Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For how long did the legal business run?

Jeff Mullarkey: We still work with legal today. We were predominant in legal from, I would say, mid-1998 to 2000. We expanded from there. When we started to shift our focus to security, we became non-vertical specific. We worked with everybody at that point.

Sramana Mitra: You still work with the legal vertical but the core offering became security. That was which year again?

Jeff Mullarkey: We were doing security all along, but in 2000, we made that shift. As a technology, it was being underserved in every vertical out there.

Sramana Mitra: In 2000, did your revenue cross a million already?

Jeff Mullarkey: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When you chose to go the security route, what did you decide to do? Were you selling your own product? Or were you selling other people’s products? Were you leveraging some of your reseller background? Where did you decide to focus?

Jeff Mullarkey: That’s a good question. We did not sell our own technology. We reached out to all the leading security vendors that were manufacturing security technology and got signed up as an integrator for them. We were reselling, implementing, and supporting the leading security infrastructures like CheckPoint.

Sramana Mitra: At that point, you turned it into a value-added reseller business.

Jeff Mullarkey: I would say yes. We were still a service provider, but I would say that’s right.

Sramana Mitra: How did that business develop over the next few years?

Jeff Mullarkey: Over the next few years, we would do a specific thing for a client. Our philosophy was it wasn’t focused on sales but on the quality of our services. We tried to establish ourselves as the number one integrator service provider of that technology in the area. If we were the best, then we would get all the leads on the new clients. It worked. We focused on delivering world-class service. Whatever we did, we had a bar of excellence that we wanted to hit that was above the competition. We constantly went back to those manufacturers saying, “Are we the best?” We didn’t stop improving but our goal was to become the best. We did.

Those manufacturers came back and started bringing us in to all of their dysfunctional clients or unhappy customers. Product came as an extension of that. Our account base grew because we were the best at providing services, and we got the product as a matter of fact. We added all other complementary things. We ended up expanding our offering.

Sramana Mitra: How did the revenues ramp from 2000 onwards?

Jeff Mullarkey: We grew about 30% to 40% a year from that point. We grew pretty consistently until a few years ago when our growth jumped quite a bit. We grew consistently over the next five to six years until 2008. Our revenues jumped to $40 million over the next three or four years.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey
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