Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that next inflection point. What happened? What do you think drove that? What were the strategic moves that you made to get that next level inflection?

Jeff Mullarkey: It really started with us analyzing the value that clients actually got out of working with us. We were working, typically, with leading-edge technologies that customers were trying to bring on. We also had to do fairly large assessments, which were often bigger than the scopes for implementing the technology. We got very good at understanding organizations that were having challenges with executing IT strategy in general. We could see that sometimes it was due to design and sometimes because they were managing it incorrectly. We started talking to clients about IT maturity model.

At the same time, our management business grew quite a bit. We had clients who were bringing bigger clients for us to manage larger and larger infrastructures. What ended happening was we managed one of the largest Citrix forums in the country because the client just gave up on doing it on their own. That client eventually said, “Why don’t you just manage this for us?” They ended up asking us to build it in a data center and manage it remotely. In 2006, we got into essentially the beginnings of where our cloud is today. We built this instance and owned it, and we managed it on behalf of the clients.

The big change was we went from a VAR at that time to a real managed service and cloud provider, although cloud didn’t exist back then. That word hadn’t been invented yet. We built this thing and several years later, the cloud came out. I said, “I guess I have to call it cloud now.” We ended up building infrastructure in our data center that we owned, hosted, and managed. In this process of us understanding what’s going wrong with these clients, we thought it was a technology issue. We learned later on that there was more to it. It’s a people issue and a process issue. We incorporated all those into what we built internally. When clients started working with it, it delivered value, and it was low cost and reliable. That launched exponential growth. These are not small clients but huge ones. That’s when our business started growing exponentially because we were part of their strategy.

Sramana Mitra: You said you’re now at about $40 million a year revenue level?

Jeff Mullarkey: I think we’ll end up at about $45 million this year.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still completely self-funded? There’s no financing in here?

Jeff Mullarkey: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve grown faster than 30% to 40% that you were growing at earlier now?

Jeff Mullarkey: We have, over the last four to five years.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey
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