Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did things progress from there? What’s the next major milestone after this?

Joe LeCompte: We turned from website development into custom development jobs—not so much of web applications, but more of dealing with local companies and helping them solve business problems. We worked with Delta Airlines and Kimberly-Clarke.

Robert Castles: We found that the bigger the problems were, the better we were at delivering. We realized that was our opportunity to grow the company, differentiate ourselves, and have sustainability in a future market.

Sramana Mitra: But you were still working in this services mode?

Robert Castles: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: At what point in your journey did you begin to shift to a product company.

Robert Castles: We definitely learned from the downturn that we needed to look for ways to make our company more sustainable and resilient, should that situation every happen again. The optimum goal was ultimately to have our own product that we could distinctly offer. We started taking advantage of a lot of the things that we were good at. We realized early on that when we build software solutions for our client, we would leave them with something that they could manage. We weren’t focused on building apps that only we could then provide future services for. That lent itself to a couple of products that we actually built and sold. We had a portal technology and a policy management platform. We were taking the best of what we could find in ourselves around our B2C experience to ultimately build the product where we pivoted the greatest in our corporate lifetime, which was in late 2006.

Sramana Mitra: What is that product? You said 2008 was when you zeroed in on that product?

Robert Castles: 2006.

Sramana Mitra: Can you describe a little bit what that product is. What was the process on specifically deciding on that being your company bet?

Joe LeCompte: We started by thinking about what we believed. We believed in a couple of things. One, it shouldn’t be hard to get what you need to do your job. From that, we also believed that we have a certain amount of energy you can expend during a given day. You can call that units of energy. Successful companies project that energy in providing service and value to their customers and not fighting each other’s internal processes. Finally, we think that any process, no matter how big or small, is something that can benefit from automation. Based on those beliefs, we developed what now is known is PMG Enterprise Service Platform. It’s a business process automation platform that we sell to large enterprises to help them manage their internal request processing.

A great example is on-boarding a new employee. When you talk about employee on-boarding, it might mean different things to different people. For HR, it might mean getting them in the payroll system. For IT, it might mean provisioning them a desktop and a network account and perhaps access to specific systems. Those systems might be financial, so you need to sign off from the Accounting department. You start going down the list. There could be a hundred things that you need. That information doesn’t really rely on any one person. It typically involves interacting with six or seven different systems.

Where we come into play is, we have a very simple user interface that asks the bare minimum of questions. What’s the person’s name? What’s their role? When’s their start day? From there, our underlying work flow engine manages the fulfillment process. We manage by sending information to IT saying, “We need a laptop with these software products installed.” We send a note to facilities saying, “Cube C104 is going to be occupied on this data with this person. Please make sure that there’s a phone, desk, and a chair.” All those kinds of things are automated. Where we can do things in parallel, we will so that on day one, that person comes to work and will have everything that they need to do their job.

There are two benefits from that. From a company’s perspective, you’re not paying someone to sit there and not work because they can’t do their job. An even more important side of it is the person’s perspective. They have now validated that they have made a good decision by taking this job because this is the type of company that they want to work for. It’s a company that cares enough about them to prepare day one for them to start providing value.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles
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