Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask a couple of details about the structure of the business. What is the average deal size of one of these clients? Are we talking in the hundreds of thousands or millions? What average size contracts are these?

Will Fleming: We do deals as small as tens of thousands and certainly do deals that are in the single digit millions. It runs the gamut in between, depending on the size and complexity of the project.

Sramana Mitra: I guess what I’m trying to asses is, is this an enterprise solutions company or is this an SME solution company?

Will Fleming: Enterprise businesses are our target market. We serve over a thousand multi-lingual websites and we have over 300 customers. Nearly all of them are companies you’re familiar with.

Sramana Mitra: What is the nature of the solution? Is there technology that is productised, or is it all services?

Will Fleming: It’s a hybrid of both and it’s in the process of being further productised. That’s what I was leading up to with another pivot that we made in 2010 and 2011. Historically, we had been a technology-enabled service where we built and were using a ton of technology, primarily for the purpose of delivering service in a purely turnkey fashion to our enterprise customers. Now, we’ve reached a point where we’re getting  a lot of customer demand for customer use and third party use of much of the toolsets that we are in the process of productising.

Sramana Mitra: What have you identified as core blocks that can be productised?

Will Fleming: That’s very much a work in progress right now because we’re early in the process of productising. MotionPoint is in the business of the globalisation platform. We’re a global technology solutions company that powers new market growth for world-class brands. Our vision is to be the world’s leading business globalisation platform. We have our core globalisation platform and what we envision productising is many of the, what I refer to, global growth services that will make more sense to you when I describe the second pivot we had.

Sramana Mitra: Up to the point of 2010, where did your revenues scale to? You can give me a range. That will be fine.

Will Fleming: We scaled from less than a million dollars when we were in the virtual brochure business to something north of $20 million by 2010.

Sramana Mitra: That’s the point when the second pivot happened?

Will Fleming: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the second pivot?

Will Fleming: The second pivot took place when we had a client forum. It was actually our second client forum where we brought most of our largest customers together. A year before, they told us they got a lot of value from the client platform. They wanted us to do it again. They wanted us to expand the invitation list. That first year, they mostly told us how great our technology was and how easy it made their lives.

The second year, one of our largest clients stood up and said, “MotionPoint, we’ve been talking to each other over this past year. We’re really glad that you brought us here again. The good news is you did exactly what we asked you to do. You got our website into another language and you did that better, faster, and more cost-effectively than anybody else. The bad news is we didn’t ask you to do the right thing.” This was stunning to us. You could hear a pin drop in the room. I was sitting next to my partner and was starting to sweat. It sounded like our largest customer is about to leave us publicly. We let it continue though.

The person said, “We got so focused on the technical challenges associated with making a website available in another language that we lost sight of the broader business context in which this problem resides.” One of the other customers stood up, “I didn’t have you translate my website into French because I want a French website. I had you translate my website into French because I desperately need to sell stuff in France.” One of them said, “Right. The first one is a technology problem. The second one is how do you sell.”

Sramana Mitra: Totally different ball game.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming
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