Milwaukee-based startup
Minlopro Partners, a
Salesforce consulting firm, announced recently that it has ended its first year in business by reaching more than $5 million in revenue and has grown to 40 global employees, including a little more than a dozen in Milwaukee. Its headquarters office is located in the Eagleknit building at 507 S. 2nd St. in the city's Walker's Point neighborhood.
Mort Sayyed, founder and chief executive officer of Minlopro Partners, said the reason for the company’s creation, a desire to put people first, is what’s continued to drive Minlopro Partners' growth.
He was moved to start his own business after the birth of his first child spurred a desire for a greater work/life balance. The same day his son was born, he registered his business.
“I was in the delivery room with my wife and I was holding my son and I thought, ‘I am genuinely happy right now.’ When I reflected on that, my career that I thought was bringing me happiness was not bringing me happiness in comparison to what I just felt,” said Sayyed.
San Francisco-based Salesforce is one of the top customer relationship management (CRM) platforms in the world. Within Salesforce, there are different modules, called clouds, focused on varying areas of a business. Some might be more targeted toward sales while other clouds focus on management.
Minlopro Partners focuses on a handful of clouds within the health care and life sciences industries. About 80% of the company’s clients come from these industries. The majority of the startup’s business currently comes from Salesforce referrals.
“It (Salesforce) really is an operations management tool across many industries with many capabilities,” said Sayyed. “It’s a very robust platform, so it integrates with tons of things. When we work with our customers, we have Salesforce as the base platform, but maybe they want to integrate their (enterprise resource planning) system for their accounting, or maybe they want to integrate medical records.”
Sayyed and his three co-founders,
Jessica Lillquist,
Mitul Bhakta and
Mireily Backus, selected the health care and life science industries simply because they have some level of knowledge in those industries. Sayyed, for example, spent several years at IBM in varying sales roles.
“A lot of it was just experiences with those kinds of clouds,” said Sayyed. “Not every one of the co-founders has experience in the industry, but is hyper-experienced in the product set, so they know how to transform the software to meet the needs of businesses in an effective way.”
Most of Minlopro Partners' customers, including Culture Biosciences and BayPLS, are located on the West Coast, but there are aspirations to build a customer base here in the Midwest.
“Milwaukee is our home. It’s the bedrock of our business,” said Sayyed. “While we don’t have any customers here yet, it’s just because we get brought into deals and we have to target certain teams across the country to help us get into certain markets.”
Minlopro Partners is already doing work with the Chicago Salesforce team and Sayyed hopes to have a Midwest customer by the end of the year.
As for what’s driven the company’s exponential growth in year one, Sayyed believes a simple people-first philosophy is part of the reason, as well as a general shift in the industry toward boutique services.
“Large corporations get lazy all the time when they experience success,” he said.
By the end of the year, Sayyed expects the company’s number of employees to grow to between 60-70 people, with “as many of them as possible” working in Milwaukee. He’s also hoping to end the year with $8 million in revenue.
[caption id="attachment_573960" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]
The Minlopro Partners office in the Eagleknit building in Walker's Point.[/caption]
