Upwardly Mobile | Jim Johnson from Mobile Solutions

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Jim Johnson 0:00
We spent a large amount of time in managing data consumption.

Alexander Ferguson 0:11
Using their own money and a family loan, Jim Johnson and his wife, Kim that started a company and took it from six employees to 100. mobile solutions is now a thriving tech company, repeatedly winning awards for growth, leadership and customer satisfaction. In part one of this episode of UpTech Report, I talked to Jim who tells us about realizing the opportunities to dress Mobile Management on an enterprise level and balancing the needs of human interactions and automated systems. Well, thank you so much, Jim, for joining us, I’m excited to learn more about mobile solutions, how I got started looking here on on your LinkedIn profile from 2011 to two now going from six employees to 100 employees, and then doubling your revenue last three years, lots of growth has been happening. Take me back to the beginning, where did it start? 2011? How did it begin?

Jim Johnson 1:00
Yeah, 2011 was the idea was really around, can we find can we drive cost down for customers on the mobility? And, you know, we proved that out relatively quick. And were able to see that that was going to be a successful venture. So from there really what we started to do is wrap our service around the the product offering.

Alexander Ferguson 1:23
Did you bootstrap it right from the beginning? Did you get any VC funding along the way?

Jim Johnson 1:26
No, it was it was bootstrap between myself, my wife and some family loans that we that we paid back in that first year. That’s that’s how we got this thing off the ground, you must

Alexander Ferguson 1:37
have felt very confident then to to say, hey, let’s let’s put our money where this goes, Well, you

Jim Johnson 1:42
got to have confidence if you’ve got an idea, and you’re passionate about it. So absolutely. I was definitely confident about it.

Alexander Ferguson 1:47
Over from 2011. Till now, obviously, I’m sure there’s been some changes and constant evolution. How has it changed from that beginning to where you are now, both with the customers you’re helping and the way you are delivering your service?

Jim Johnson 2:01
Yeah, it’s, it’s changed. It’s, it’s, it’s completely opposite from what it was, you know. So in the beginning, it was really around, can we drive cost down. And today, what we’re doing is full lifecycle management. And we built a product over the last eight years that really encompasses everything that we’re doing, how

Alexander Ferguson 2:23
many customers are you helping right now? And also like, how many devices does that turn into?

Jim Johnson 2:27
I think that that last client count that I saw was roughly 480.

Alexander Ferguson 2:34
Wow. So then the number of devices and manage

Jim Johnson 2:38
the number of devices is is definitely in the in the six figures. There’s six figure plus. So it’s a lot.

Alexander Ferguson 2:46
And there’s the devices when you say, the diminished devices that wouldn’t smartphones, for one, but does that include other types of things? Tablets it does.

Jim Johnson 2:53
So smartphones, tablets, Wi Fi devices, embedded aircards in tablet or in laptops, correct IoT devices, machine to machine? So yeah, that that all encompasses, in our line count?

Alexander Ferguson 3:06
How do you see the growth, obviously, with IoT, exploding, and in every type of facet with AI, we want to track this thing. So let’s make it IoT unable to do you see a growth in in managing those other capacities?

Jim Johnson 3:18
In the last 18 months? We definitely have Yes,

Alexander Ferguson 3:21
got it. Moving forward into your technology behind it. And of course, you’ve got some marketing around this, your, your brains, Maxine and Maximus, which really is robotic process automation you’re using there, tell me just dig into more about your your IP.

Jim Johnson 3:39
Yeah, so really, we’ve got a lot of repetitive tasks that we do around here. And it’s not the sexiest job that we offer, that’s for sure. So when we found that there was technology that we could tap into, that could complete those tasks without a human touching it, we were very interested in. So we began that process in April, we launched the two brains in, I want to say late May, and have been adding to their tasks every month. So initially, we had them completing a couple of requests. Today, they’re completing more than just two requests. In addition to that, they’re also starting to, to complete some of the repetitive internal tasks that are not customer facing. Whereas a team can walk in in the morning, and all the reports that they manually were pulling normally are all in there in the folder with what they need. So they can just begin their work right when they get in so well. And that’ll be an evolving product for us, we’ll continue to invest in the in the brains of the RPAS. Today, we have to, I would say by the end of 2020, that that too, will most likely be five or six. And each each brain can handle something like 4000 requests a day. So we’re very excited. We really feel like the brains are going to be able to touch every department in this company at this stage. It’s really around it’s manpower, we’ve got to build these brains out, we’ve got to get them to learn. And, and in any small business, you know, I don’t feel like I have a small business anymore, from six to over 100. But, you know, resources are always at the top of the list there. And so we want to make sure that we’re that we’re smart as with who we tasked to manage these today,

Alexander Ferguson 5:24
so that I can understand the story right by you’ve built a platform where you’re helping SMB and enterprise manage their devices. And it was a lot of manpower originally, of people entering keeping track of reports as they came in. But now you’ve actually built out a, an automated system that will doesn’t even have require your own people to do it, they manage the system, but it actually will take in the reports and pull it into the systems and run automatically. Am I capturing that story correctly? You are correct. Okay. And obviously the future of that’s why technology’s awesome, automating things, removing people from simple data entry to what your RE defining than the roles of your team members. How does that transition, how’s that transition work, because I think this is being applied in many different businesses right now. Sure.

Jim Johnson 6:12
retaining top talent is important, right, and I’m not going to retain top talent, if I’m not investing in technology. And if I’m asking these, these individuals, these bright individuals to do these, these, you know, just repetitive, time consuming tasks over and over again. And so that it’s first and foremost that that part is more important than anything else, we want to retain the people that we have, and we want to make sure that they are working on items that are important to the business. Now, those repetitive tasks are important to us, clearly. But it’s, we want to make sure that our people are challenged, I guess, is really what it comes down to. And by alleviating 1000s of requests and having the bots or the brains, as we’re calling them, having the brains handle those requests, we’re able to reassign that talent into other areas so that they’re, they’re making more of a meaningful impact on the overall company.

Alexander Ferguson 7:03
So just within six months or so you’ve been able to build out these two brains, these two, the two brains

Jim Johnson 7:09
are one of the brains is almost our top ticket producer today. So it’s rivaling our number one individual.

Alexander Ferguson 7:19
And do the technology bit more are you using like existing like Azure cloud or Google products to utilize some of that technology or open source? What route did you go? AWS? AWS? Okay, so you want to Amazon nice, yeah. And reason for going that. That’s why I’m always curious, there’s there’s kind of a three major players, their preference pricing,

Jim Johnson 7:40
I left it up to the people who are much smarter than me. So my CTO made that decision.

Alexander Ferguson 7:44
Nice. Now, obviously, the future building more of these means faster ability to import reports and serve your customers. And then reef positioning your team members for customer support is that probably the biggest area,

Jim Johnson 7:59
I would say repositioning those individuals to other areas of the business and probably more or less away from or more away from support, we really want to make the majority of the support requests of the Mac ds that we’re getting today. We want to automate all of those Now, clearly, we have a lot of customers that will call in. So the bots aren’t, we’re not going to do that, you know, we’re big on customer service, we lead with customer service, we all talk about how great our people are out in the market, right? You know, part of our sales process is letting our customers experience that before they make a decision to work with us. So we’ll never take away that human interface from our customers. That’s a big part of why we’re successful today.

Alexander Ferguson 8:40
With the as you mentioned, your to kind of that forefront, interaction with your end customers, they don’t need to deal with the carriers. You play play that role. What other types of integrations or partnerships have you developed then that really have made your system take care of that automation and seamless service?

Jim Johnson 9:04
Sure. We have SMS integrations where we’re pinging individual users, if they’re abusing their devices. We have integrations with ERP systems. So from an accounting perspective, we’re automating the expensing of the invoice and so there is no manual data entry for our customers. We’re alerting managers out in the field. They’re the people that fall under their purview, what their usage looks like, because at the end of the day in our world today, very different than it was back in 2011, and 2011. We were maintained, we’re managing how many minutes you were using, how much text messaging was using and how much data was being consumed because data was expensive. Well, fast forward eight years, then it’s unlimited. Texting is unlimited, and data for the most part. What you see today is unlimited in the in the corporate world, the enterprise world, not so much. It’s not as cost effective. So we spent a we spent a large amount of time in managing data consumption.

Alexander Ferguson 10:03
Hmm. Data definitely is the main driver today and obviously going into 5g soon. Do you see anything changing with how you have to manage?

Jim Johnson 10:14
Well, we’re curious to see what the plans are going to look like. Because we do believe that that consumption of data is going to double, triple, quadruple, you know, immediately. And so how are what we’re kind of waiting for the, for the industry to evolve so that we can start wrapping a managed service around what that’s going to look like, I don’t see that the model is going to shift too much because we are ready, manage data in real time. That’s one of our unique capabilities in our marketplace. And so I think that that just becomes that much more important that it’s being managed in real time. And we’re not reacting to invoices with large overages, we’re able to catch that mid cycle and make those adjustments before they invoice cuts.

Alexander Ferguson 10:56
Got it? That’s smart. How does your of your plans and packages for your customers evolved? What are they today look like?

Jim Johnson 11:03
Yeah, no, that’s a good question. When we first started, it was really, if we save you X amount of money, then we get paid X amount of money, it was a percentage essentially of savings. And then we guaranteed those cost savings. So we’re a little different in that we had a lot of skin in the game around that guarantee. Today, it’s a very different we, we don’t charge a percentage of savings. We have four different bundles that we go to market with, we have our traditional mobile expense management, which we call our value package. The next package up is called our standard package. And all this is available on the website. The standard package is the value package. And in addition to that, we wrap that lifecycle management. So the stage and Kitty on the front end, where we’re procuring devices in our facility, we might be wrapping an accessory screen protector on that device. We’re provisioning that device with the security and applications that that specific user needs in the field. And then we’re shipping that device out with instructions on exactly what to do what we found in the, you know, our customers are busy, IT departments continue to shrink, they don’t have the resources internally anymore to be able to do this. And so those devices tend to sit around for a couple of days, which means the individual in the field is not being supported. And so customers see that value around our staging and kitting services. And then on the back end, it’s really around recycling those devices, device costs have have skyrocketed since 2011, and 2011. A lot of most, most of the product was free. As long as you were willing to sign it to your contract the carriers were willing to just hand you a device. Well, fast forward eight years, and we’re talking about Apple products. 616 $100 iPhones, right? And so what are we going to do with that device? When it’s reached end of life? We don’t want it Yeah, there you go. There’s your iPhone, what are we going to do with that device, if the if the screen breaks, or if the speakers broken, we’re trying to we want to, we want to drive as much money back to the organization’s we want to get them the value of that device as it stands that day, and not let it traditionally what you’ll find is it’s just going to get thrown in a box at somebody’s desk. And it’s going to be forgotten about it, maybe once a year, they’ll recycle those devices, but they’re actually not monetizing it. So we have, so that so to kind of Long Story Short here. We’ve wrapped a bandage service around recycling those devices, and then being able to provide a decent amount of credit back to their accounts for the value of the device. So that that wraps up our value chain, we’ve got our secure package, which is which is the value package plus what we call UAM unified endpoint management. So we’ve partnered with several of the organizations in the marketplace like mass 360 42, Gears AirWatch, the list goes on. All of those are in the Magic Quadrant. And so we are we’re managing that UTM process for customers, again, we go back to it to IT departments and the resources are shrinking, which means they won’t be able to adequately support the UVM product. So we’re managing that, that security for those customers. We’re managing those instances. And then our pro product that’d be our fourth bundle that encompasses that’s everything. Right? So that’s going to be your your MDM, your mobile expense management, your staging and getting in your devices, recycling services, and then your UTM solution.

Alexander Ferguson 14:23
Be sure to check out part two of our conversation with Jim, which he tells us about some of the biggest mistakes he made early in his career and the important methods he relies on to nurture his company