How Winshuttle prospers by linking
Excel to SAP
by Grant Buckler, Contributor, SoftwareCEO
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Eight years ago, two consultants realized that
office people had a tough time transferring data
from desktop software like Excel into SAP.
In classic entrepreneurial style, they set out to fill a need.
The result was Winshuttle, a privately held company whose software helps ordinary business users transfer data from Excel and other desktop programs into SAP — without needing IT experts to do it.
In eight years, co-founders Vikram Chalana and Rajat Oberoi built the Bothell, Wash.-based software firm into a worldwide company with 45 employees and 2007 revenues of $5.5 million.
That's up from $3.2 million in 2006, a figure that already represented better than 1,400 percent growth in four years, and earned Winshuttle spot 124 on Inc. magazine's 2007 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S.
Winshuttle's customer list boasts more than 250 Global 2000 companies, including AMD, Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, and Warner Brothers.
And Chalana and Oberoi did it all without taking any outside funding.
Instead, they bootstrapped the company with a "land and expand" strategy, getting their foot in the door at big customers and turning those footholds into more and more business over time.
In the following 15 tips, co-founder and CEO Vikram Chalana tells us how they did it, and how they intend to keep on doing it.
Land and expand tip #1: Build a frugal company culture
Within a couple of years after launching the company, Chalana and Oberoi made Winshuttle profitable. They did it by living within their means.
"He's the no person, and I'm the go person," Chalana says of Oberoi, who is Winshuttle's COO. "We're continually butting heads on that, but it works great because we've achieved such a good balance on things."
That means Winshuttle's spending for this year has usually depended on its revenues for last year. Whatever the company makes goes back into growth, but the goal has always been to avoid spending more than was coming in.
It's not just about saying no. Chalana says he has tried to build a frugal culture, starting with hiring.
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