MOBI fuels growth with ‘POWER’ culture and delighted customers
MOBI, winner of the 2016 Company Culture of the Year Mira Award, is a fast-growing managed mobility services (MMS) company located in new 60,000 sq. ft. headquarters on the Northwest side of Indianapolis.
So what the heck is managed mobility services?
Business today is all about mobility. It’s remarkable how fast we’ve shifted from desktops and even laptops to doing a significant amount of business on smartphones and other mobile devices.
The complex web of software applications; carriers, networks and other service providers; and security solutions necessary to control and manage the wide range of mobile devices we all use every day is a big problem for big companies. To give you an idea of scope, MOBI’s average customers have about 4,500 deployed devices.
MOBI provides software and services to help companies manage their mobility:
- MOBI’s cloud-based software brings everything under one platform — a singular point of entry — for managing mobile devices by integrating with wireless carriers, mobile device management systems (MDMs), corporate IT systems, and more.
- MOBI’s services help organizations plan for, save on, deploy, support, and decommission all mobile devices. As a result, MOBI’s customers achieve enhanced control, greater visibility, reduced costs, and increased efficiencies when managing mobile devices.
For example, one of MOBI’s largest single customers — a large airliner based in Chicago — came on board three years ago migrating about 4,000 corporate, domestic iPhones to the MOBI platform. Today, this airliner customer has around 40,000 devices deployed, tracked and managed within the MOBI platform.
In January, MOBI and BNSF Railway announced a new deal whereby MOBI would create a centralized, one point-of-control environment for all mobile devices used by the leading North American freight transportation company. BNSF is saving time and money by bringing 24,000 machine-to-machine data devices and thousands of mobile devices used by its 47,000 employees under the MOBI platform, automating processes, and gaining insight into its total scope of mobile useage.
What makes MOBI different from other providers?
Scott KraegeCEO, MOBI
Kraege is bullish on MOBI growing with its existing customer base because of the company’s 97 percent customer satisfaction and retention rate. I asked Kraege how that 97 percent statistic stacks up to competitors.
“It’s almost unbelievable. People think we’re making it up,” he said. “But when you look at the statistical analysis from Gartner and other analysts, it’s our technology and our people that set us apart. It’s our superior technology that helps us make the sale, and then it’s our people and the way we treat our customers that allows us to keep them as customers long-term.”
An award-winning culture that breeds passion.
The culture at MOBI is is what the organization calls “present tense,” or employee/customer based that changes and grows with the community instead of top-down or founder based, though its co-founders are definitely a key part of the culture. MOBI prides itself on being a fairly flat-structure with easy access to all of its co-founders and executives for employees and customers.
On a recent unannounced visit, I observed first hand the collaborative, open environment at MOBI where the core values of Pay Attention, Own It, Work Together, Expect Change, and Respect People are prominently displayed. (They spell POWER.) Small groups of employees huddle around tables and numerous impromptu gathering areas working together. The office design is spectacular and almost lodge-like — more like something you would find in the pages of Architectural Digest than a business.
Take a tour of the MOBI offices in this Facebook Photo Album.
MOBI is a four-time “Best Places to Work in Indiana” honoree and recently became the first ever winner of TechPoint’s “Company Culture of the Year” Mira Award. MOBI’s attractive company culture didn’t happen overnight. It was a thoughtful process that evolved over time out of their bootstrapping days, which fostered a real organic sense of “everybody being in this together.” Today, MOBI has two critical goals with its culture — to be even more customer-focused and to be more agile as a business.
Growth this fast requires superior tech talent.
In fall 2013, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation ( IEDC) offered MOBI up to $2.9 million in performance-based tax credits and $100,000 in training grants based on its plans to invest $3.3 million in tech upgrades to its new headquarters on the Northwest side of Indianapolis, and to create 253 new high-wage jobs. MOBI was 15x smaller then with only about 20 total employees. While most incentive deals usually include creating hundreds of new jobs over five to eight years or longer, MOBI created all 253 new high-wage jobs and hired top tech talent to fill them in less than 15 months. About 200 total more new jobs will be created by 2017.
MOBI’s growth is being fueled by a double-digit increase in monthly recurring revenue — 67 percent MRR in 2015 — and a $35 million minority stake investment from Bregal Sagemount, a New York-based private equity firm.
“The problem MOBI solves is one that has not been traditionally addressed by a comprehensive software platform. MOBI is experiencing incredible growth and has established itself as a market leader in mobility management,” Daniel Kim, founding partner of Bregal Sagemount, said in the funding announcement. “Their acceleration in new customer wins attests to the enormous pain their solution mitigates.”
MOBI is currently hiring software and UI/UX developers, IT security, marketing, accounting, customer account team and sales professionals.
In an effort to raise the visibility and accelerate the growth of Indiana tech companies, each week we will spotlight a growing company with a compelling story. In particular, we will spotlight scale-up companies that are rapidly emerging and could become our community’s future success stories. Visit this page to learn more the Tailwind program and see if your company qualifies.
The Tailwind program is supported by grants from the Indiana Office of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (OSBE) and the JPMorgan Chase Foundation.
