Stephen Young
In April I interviewed Square 9’s President Stephen Young for a profile article of Square 9 for the May issue of ENX. We covered a lot of ground in that interview and not all of it made it into the article. That article presented more of an overview of the company, focusing on its history, its products, and why dealers opt for a Square 9 solution.
If the profile in ENX was the main feature as on a DVD, consider this one of the special features, the deleted scenes or the edited for TV version if you will.
How’s business?
Young: Business is great. We were able to finish our last three-year run from 2012-2014 with growth of just about 448 percent. We’re looking to continue that trend this year. After the first two months we’re already up 42 percent year over year. This has historically been our slowest quarter so this figure points to another strong year.
What’s your elevator pitch when someone asks you what Square 9 does?
Young: We help businesses work more efficiently through automation of their business processes. We don’t even talk about document management as much anymore, our focus is on helping drive efficiency in any organization by automating the things you do on a daily basis.
What’s the one thing most dealers/resellers you talk to don’t seem to know about Square 9?
Young: When I speak with potential resellers they’re usually familiar with our products, but they don’t know about our model. We had a training class yesterday for about 12 dealers that recently signed on. We started to review the levels of support that we provide them in comparison to what they’ve seen elsewhere and it draws a very sharp contrast. It’s a big reason why we attract so many resellers and a big reason why we retain such loyalty in our existing channels. That’s probably the single biggest thing they don’t know about us until they start to dive in deeper.
Why do you think dealers and resellers select you?
Young: It’s not just one thing, it’s a combination. First, you have to commit yourself to constantly evolving your product. Markets change all the time and so do the needs of the partners so even if you have a great product you’ve got to continue to reinvest in it. On average we develop about 40 new feature enhancements a year in addition to new product development.
The next thing you need to do is wrap a strong support infrastructure around it, including both pre and post sales support to ensure the success of the dealer. That’s what it’s all about. If they try to take you on and they don’t have success it’s going to be a short-lived relationship.
The last thing is you have to be easy to do business with. We actually started as a dealer reselling other people’s products so I’ve worked on both sides—as a manufacturer and as a dealer—and the truth is dealers have a wide range of choices for solutions providers and if you’re not going to work collaboratively with them you’re not going to retain their loyalty.
What exactly are you providing dealers in terms of support, and does everybody need the same level of support?
Young: I don’t think they do, but you have to offer a wide range. You bring up a good point—a dealership like EO Johnson for example is more experienced and doesn’t need that high level of support. They have an established infrastructure, both in presales implementation and post-sales support.
On the other hand, many dealers support so many different products and it’s difficult for them to be successful without a certain level of support from the factory. Our regional sales team can provide them a dedicated solutions engineering team. This is an overlay to our regional sales directors and they do everything from product demonstrations, to scoping calls, to pricing configurations, to workflow analysis. They ensure that the project is scoped and coded correctly based on the customer’s needs to ensure a higher rate of success. That’s one of the key things because a lot of dealers get in over their heads with the initial needs analysis. They don’t deliver the right things, they don’t have a clear picture of what the deliverables are, and then they go down the rabbit hole of scope creep.
Second, we have a professional services group to assist with implementations or to augment services that they might not provide like workflow design or SQL scripting. We not only focus on our products we also provide support for third party products so for example, if you’re working with PlanetPress or you need an advance capture solution like ABBY Flexicapture, we can give you that one throat to choke.
Last but not the least is our Help Desk, which I think is world class. Across our industry support is frequently measured in hours or day; we’re still focused on delivering it in minutes.
On our Web page, the tab under support provides the ability to see where you are in the queue for first response and what your average wait time is going to be. By taking ownership of this, we’re showing support of the channel in a way that very few people are doing these days.
Are there certain target markets where Square 9 is an obvious choice?
Young: We take a different approach then a lot of other document management companies. We focus less on vertical markets and more on horizontal markets. We develop solutions that apply regardless of industry; for example, Purchase to Pay for accounting automation, what we call Hire to Retire where we focus heavily on HR on-boarding and advanced contract management. With these solutions you can walk in anywhere because almost any organization has bills to pay. Accounts payable automation accounts for more than 60 percent of our new installations. It’s an area that everyone understands, they see the efficiency, and use that as a starting point. We work across any number of vertical markets too, but it’s very much more of a horizontal approach.
How important are your partnerships with the OEMs, why do they choose you if it’s different why dealers and resellers do, and what do they bring to the table?
We understand we’re a small part of what both the dealers do and the manufacturers do. We’re more of a strategic decision. If you look at some of our largest dealers, we may represent only a couple percentage points of their revenue. What we do however is help them sell more equipment which is what they really care about. We make ourselves an invaluable part of that process by pulling through business they might not win otherwise. When you look at a company like Toshiba or Konica Minolta, and look at us, this is a strategic play to help them to win new business. Conversely we’re looking at them not only as a manufacturer of office equipment, but as a sales organization. These guys are very talented at going out and attacking a market and building on their success in the equipment space. Considering the number of feet on the street that these companies represent it’s obvious the value they bring to us.
We wouldn’t be where we are today without our OEM partners.
When talking trends, one keeps hearing cloud and mobility, how impactful are those trends to Square 9, especially since you’ve got a cloud solution?
Young: There’s no denying the cloud, it’s definitely a fast growing area and if you look at our recent releases and go forward product strategy it’s been heavily weighted in both of those areas. More customers are expressing an interest in moving to the cloud. We have a product, GlobalSearch C2, which sits on the Amazon cloud platform, and we’ve seen great success with it and expect that to continue in 2015.
That said, it’s still a developing market and there are some constraints. One thing we see in this market is resistance by some companies to put their documents in the cloud. That’s despite the fact that we have a high level of security and are leveraging 256 AES encryption. When you get those highly publicized breaches however it gives people pause, but more and more we’re starting to see that diminish.
Despite concerns over security, I don’t think cloud and mobility is going away because organizations don’t want to manage or back up their servers. Plus what they really want is to access documents from their iPads and their mobile phones. I only see that demand growing, but the big trend we’re starting to see in our industry is towards business process automation. This can grow even faster than the cloud because there’s such a strong ROI behind it.
People have been accustomed to document routing, and what they’re starting to see is they can capture high-value data from those scanned images and instead of just using that to file a document away they can actually feed that to a line of business application. For example, we’ll extract all the information off a vendor invoice and instead of filing that document away we’re creating a voucher in Microsoft Dynamics or creating a payable in QuickBooks. That eliminates a lot of that manual data entry, allowing organizations to work more efficiently with a proven ROI.
How does the rest of the year look for Square 9?
Young: We had a great start to the year! With the activity we’re seeing, the current rollouts underway, and some of our new OEM relationships we’re projecting continued revenue growth of well over 40 percent. We’re very excited to be launching two new products at our conference in October and to build on the success of our channel with a new education initiative. Overall it looks to be a great finish to 2015.
