Smart50 rank: 1
Revenue: $10,152,865
Growth: 278.35%
Founders:Brian Cook, 43 and Brett Campbell, 38
Based: Victoria
Employees: 33
Industry: Information technology
Website:www.nintex.com
Nintex was started by Brian Cook and Brett Campbell to develop products to take advantage of new developments in Microsoft technologies and strategies. There were four major aims, says Campbell: including addressing real business problems and not just creating tools, always using supported application programming interface and offering extensibility options to professional developers. “We wanted to make IT happy by keeping infrastructure requirements to a bare minimum,” he says.
The company started in 2004, reached $1 million revenue 16 months later and in 08-09 has revenue of $10 million, a growth rate of 278% over three years.
"Growth came almost immediately," says Campbell. “The most challenge part is the constant battle of backing your own goals and sticking to your original values and principles.”
In 2007, the company hit a major snag when Microsoft launched a range of new products that included features of Nintex's existing set of products. "This was a challenge for both ourselves and our existing 400 customers that had purchased our products,” says Campbell. Fortunately they had developed a very tight relationship with Microsoft. “We reached out to the development teams and provided all of our knowledge and in the early stages of the new product being developed we worked together to identify the features that were going to be filled and brainstormed the next set of gaps our business could fill,” he says.
Nintex had access to the new platform 18 months before it was to be released. “We worked on a plan to message and market the new range of Nintex software before the new products were launched by Microsoft and we were able to keep our momentum going and grew by 500 new customers with the release of our new products,” he says.
The downturn did not affect the business as they used partners to scale into the regions where they didn’t have a sales force and so could keep costs low and drive the cost overhead of selling to their partners. “Also our products help companies save money in business productivity outcomes and reducing large IT project costs,” says Campbell.
Campbell says while large global enterprises have put a range of procurement policies in place that has extended the buying cycle of that group of customers, the upper mid-market customers are still buying their products to reduce total cost of ownership of business process automation and reporting. “The downturn did make us change the way we talk about our message so it is more focused on saving money by using our products,” he says. “We also extended free trials for more than 30 days to help business evaluate over a longer period of time.”
More than 89% of revenue comes from export, mainly to US and Europe. “Nintex is on a global program to have over 500 partners in out network," Campbell says. “We have opened offices in London and Seattle in the past 18 months to have local representation in all regions." He says the company is aiming for $25 million in revenues by 2012. One way they will achieve this is to build business solutions with partners to drive global adoption of their products that just “work out of a box” in industry segments such as healthcare, financial services and government solutions.
The online strategy is focused on promotion and giving information and resources to customers. “It has increased run rate with trials to purchase and also reduced our sales cycles to an average of three months. There are three targeted online experiences for our customers and partners. First, the public website has videos, free trials and content to help the procurement processes ranging between SME and large global enterprise accounts. Second, we have a community site that allows our development and IT community to share and input information between our network of customers and partners,” says Campbell. “We have over 2,300 members helping us develop better roadmaps and innovation for our products. Third, there is a secure partner portal with a 24/7 demonstration environment that allows all partners to have access to sales, technical and marketing resources to help sell our products in all regions worldwide.”
Nintex also uses Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. “Our partners can follow a Twitter feed of our technology leaders to help them stay in touch with innovations and products developments releasing in the short- to medium-term. This means our partners know what we are doing at that point in time. That has been great for us to also manage the feedback and be flexible to change if someone in Europe is doing some great stuff that may help our development in Australia.”
The industry is changing in a number of ways. “IT is continually moving up the chain,” Campbell says. “Our business and our partners are now selling to HR, finance and sales executives that need to understand not just cool technology but how this will help their business from a profit, competition and growth point of view. So the sales and marketing people have a new audience to sell and speak to which is changing the way we talk to our customers.”
He says the expectations of customers are now very high. “The industry and markets expect all tools and solutions will become easy to use and managed and costs will be dramatically reduced over time. Gone are the days of large enterprise systems and projects that last for long period of times with large budgets. Business productivity improvements are now being implemented without IT,” he says.
Nintex began planning for the recovery back in December 2008, as they witnessed the conditions in the USA and Europe. “We have seen an increase in the markets globally since the end of March 2009. USA and Europe were the first markets to rebound buying software. We see some strong indicators that 2010 will be a very strong year in all regions.”
And words of advice to other entrepreneurs? “Listen to your customers and partners. Don’t rely on internal data from within.”
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