It's a Rich Full Life

The New (Knowledge) Economy

This morning I sit at my desk in Edmonton, typing a proposal to a potential client in the United States. They are the licensing body for inspectors who will grant "Green Builder"accreditation to residential home builders across the United States. Green buildings will qualify for tax credits, will save on energy costs, and do less to harm the environment.

Our proposal will be for the client to use our online training and testing platform to teach and certify their inspectors. Online is more efficient, less costly, and flexible for the users.

10 years ago nothing I have described above would have made any sense, let alone be part of a couple of fast-growth industries (online certification, green building, etc.). That's what I call the new economy, and I think we are just at the tip of the iceberg.

Hot damn are we busy!

I am pleased to announce that our company, ProTraining.com  has once again been added to the Alberta Venture Magazine Fast 50 list. For the third straight year we have been added to the list of 25 companies under $20M in revenue as the fastest growing in the Province.

Firstly, this is great. I am proud of the accomplishment and particulary the people we have working for us that have helped make it happen. That being said, life continues to get more and more complicated. Being a fast growing organization is a bittersweet combination of stress & fun and is of course tiring, and challenging. The biggest frustration is that we are under the constant risk of not providing the same level of great service to our most recent customer than we have to our first. And vice-versa. not to mention that athough the potential financial rewards get larger, so do the risks and stakes.

Recently we have added 4 new staff, a 50% increase in the last 3 months. This is an exciting time, as for the first time in probably 2 years we have capacity in our system to start investing in product and process improvements, as well as add sales and marketing capacity that will make the growth even more substantial.

All of this means that we are years away from putting our feet up, and I will have a heart-attack by the time I am 40, but then if your an entreprenuer like me, you know that I would have it no other way.

Busy working in Florida

Some times it can be tough having to work at your own business. You may have to work weekends, travel away from your family and endure long days with clients. Today was a prefect example of all three when my partner Don and I got to spend the day on the ocean off the shores of Ft. Lauderdale Florida in pursuit of some Mahi-mahi. (The locals call them dolphin).

It was an awesome day, and although we only caught 3 dolphin, having to throw one back, we had a great day on the water. The sun was relentless and I am glad that I used the 60SPF sunscreen. Don did not, and I suspect that he will be regretting that for a week or two.

Our clients, Jim and John (twin brothers near our age) were consummate hosts and Jim's son's Adam and Stephen provided much of the comic relief. Jim and John have a beautiful 37 foot fishing boat with all of the latest electronics and fishing gear, which made it fun.

Also, I picked up a Flip Video Camera on Saturday so I was anxious to use it on the boat. It is by far the most simple to use video camera on the market and shoots up to 60 minutes of decent quality video which is ready to upload to YouTube or your video website of choice. I might just start a video blog now that I have this unit, which I plan to keep in my briefcase at all times. Here are a couple short videos from the boat, the first was at 7:00 am and we are heading out into the ocean through a residential canal system in Ft. Lauderdale and the second was Adam's first ever dolphin fish catch.

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A Technology SERVICE Business can be Trying

This has been a tough time at work. Everyone is feeling the stress, mostly due to some fantastic growth. Our key sales point and our biggest task at the same time, has been offering a full service package for our clients. We are committed to it for a couple reasons. Firstly it makes us unique among the hundreds of other Learning Management Systems and very unique among the handful of Online Exam companies, so this is good for business. We also do it because this is what the majorty of our Small / Medium size corporate customers want and the majority if not all of our Association clients.

Now there can be limits however to our patience, and every so often it feels like just maybe some of our clients are not giving their whole effort in the process. Not the majority of our clients, not hardly any at all in fact. But there are a handful....but that's ok, that's why we love you....because that which does not kill us makes us stronger right?

Today felt a bit like this:

Wow....now I know what to do....

Last year we had some interest from the Venture Capital comunity. We politely snubbed them, as we didn't want to; and didn't HAVE to deal with them. But after watching this video, it's hard not to get a bit excited about calling them up again....

