more taken aback by the fallout at the company. “What I found was that it was much worse than even Steve feared,” he recalls. “The revenue that the company was truly generating without all the fancy accounting these guys had been doing was around $3.5 million per quarter, and the company was spending $6.5 million, so we were losing $3 million in cash every quarter.” At that pace, and with little in the bank, the company was set to run out of money in three months’ time.

Before Wille could deal with the company’s balance sheet issues, he had to do something about the team of forensic accountants who had taken up residence at one end of Unify’s office space, poking around and disturbing employees. “My first challenge was to get them all to leave.” He managed to convince the auditors that they’d gathered enough evidence for their purposes and that investigating further would be at the expense of the company’s survival. They packed up and left — a confidence-boosting victory for the new CEO.

Wille was then able to look at the accounting debris. “Since there was no controller and the accounting manager was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, guess who got to fix the books?” From August to December, Wille followed a punishing schedule. “From about 7 a.m. to about 2 p.m., I tried to figure out what to do with the business, how to keep customers from panicking and leaving, how to reduce costs and take payroll down,” he recalls. In the afternoon, he pored over the 85-page report the auditors had prepared and tried to make sense of the dubious transactions they’d uncovered. “Then in the evening I’d start to prepare the actual journal entries and do that till about 2 a.m. I’d come home, crash for a few hours, and go back and do it over again the next day.”

Perhaps the bleakest moment came in November, when the board suggested that Wille inquire about filing for bankruptcy protection to get a bit more breathing room. He spoke with a bankruptcy attorney to get a sense of the process. “The attorney says, ‘First thing you need to do is write me a check for $400,000 as a retainer for legal fees.’ I remember thinking, ‘I have $700,000 in the bank right now, and a $300,000 payroll coming up in a few days.’ If I’d written him a check for $400,000, I would have gone out of business. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m too poor to go bankrupt.’ That was a dark day. I think I went home early that day and had a couple of drinks.”

Fortunately, there were small victories during the gloomy period. At the same time that he was sorting through company finances, Wille was talking down irate customers. At one particularly memorable meeting of 60 clients in London, Wille found himself in a showdown with his biggest U.K. customer. “That was what I call the ‘Don’t Blink Day,’ ” says Wille. The CEO of a large accounting firm explained that he did not want to sign his $100,000 contract for the following year since he didn’t know if the company would still be in business. “I just looked at him and said, ‘You know what? If you do that, I will be out of business. Because if other people do what you want to do, there won’t be cash coming in and you’ll get your wish.’ He was silent and I was silent. It seemed like 100 years, and it was probably 45 seconds,” Wille quips. “Finally, he said, ‘You know what, Todd? That makes a lot of sense. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.’ ”

With his and other contracts signed and paid for up-front, the company had a bit more cash to get them through the rocky transition. At the same time, Wille had to work even harder to motivate the troops after a brutal layoff that reduced staff by nearly a third. Wille, who had worked with many of the employees in his last stint at the company, knew that brutal honesty was the only way to shore up employee support. “I held a weekly meeting where I told them everything,” says Wille. “I told them we were almost out of money. I told them I didn’t know if we’d be all right or not. I pulled them together and said, ‘Thirty-five of you are not coming back tomorrow.’ And I said I was sorry.” The candid heart-to-hearts paid off, along with the goodwill he had earned as CFO. Over the next year and a half, only one employee left the company voluntarily.

Two days before Christmas 2000, the company restated its earnings and Wille was able to begin putting the scandal behind him and to begin putting the company’s future on the front burner. The next several years proved a learning experience as Wille searched for a sustainable model for growth.

The company has recently turned a corner, and the future is looking bright. With the 2006 acquisition of Gupta Technologies, Wille effectively doubled Unify’s size, gained new customers, and positioned the company for growth. Boasting its highest revenue in seven years, Unify recently announced its first operating profit — $692,000 — in five quarters. Wille had set a target of 50 new customers in fiscal year 2008, but the number is now closer to 200. And its stock is finally trading above $5 — where it needs to be to relist on NASDAQ. Wille has just petitioned for relisting on the exchange and, if it happens, that may be the sweetest victory. “That will be the last chapter to get back to where it was when I left in ’98.”

Still, having come full circle, Wille has no plans to rush off to save another ailing company. “I’m having way too much fun now,” he says. “We’re going to have to hang out for a while.”