Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of revenue level did you get to?

Victor Allis: Ultimately in 2014, we had $100 million.

Sramana Mitra: What are the inflection points? You remember the milestones really well.

Victor Allis: The first one was in December 2000. The Dutch Railways was looking for a solution. It wasn’t part of my scope. My scope was manufacturing and trucking companies. We had never thought about Railways.

One of our partners that Aryan had found said they have a problem that is very complex. I was in the demo meeting and they had given us a case and it turned out we had solved it perfectly. We had even found a mistake and we later heard that they put it in on purpose. We won a deal with the Dutch Railways.

That’s when I realized that we can sell this to any company in the world. That’s when our scope broadened to solving the world’s planning processes. Another one was in 2006. We had about a hundred people. DHL Worldwide was trying to get a solution for scheduling all their package deliveries worldwide.

That was a different size of company that we ever dealt with. They sent a quality audit team that was going to see if our organization was professional enough. We realized that we probably weren’t.

We took a decision to be very clear about our identity. We are a hundred-person company. We are trying our best and there are certain standards that we probably won’t pass. We’re not going to hide it. You can point out where we need to improve and we’ll see it as a chance to improve. They were brutal in the quality audit and they selected us. We became the supplier of DHL Worldwide and then we were rolled out to hundred-plus countries.

Sramana Mitra: How big was that deal?

Victor Allis: Millions of dollars. It was big for us. That was one of those moments where we realized that we can go to the world’s industry leaders. In 2011, we signed with Walmart. In 2012, we signed up Chevron in Australia. It went on and on.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these leads?

Victor Allis: It was a combination of all the standard marketing tactics and partners that work in the industry. It’s all sorts of ways.

Sramana Mitra: When did you start working with system integration partners?

Victor Allis: We’d already started working with smaller partners in 2000. It was one of Aryan’s strategies. One of the ways to get credibility is to get other people to say you’re good. We moved up in that ecosystem to Accenture and IBM. But we started with 20 people who worked in the railways industry.

Sramana Mitra: In the kind of business you’re describing, system integrator partnerships are really important.

Victor Allis: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: No financing?

Victor Allis: Yes, until 2011. Now we’re 13 years old. We got $13 million in revenue I think. Finally, we took some money off the table. People were very happy to give us the money if we wanted it. We were profitable in every single year but never really highly profitable. If we would make $5 million, we would have invested four of those to keep fueling the growth.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from The Netherlands to a $300M+ Exit: Quintiq and ActiVote Founder Victor Allis
1 2 3 4 5 6