I wish it was us....

I have been watching Salesforce.com for some time now. Firstly, at ProTraining.com we use the hosted CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. It is extremely feature rich, and when used properly, can be a very effective way to enrich your outbound sales process, as well as manage customers, leads and opportunities.

Another reason for my interest is more big picture. We have tried to emulate best of breed companies that have a hosted web-application model (sometimes referred to as Software as a Service) like ours. This is the business model that we at ProTraining.com have embraced, and it is what makes our business a lot easier to manage. Having subscription or licensed based recurring revenues is the single biggest advantage. The cash register doesn't hit zero at the beginning of the month, which takes a tonne of pressure off our company. Also customers seem to embrace hosted solutions that bring little IT and budgetary risk.

That being said, one of the risks of this model, is customer apathy. As a Salesforce user, we have used the tool moderately, and probably not to it's full potential. We have not invested 10,000's of dollars in a CRM solution, which is why we bought in the first place. That's also the same reason that we haven't made it a critical application in our business.

It is rumoured that Salesforce is trying to convince Oracle (a large competitor and owner of ASP PeopleSoft) to purchase them for around $75.00 per share. That would put them at a market value of $9B. Currently Salesforce trades at about $50.00 per share which is at a whopping 500 times EPS. The company is projecting to do $0.13 per share in 2008. I would trying to sell the company at those prices also.

I frankly think that the company sees a ceiling for both their share value, and even their rapid revenue growth. They have tried to diversify their offering from a simple CRM application, to force.com, a platform offering. In line with Amazon's S3 strategy, it makes sense on the surface to leverage their existing infrastructure for companies and developers who are looking for enterprise level infrastructure. The Salesforce APPExchange is an example of how they are opening their platform and customer base to other software providers. I don't think it has been as much of a success as they anticipated.

One of the reason's that I think their model can start to sputter, is that the companies that use the CRM application would already have an ASP in place. It's these ASP's that will eventually be the primary competitor for Salesforce, and I suspect that many of them will embrace the Software as a Service model soon. Oracle, Microsoft, NetSuite and others are entering the on-demand space in a big way.

So of course they could make that a lot easier by acquiring a solution like Salesforce, but I have a hard time believing that they would spend $9B to do it. But regardless of if they do or not, it is a very nice to see that the revenue and EPS multiples being considered for subscription based, hosted web-applications.

I am glad that we chose this model, even though many times it might have been more lucrative in the short term to sell our product differently. It's nice having hundreds of smaller customers, paying us modest amounts on a recurring basis. That will be easier to sell some day, and if your offering 9 times revenue, like this deal, we would like to talk to you now! In fact, we are having a special this week at 8 times revenue.

NAIT ENTREPRENEURSHIP & INNOVATION DIPLOMA

I am excited about an opportunity that I have been offered, to assist in the new diploma  program which NAIT is offering. It's a great diploma program call the ENTREPRENEURSHIP & INNOVATION DIPLOMA, which is a 2-year program to ready students for running or working in a small-medium sized business. Here are some details about the program:

"The Management Diploma Entrepreneurship & Innovation Specialization is for those students who see their career path focused on starting their own enterprise, purchasing an existing business or franchise, taking over a family operated business and pursuing an entrepreneurial career. The program is ideal for those who want to be prepared for the frontier of the new Alberta entrepreneurship based economy and self-employment."

I am participating in two ways. One is in a more detailed fashion with other Edmonton entrepreneurs by working on Case Studies of our businesses and our experiences. The second will be as a mentor for students in the program. Both of them will be exciting ways to help others prepare for the rough and tumble existence of business ownership. My experience will of course be helpful as it relates to new business start-ups. Although technology companies will not be a theme, I have to think that many of the students taking this diploma will be considering starting a technology company. I was probably asked because of our Venture Prize Championship, and ironically what we learned in that experience played a big part in many of the business decisions we made after the fact. There is nothing better for your business than having to build a busines plan that is highly scrutinized by seasoned venture capilalists.

