The Website is Up – A Founder’s Milestone
The birth of a technology business mostly happens behind the scenes - It’s now rewarding to show our face in public.
It started with a warm welcome at a long overdue meeting between old friends. Celso and I originally met in the early 80’s during the emergence of small business and personal computing, where we flourished in Apple’s orbit. With a crowd gathering at the bar and the band ready to take The Rex’s stage we moved to the patio and spent hours catching up on family, reminiscing about the “old days” and pondering our futures.
Around hour four, Celso began to share his interest in starting a new firm, an iOS-only managed and professional services company. Having recently left Apple he was exposed to what he described as a gap between enablement and execution at a time when the mobilization of the workforce is exploding. Celso is accomplished, very technical and passionate about all things Apple. He explained the under-utilization of Apple’s corporate programs, the compelling economics of a Corporately Owned and Supervised mobility program versus BYOD, and the security and compliance benefits of Apple’s iOS eco-structure versus Android’s fragmentation. I’m sure it was the eloquent description and not the perfect patio weather, Tito’s or jazz that compelled me to dig in and help flesh out the idea.
Experience, read age, instills a certain conservatism, bordering on cynicism when presented with a new idea. Looking for confirmation and support we endeavored to pull together a founding team. We needed a cultural fit, distinct skills and little bit of money.
Celso the brain-child, successful entrepreneur and technologist, Paul brought decades of global software sales and operational leadership, Guy is our statesman, a channels expert who sits on multiple software boards he provides insight and sober second thought and me, with decades of enterprise sales and sales management experience.
The first team meeting was a full Sunday in a rented boardroom at an airport hotel. Despite our lack of agenda and a few technical glitches, we took to the task of evaluating the opportunity. Celso described the market opportunity, corporate programs and demonstrated the technologies and workflow he was most confident to build a company around. Guy spoke to the economics; sales cycle and kept us from scope creeping. Paul challenged us to define and articulate the value of our services from both a hard and soft dollar perspective. It was an amazing day, 6 pm and we hadn’t noticed.
We agreed that our company would need to be a representation of the best we had experienced over our decades in the industry. Our KPI’s were developed to measure customer engagement and satisfaction, our business model is modern and efficient and those attributes become our customer’s benefit. Open and clear communication allows our customers to maintain a connection to their field enablement program while under our care.
In around the time it takes to build a house… where are we today?
From a list of proposed names we agreed on MobileSurety.
I owned a consulting company that had been idle for a few years and used that as the shell for MobileSurety. The age and income history of the shell help us qualify for credit terms with our new distribution partner. We established our partnerships with Cisco, Meraki and ProntoForms. Hired our first System Engineer, deployed our MSP development and production environments, setup the CRM, and tested our integration capabilities and enrolment workflow using our own inventory of supervised devices. Our service descriptions, SOW’s and agreements are complete.
It’s with great pride that we present MobileSurety at mobilesurety.com