Finally moving forward with a new business

For YEARS a former co worker and I have kicked the can around about starting a consulting company around business intelligence solutions and data warehousing to just name a few along with IoT AWS integration and data capture.

Well after several years we found a professional sales executive in my local market who is willing to not only sell for us but agreeing to become a managing partner. He has owned businesses that ranged 10 - 20 mil after sales. He is very successful and it was a blessing to finally be able to partner with someone who is polished.

Our team is locked in, software engineer, solutions architect, technical pm and sales / client engagement. I'm filling the SA role currrently, basically partnering with the the sales rep to assist with technical analysis and requirement / solution understanding. (Making sure we can deliver on the ask).

our TA is from India along with our lead software engineer, who also has another company with ~11 devs under him. These resources are be leveraged as need, of course they will $.

I'm being humble and would look for any advice possible. Obviously nothing is in stone, but it's moving at a nice clip and all seem to be on board. I also have some contingency resources out there if needed who are willing to project to project.

Our motto at this point is slow and steady. We are all patient and relaxed, no panic no worry. Really liking the way the team has come together so far.

I'm not nervous, I have been mediating a lot and keeping calm. I want this to work.

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Comments

DatabaseHead

Had the kick off meeting between all members surprisingly smooth. Time line was a little off, 7:30 - 8 am in India, 10 PM on the east coast but the cadence wasn't bad and the timing was quite nice, gives me something to look forward too.

Communication seems organic at this point which is nice. Of course there will be challenges. We believe it's in our best interest to incorporate now, most companies aren't going to hire some fly by night shop, so if we fully incorporate in Delaware and get our insurance set up we should be good to go. Not to mention our personal assets will be protected.

We are partnering with a think tank in India who are very talented people but 0 marketing and sales skills (this is on their account), we on the other hand especially my local partner is a sales person by trade. I'm going to support him going over the product offering demo's and other sales support functions.

We all agreed to accept out first project in the eCommerce space mainly because our engineering team has several projects completed and to create a demo environment is very little overhead or time.

What's interesting is the engineering firm (soon to be part of our company) have multiple products created, at least functioning prototypes and of course delivered solutions. They just need direction and customers, which will be more than glad to provide.

Being rather new to AWS services I am reviewing some technical AWS diagrams inclusive of all their services. My approach is for the engineering lead to provide me with some documentation and which services to get ramped up on first. I have my work cut out for me not having a ton of experience in the cloud space, but challenges are fun.

Have a few meetings set for this evening and one with the sales rep over the weekend, playing 18.

LonerVamp

Good luck! It's all about sales and revenues. You could build amazing products and have a great team, but if there's no $$, it doesn't matter.

DatabaseHead

LonerVamp said:

Good luck! It's all about sales and revenues. You could build amazing products and have a great team, but if there's no $$, it doesn't matter.

The sales component is taken care of. My partner is extremely well connected in the southeast region of US. It's been the number 1 reason why I haven't gone any farther with this initiative. I've known the other two gents for ~2 years now, in fact I had some personal development work done, which turned out outstanding.

Nevertheless, thanks for following up and the well wishes.

Neil86

Sounds exciting. Good luck with everything!

DatabaseHead

Just a heads up. First client lined up next Friday at 10 am. Big marketing and IT budget, really excited if our sales rep can come through.

Incorporated and insurance knocked out as well. Lame company name, voting on client facing company name this evening. Pricing model in place of course subject to change as lessons are learned and our managing partnership % stake agreed upon. We are leaning to quarterly disbursement to lighten the taxing load.

More to come.

DatabaseHead

Meeting concluded, all agreed upon managing shares and financial strategy as we begin to make sales and revenues. Taxes, Expenses, Retained Earnings.

Discussed aligning with AWS or another vendor but decided against it, we want to remain agnostic so we can truly offer the right solution to our customers. More to come......

yuddhidhtir

I wish you all the best.

UnixGuy

Congrats mate, keep us posted!

DatabaseHead

Updates.

Liability insurance covered, 2 mil in protection. S Corp completed, 3 sales meetings coming up in the next 2 weeks. One is really promising the others are as well, but not quite the budget. The 4 owners, one of which is me are meeting 4 - 5 times a week. It's funny how our roles are morphing. I've snapped into a sales engineer roles for our products. Creating all documentation, sales slide decks, working with development staff to create POC's and other task aligned around that.

We are officially a corporation, company.

Our other managing partners
Myself - Sales Engineer
Sales Executive, he is the engagement guy, he is fantastic so far. Really excited.
Senior Architect/Dev is another brilliant resource. PHD in Mathematics and has been running his own dev shop for ~18 years. Been very successful, just need inroads in the US market.
Tech PM, he really is the founding father, he brought the dev and myself together and I went out and procured the safes exec.

Really excited, had a couple heated discussions normal things you would expect. But our last meeting was pointed with laser focus, aligned strictly on our client and sales exec. Ensuring he knows the strategy inside and out. Making sure he is familiar with UI and UX, the difference and how it's applicable. Looking at potentially taking over their social media management and potentially some other opportunities, such as custom built applications.

The other two engagements are around the data space and potential application development.

I don't want to get to detailed because I don't want to give away our LOB and our competitive advantage. Either way I feel energized to move forward with this dream. No plan B, just A.

DatabaseHead

Follow up....

Registered with several RFP sites, have a couple of bids submitted. One is a content management system for managing digital media the other is a regulatory database for a utility company. They are looking at building a data mart to source data from multiple source system into a single repository (I have data architecture experience you can see this is the responses I worked on:) ). We are going to propose a AWS redshift solution with a contingency MYSQL. A lot of their platform is sitting on Lamp Stack, (Apache).

I spoke with the operations managers had a really good conversation hopefully build some cred. Sales exec broke off on an University project hoping to hear back. Two primary sales channels, RFP's and relationships.

Excited about the mobile space, lots of opportunities. This market is still very immature a lot of opportunities.

Started to build out RFP response artifacts, resumes geared towards the clients, org chart, capabilities matrix and several other documents. I have a close friend who is willing to jump on to help with RFP's (he's a sales engineer for ~10 years for a fortune 500 (tons of RFP response experience I mean TONS).). Getting him at a steal, loves the focus and can see the positive energy. He is going to offer his services, no win no payment to him....... A win will be a flat rate for the first 2 at ~1,000 and then a percentage. Since he is a friend of my, I stepped out and explained to the other 3 owners the vote is between them, one of the owner reached out to me and said he loves it I think the other two do as well, but I don't know for sure.

Should have some news this Tuesday our first sales meeting, and this is a big client 10+ million in annual market budget.