“I need to invent my own software and I'm going to sell that, and work at that instead,” you know? So how did you start dabbling and building your own software and how, and why did you get into doing that? Mark Graham I think like all interesting businesses that are launched, Marshall, I think it's born out of extreme frustration. So my story was that Right Sleeve was started in 2000, the business was growing nicely. I was pretty good as a salesperson, I had maybe three people within a couple of years of the business, about four people I think. It's someone in sales, someone handling production, and someone that was handling the books, but I was primarily driving the sales. And what I was finding is that I was constantly bumping up against the ceiling because of a lack of process and operational deficiencies. And I know when I say operational deficiencies, I get a guy like you, Marshall, you're very excited because you're a genius when it comes to operations. Marshall Atkinson You’re singing my song, Mark. Mark Graham Yeah. And, so as a sales and marketing guy in my business, I was bumping up at about, you know, $750,000 - $900,000 in sales... where my way of doing purchase orders, andmanaging my team, and managing my suppliers and my customers I was able to do it with -- to be a quite honest, embarrassingly archaic way of running the business. Like, handwritten purchase orders, entering PO’s and sales orders and invoices and multiple different systems. And I say that the moment that was really like this a-ha moment was when the pile of paperwork, purchase orders, invoices, all that stuff literally fell off my assistant's desk. And it just was unbelievable. And it was just so frustrating because the business was doing so well, but we were hampered by operational deficiencies. So I went out into the market as an entrepreneur. I said, alright, now we've got to take the business to the next level. And I went out into the market and then looked at industry software as well as non-industry software. And I couldn't find anything that was up to my standard -- what it was that I was looking for. So it was critical at that time, so this is around 2004-ish. It was critical that the software was in the cloud. I know the cloud is ubiquitous now, but at the time it was not ubiquitous. Because I wanted to be able to run my business from wherever. I had to have something that was eCommerce enabled because we were dabbling in that space and also wanted to have something where the entire workflow was in one system. So that if I created a presentation, all the products and pricing, and margin and all that stuff would flow right through to the sales order, the purchase order, the invoice, and all that without having to duplicate effort because duplicating effort was causing mistakes and was hampering growth. So some people listening to this podcast might be thinking, “yes, that describes me!”
205
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs