MondoCRM Opens an Office in the United Kingdom
MondoCRM is pleased to announce its acquisition of WiredContact UK, the only WiredContact consultancy in Britain, earlier this year. After almost 30 years in business, we have a long and rich history of growth and adapting to changing conditions in technology and the business services marketplace. This is our second strategic acquisition in recent years. Most recently, MondoCRM closed its acquisition of Novak Information Systems in June 2017, a long time Act! consultancy located outside of Chicago.
Given my wife’s and my deep affection for the UK, its culture, and its people, we are particularly excited about our prospects for this new venture! Here’s what to know:
- Background: How the opportunity was presented
- Rationale: Why acquiring a company on a different continent makes sense for us
- Strategic Value: How WiredContactUK brings value to MondoCRM and our clients
- What’s next: Our plans for what’s ahead delivering great client experiences
Background
As some of you know, WiredContact was founded by former Act! and Saleslogix consultants who’d grown frustrated with its functionality and stability after a series of acquisitions by private equity investors. Over the years, WiredContact has developed into a uniquely user-friendly, highly adaptable platform designed to deliver custom CRM solutions around the client’s business processes, instead of the client having to modify its processes around the software’s limitations.
We’ve observed over the years that WiredContact presents a powerful niche in the CRM marketplace for small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB)—especially those requiring custom-designed solutions—and they’re attractively priced compared to other larger players like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. MondoCRM has long and deep relationships with WiredContact’s leadership and engineers over the years having collaborated on many custom CRM design projects.
I’ve known the founder of WiredContact UK for about 20 years, and when I heard he was looking to retire, I reached out to him pronto! Over time, he diversified his consultancy impressively with practice areas including real estate development, property management, trade associations, local government economic development, higher education, funeral management, and even Royal Palace private event sales! But what I found most fascinating was their ingenious use of WiredContact’s custom CRM design capabilities, far more so than I’ve seen here in the United States.
Needless to say, our due diligence process began straight away!
Rationale
12
Avg Client Relationship in Years
3
Number of New Features for WiredContact
15
Years of Local Support Experience
When considering our own growth and recent experience with acquisitions, our calculus revealed that MondoCRM can more efficiently and profitably expand our business by acquiring existing profitable consultancies than staffing up a business development team for aggressive marketing campaigns.
Our process of due diligence was considerably more challenging than our domestic acquisitions for some reasons that are obvious, and others that are less so. Long story short, making a trip to London smoothed over any rough edges that are customary to such a transition. We joined the British American Business Council here in Chicago, a membership that promises to be helpful in regulatory matters and making strategic introductions when required. But mostly, we needed to take a deep dive into the subtleties of both WiredContact UK’s book of business and the personalities involved. We’ve learned in our client work over the years that a business is much more than debits, credits, and growth metrics. They’re run by and for people with very human impacts and considerations.
We found their local support teams to be outstanding and their customers quite happy. Like MondoCRM USA, customer loyalty is strong, with their average relationship lasting 10+ years. Core to our client work, we know customer churn wrecks growth, and that it costs 7x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing customer. We know that long-term customer relationships are much more profitable over time than shorter-term, more transactional ones.
Strategic Value
Total Spend on Cloud vs. Desktop CRM (Gartner Group 2019)
Previous acquisitions have taught us that we aren’t just acquiring customers; we came to the realization that we could leverage our blended capabilities to grow our practice here, as well as throughout the UK and EU. We believe our existing clients will soon see these new capabilities at work as we begin to drive more innovation and develop custom-designed CRM and business process solutions for them.
Also worthy of consideration is Mondo’s very close partnership with Caldere Associates, another cutting edge CRM consultancy and Zoho partner located near London. You may have had contact with them via Meeta, Vivek or Graeme in the past. To wit, we never considered Caldere a competitor and have been routinely rewarded for this progressive mindset when collaborating on countless projects with them over the years. The vitality of our partnership will only improve with this new and exciting opportunity that WiredContact UK brings to us both. While Mondo and Caldere are both Zoho Certified Partners and its platform capabilities are truly amazing, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all approaches for our clients and think WiredContact UK will bring intriguing custom solutions to the table for our clients on both sides of the pond.
What’s Next
As I mentioned earlier, we believe there is an exciting market opportunity to deliver custom CRM and business process solutions for SMBs who simply don’t have the budget for Microsoft Dynamics, SAP and Salesforce. We maintain very close working relationships with the engineers at WiredContact corporate and expect these relationships to only flourish further as we bring them a wider array of interesting client projects. We routinely work with WiredContact’s Chief Architect to create custom features and functionality, completely bypassing the committees common to other CRM providers as well getting fixes rather quickly when a defect is found.
For example, we are working with Walgreens to build a common platform for all their contractors to operate from, and we think WiredContact is just the right fit for developing a custom solution for them while avoiding layer upon layer of corporate bureaucracy. In fact, we have the explicit backing of WiredContact’s ownership and management.
At some point in the future, we expect to explore opportunities across the EU using WiredContact UK in London as a launching point. But for now, we continue to learn about what we have in WiredContact UK, explore its potential and bring it the best vision and management we have to offer. And who knows, perhaps more frequently indulge in English ales, Yorkshire pudding, shepherd’s pie and English Premier League football games? I think that’s a safe bet, since I’ve already been doing it for years.