Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles (Part 6)

Joe LeCompte: We have always been self-funded. It’s been a strategic decision because we feel that we didn’t need any funding. Also, we feel that if we did potentially accelerate growth, it would take our eye off the ball. It would take our focus from providing value to our customers to a different cycle.

We were now looking at our next financing move. Do we need to take on growth for growth’s sake so they can maximize their revenue? It has always been funded by customers and ensuring that is our focus. Robert can probably speak to you a little bit on how our customers drive our product roadmap.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re building the company organically.

Joe LeCompte: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: You would like to continue to build organically?

Joe LeCompte: It would have to be a compelling reason for us to raise funding.

Sramana Mitra: Do you intend to acquire companies?

Joe LeCompte: It’s an option.

Sramana Mitra: You haven’t acquired any yet?

Joe LeCompte: We have not acquired anyone but if we see a strategic fit, then it would be something that we would look at.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your product roadmap. Where do you see your product in five years?

Joe LeCompte: I think five years is too long. We look at two to three years cycles.

Robert Castles: Much of what our product is today is heavily based on where we started—the idea that people who have a business problem can solve that problem with our software without needing an army of developers.

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you consider your top competitors?

Robert Castles: Our biggest competition is from within and staying the course. We are meeting with only one group and they feel some pain, but they haven’t done the math to realize how real their pain is. They think it’s something they can put a bandage on and keep doing it. We’re seeing less and less of the we-can-build-it-ourselves mentality. That is a bit of why we’ve seen a recent uptick of growth. The companies are realizing that there are products that can meet their needs better than something they can build themselves.

Sramana Mitra: In deals, whom are you seeing the most? Who are the competitors that you see most often?

Joe LeCompte: We typically see the big four—HP, TA, BMC, and IBM. They all have their IT service management suite and they all have front-end to those particular suites that interact directly with their product. Where that model tends to fall down is you may have a company that uses BMC to manage infrastructure and HP to manage point of sales. From a business perspective, you might request something or need something that’s going to touch both. Neither one of those companies integrate well with the other.

We, on the other hand, are completely agnostic to that. We can come in and be agnostic and say, “What you require is that we need to make an incident in BMC and update a user permission in point of sales.” We can orchestrate that entire process and automate end-to-end to where a person makes a request, sees the status, and has the integration automatically completed.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services From Atlanta: PMG Founders Joe LeCompte and Robert Castles
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