Feature Company

Interview with Grant Wickes, Wasp Barcode Technologies, VP Marketing
June 2007

FB

Can you please supply our readers with a brief background of your company?

GW

Wasp has been in business for 12 years and has focused on the small business market during that period of time. We started as a software company, interestingly enough, to provide an interface between barcode scanners and the PC so the barcode scanner could be read, and it evolved from this to provide a line of hardware and software together. We take mature technology such as barcodes that large enterprises and companies have been using for many years -- they use barcode-based systems to make their processes as efficient as possible - and we use the same barcode-based technology, but design our solutions to fit the needs of small business. That means affordable solutions that include all the hardware and software required to work right out of the box.

FB

You mentioned you have focused on the small to mid-sized business markets. You have been very successful in that. What are some of the challenges that you see in that particular segment?

GW

When people say SMB or Small, Medium Businesses one of the first things to examine is what they mean by SMB. What Cisco means by SMB is quite different than what we define as small business. For us, when we say "small medium business" we really mean businesses that have in the range of 5-99 employees. Most of these businesses especially the ones that are say, less then 10-20 employees, are run by a business owner and they don't have a dedicated IT person or department. There's not a lot of structure. The business owner keeps a lot of information in their head. There is some improvement that can be done when you automate things, but the pain really becomes more acute once you have a few more employees and the challenge for the business owner is when they try to keep using a manual approach or keep everything all in their head. As mentioned, an interesting challenge is that small businesses typically do not have an IT person. Larger companies who have dedicated IT staff - you know, these knowledgeable 'techies' whose job it is to seek out new technology and solve business problems with new technology. In a small business, this function often rests with the business owner (or a family member) so the big challenge for us is twofold - one, trying to work and target the small business owner in a way that they understand because they are not 'motivated' by technology like the IT techies are - and secondly, in their day-to-day operations it is hard to identify a trigger or flash point, a massive pain point that causes them to make a change. How do we get them to consider improving their business with a barcode-based data collection system, because most business owners still think that, "Hey, I don't need to fix this right now - it's not critical - I'm still get around and I know what's going on". So the challenge is to move people away from doing nothing with technology, and not being fearful - that putting in a technology solution can actually be beneficial to them and can be done affordably.

FB

When did you move into the Biometric area and what prompted your decision to incorporate biometrics into some of your products?

GW

We introduced biometrics about a year or a year and a half ago. Our Time & Attendance product is a comple software and hardware solution that we have had for a couple of years. As we got into the market, one of the things that we heard from the small business owners - and again the vast majority of small business owners still do employee time capture by pen and paper, or mechanical punch cards or maybe e-mail, which is totally inefficient and usually inaccurate - those that did have the barcode badges or mag stripe badges or were using a badge and a clock to clock in, found that there was still a lot of abuse or potential abuse for people sharing a badge with their colleagues. "Hey, Bob, I am going to leave 15 minutes early, here's my badge will you clock me out at 5 so I can leave at a bit before 5". It is amazing when you add up 10 to 15 minutes across 50 employees or 75 employees - that adds up to thousands of dollars in a month. Biometrics has become technologically mature enough so that it works - it works well, it works efficiently, and then you eliminate these badges because now people just carry their human barcode along with them - their fingerprint if you like. Clocking in and out with their finger eliminates "buddy punching" so their buddy can't punch them out 15 minutes later to capture those extra times. You have to physically be there with your finger to clock in and out.

FB

What type of real world feedback have you received from your Biometric time clock deployments?

GW

Surprisingly positive on two fronts! When I say it is surprising, generally speaking, when you put a technological solution in, it benefits the business owner or sometime benefits the employee, but with the biometric time and attendance, both the business owner and employee enjoy the implementation. The business owner clearly benefits from the biometric solution because of the assurance of accuracy for people actually being in and out at that particular time. The employees, interestingly enough, really appreciate the convenience of the clock with the biometric fingerprint because now if they have lost their badge, left their badge at home, it's in their wallet, they have left it in the car or it isn't handy - they don't have to worry about finding the badge or losing it or getting it out, the badge is already embedded in their finger.

FB

You are a global company with offices in the UK and other areas in Europe. Can you elaborate a little bit on that for us?

GW

The small business market in the US, and in Canada for that matter - we sometimes forget how important the Canadian market is while paralleling the US in its dynamics, -- has great entrepreneurial spirit. But we also feel that English speaking countries besides the US and Canada such as the UK and to a certain extent Australia, can apply these technologies and you can easily adapt them into these countries. Most of our solutions "translate" well in the UK market. With something like the biometric Time & Attendance if the laws are slightly different country to country you have to be a little careful how you go about capturing the time and making sure it is being processed properly. There is just so much opportunity in our own back yard here in the U.S. and Canada that to a certain extent we are focusing on expanding the market in the North America while establishing a presence over in the UK.

FB

Has this been a good year for your company?

GW

It has been an outstanding year on a couple of fronts. What has so often happened in business is you have success but you really don't know why or what your core competency is. So about a year ago we came together and said what is it we are doing, what is it we really consciously want to do. We spent a couple of months to really identify the opportunity in the Small Business market. We got really intentional - really focused at this target market of business with 5-99 employees. We started to reach out to our customers - to really understand who they were - what industries, what segments, what are the dynamics - so in the end we understood our customers and the opportunity much better and felt good about that. Instead of being sort of unconsciously successful we started to be consciously focused on the Small Business market. It is funny; when you do less better, your success often grows faster. It is really one of those fascinating corollaries where you only want to do more, more expanding, more products, more this and that, but interestingly enough if you just stay focused, "here is our core focus of Small Business 5-99. Let us get really efficient in targeting that market with the right message, the right delivery and the right channels." On the sales front, we just sent out a press release showing the quarter results for the March quarter - our sales were up over 20%, profit was up over 20% and our 2nd quarter is on record run at this point in time. We are very excited at what is happening and where we are heading as the year unfolds.

FB

Congratulations on those results. What can we expect to see from Wasp in the coming year?

GW

The mantra we have is to make it even easier and more efficient for potential customers to reach us. We do a good job on our Web presence with key word searches and stuff like that to get people coming to our site when they reach their hand up looking for a Time & Attendance system. We are now ranked in the top 3 for time and attendance organically on Google. After people find us on the internet, we want to improve the processes people use to evaluate with trial downloads, support on case testimonials, more video things - helping small business owners feel comfortable that people like themselves are using this technology and become really comfortable with Wasp. We want to become even more efficient about moving a prospect through the evaluation and buying cycle. We are really excited about biometrics - we just launched a new version of WaspTime (v5) at the of end of March - it is lined up quite well and has already hit a record month in April, so we feel that Time & Attendance is a huge, huge opportunity where we are on the cusp of a fantastic market opportunity. We will see a new inventory product solution in the summer timeframe which we feel will have terrific legs given the small businesses need for tracking inventory. So, whether it is efficiently and accurately keeping track of human inventory with WaspTime or making it more efficient to keep accurate track of product inventory, Wasp has the bits and bites in a form that is understandable and easy to use for the business owner. It's just terrifically interesting reaching out and finding ways to help the business owner find ways to manage their business more effectively, freeing up more of their time to either have a better quality of life or find ways to further grow their business.

FB

Well thank you very much Grant for speaking with us to-day. Congratulations on your success and I wish you all the best in the coming year!

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