I have always wanted to be a teacher when I grow up and this will probably be as close as I get. There is no question that I will have lot's of advice on what not to do. And that's the point isn't it, help people avoid the mistakes that we made in our experience.

The 2008 Fast 50 - ProTraining.com

Our company, www.ProTraining.com has been selected to the 2008 list of fastest growing companies published by Alberta Venture magazine again.

Last year we made the list in 10th position, and are now featured in position number 16. It is great to be recognized, but frankly it was a bit less exciting this year than last. Our three-year revenue growth hit 900% this year, with FY 2007 revenues hitting $1.7 million.

We have been lucky to have a fast growth rate since we commercialized our online training and testing application and I think that 2008 will be our best year yet. Like all companies, the trick is to build revenues, while keeping costs scaling down as a percentage of our revenue. Although we are now profitable, it will be more important that we focus on profit growth this year.

We are currently working on a very exciting initiative that will make a big impact on both our bottom and top-lines, and that is what has me most excited. Stay tuned, as I think that what we are working on has yet to be done by any training software company.

The ProExchange is open for business!

The elf's at www.ProTraining.com have been working hard to bring our application customers a new service which allows them to access third-party content for their training site. Customers who are using our T2 Platform for training their employees, can now add courses in many key areas:

• Desktop applications
• Health and Safety titles
• Business Soft-Skills
• IT Technical training

Also, many of our customers are using our T2 Platform to sell training for a profit. They can now access the same course library to re-sell the courses to their users. This is revolutionary to our business model, and in our opinion, cutting edge in the area of Learning Management Systems.

We have signed content agreements with two leading content companies, and have over 400 titles already available. We are also very close to signing agreements with three other content companies which will make this list even longer.

You can browse the ProExchange library at www.ProExchange.com and I have attached a screen-shot below. What's even more exciting to us, is that in the new year, we will be launching a new service which will allow anyone to build a training site to sell training, using dozens of pre-built templates, in a matter of minutes. As we like to say, it will be a "Business in a Box".

Exciting to say the least!

ProTraining.com and Kiva.org an Exciting Partnership

The old saying that it is better to give than receive stands true, but I really like the entrepreneurial angle of this story.

ProTraining.com has been presented with an opportunity to help one of the most unique and exciting web initiatives underway for a long time. I was going to refer to what Kiva.org is doing as charity, but frankly they are empowering third-world entrepreneurs, in a very interesting way. It started about a month ago, when Kiva.org approached us about our online learning management system. It is a perfect fit for what they were looking for, as it operates in multiple languages, and has some special features that reflect their structure.

Let me first tell you about Kiva.org. They have been gaining massive global appeal, and recognition for developing an innovative way for third-world entrepreneurs to build a business and work themselves and their families out of the cycle of poverty.

Basically, Kiva helps profile these individuals and their small business opportunity. In this example, Shamama is a 36 year old woman, who is looking to raise $1200 to buy 20 sheep for her livestock business. Kiva lenders (note that these are micro-loans which are repaid) then donate as little as $25 towards her goal. Interestingly over 99.7% of the loans are repaid!

On the ground in her country, are what Kiva calls Fellows, who evaluate loan opportunities for legitimacy, verify the funds are used for what's being asked, and then administers the repayment of loans. Fellows are non-paid volunteers, and have to be trained by Kiva. Which is where ProTraining will step-in.

All training of fellows will be done on a site that ProTraining will develop and has donated the full cost of design, set-up and configuration.

If you have never heard of Kiva.org, it is only by chance. The founders have been profiled on Oprah, and even former President Bill Clinton has loudly endorsed them in his book and on his public speaking tours. We are proud and excited to be involved in this, and we look forward to the great stories that I know we will be able to enjoy, as we help the Kiva Fellows around the World search out and help these entrepreneurs help themselves.