Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2006, you had this product out. Relatively soon, you have three paying customers. What happens next? What was the next major strategic move?

Joe LeCompte: The primary move was the IT focus. ITIL was really hot in 2008 to 2010. IT was looking for a way to better interact with their end customers. That was fuelling some of the growth. Now, I think people understand that you need to have a single pane of glass for anybody in the company to request something from anyone else in the company. What was once an IT service catalogue has now become an enterprise service platform that can easily serve the needs of the legal department as well as the HR department.

Sramana Mitra: At what point in the evolution did that transition happen?

Robert Castles: We were always doing what we do today in the sense that we were focused on work flow and business process automation and how our users could know what their problem was and model it into the software to meet their needs. We believe that is the strongest driver behind why we twice won the top rank in the industry analysis of our space. We’re leveraging it now and our customers are taking us there.

This next big phase of where we’re going next is actually happening right now for us, which is capitalizing on sharing the message and expanding the capabilities in business process automation and work flow.

Sramana Mitra: Between 2006 and 2015, we’re talking about a seven-year window. How did your revenue ramp? What has been your financing strategy? Is it organically financed?

Joe LeCompte: As a privately-held company, we don’t share specific revenue numbers but once we made the switch to our own product, we got up to about the $3 million level before the financial crisis hit us. Based on what we had learned through the dot-com bust, we were very careful in our growth. It was smart growth and not growth for the sake of growth. We were able to weather that crisis fine. We actually grew. We grew in revenue but not at the rate we wished it would be growing, but I’ve never met anyone who has revenue growing at the rate they wish it would be growing. 2014 was our best revenue year ever and we’re 50% ahead already in 2015 than we were in 2014. It has continued to expand well beyond where we were six years ago.

Sramana Mitra: Can you give us a growth rate benchmark?

Joe LeCompte: It’s been 20% to 50% a year ever since 2010.

Sramana Mitra: During the financial crisis, you flattened and then grew a little bit.

Joe LeCompte: Yes.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles
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