Feature Company

Interview with Grant Wickes, V.P. of Marketing, Wasp Barcode Technologies

August 2008

FB

You just recently announced strong revenue & earnings growth in the first half of 2008 including impressive numbers for the recent second quarter verses last year and this during a slow economy. What is driving this growth?

WASP BARCODE

I think the growth is driven by two things: continued execution and targeting an underserved and under-adopted market.

First, for us as a company it’s all about consistent execution in marketing and sales. For example, most of the work that we did for the website and continue to do drives traffic to our web site. We grew an incredible 60% last year and we continue to see steady traffic growth each month this year. Once we get people to the site, it is about engagement and helping prospective customers learn about barcoding solutions. So this year, execution is around helping visitors learn and nothing is easier than rich media – flash presentations, lots of video, one on one demos – helping move prospective customers along the sales cycle…creating motivated buyers for our sales partners. As a small company ourselves, it is truly amazing how technology is allowing us to cost effectively market to other small businesses and we’re having great success.

Secondly, as I mentioned, our target market is small business –generally employee based companies of less than 250 employees with the prime target between 5-100 employees. There are over 2 million of these in the U.S. & Canada. We know from our research that the vast majority of these customers don’t use technology to help them in their business. Lots use pen and paper and the ‘sophisticated’ ones might use Excel. They just don’t realize how affordable and useful barcode-based productivity solutions can be. Ultimately, it’s a hugely unadopted segment that really resonates to our message.

FB

Because you are dealing with a group like that is education a critical aspect of what you do?

WASP BARCODE

It is almost like waking up a sleeping giant. Even before education it starts by stimulating awareness… awareness that a problem exists… awareness that there is a better way. The first step is just stimulating the people… trying to make them sensitized to the fact that technology exists to help them. Many of these guys just run around, so busy fighting fires day after day as a small business, they don’t step back and have the opportunity to analyze, "hey is there a better way to do this and if so, what should I use?"

Big companies have dedicated analysts, dedicated IT people whose sole job is to improve processes and look for technology to make that process work. The small business owner does not have that luxury, so our biggest challenge is stimulating that initial awareness that something does exist to help them.

The next piece is education and to put it into context of their business. This is to show them how this can actually work for them, as a retail store putting in a "Point Of Sale" system and demonstrating how more efficient it is verses the cash register they might currently or have been using.

FB

What new products are you introducing into the market place?

WASP BARCODE

One of the biggest things I just mentioned is the POS system, especially in the Canadian market. We see a big opportunity because so little emphasis targets business owner of the single retail stores. For example, QuickBooks is a product in the U.S. but doesn’t have the POS version up in Canada. We have just launched a new version of our POS hardware and software and are introducing that to the Canadian market and the U.S. market.

FB

How does your Biometric line-up compare to your other lines in terms of growth?

WASP BARCODE

That’s interesting - we have a broad product line for inventory, asset tracking, POS and "Time in Attendance" and Biometric is 90% of our sales in the "WASP Time and Attendance" segment is through Biometric clocks. Sometimes the cards are used by heavier manufacturing companies that want the cards because of the dirt or if there are metal filings running through the air or just really dirty hands. People in this case prefer the cards. Right now biometric continues to rapidly grow. Biometrics are well received. To your point earlier, very few people recognize that for $1000.00 you can get terrifically good Biometric Clock & Time & Attendance software and we have case studies that show that the biometric solution pays for itself with customers in as little as 2-3 weeks. It is mind-boggling how quickly the return on investment is for these small businesses when they are using a biometric solution.

FB

So it gets back to that educated aspect to make sure that they are aware that these solutions exist?

WASP BARCODE

Correct, and one of the ways we try to do that Peter is that these business owners love and resonate with reading about or learning about their peer group, people like themselves. So we just put out three case studies for manufacturing companies and this is a big group of our audience for the "Time Clocks". It runs from a 14 person firm to a 30 person firm to a 100 person firm and all of them are in different segments and different sizes.

People of other companies can read about this and say, "if it works for them, it can work for me!" It’s totally how the small business audience really buys - it buys a lot on comfort because other peer groups are using the solution.

FB

Since we last spoke you have been named to the "Inc 5000" list of the fastest growing private companies. Two areas around that; what does this mean for your company? And two, what are the greatest challenges handling that amount of spectacular growth?

WASP BARCODE

It was brilliant for "Inc Magazine" to expand from a list of the top 500, to the top 5000 because they recognized as companies are a little older the % growth isn’t always as high to get to the top 500. There is still some spectacular or pretty consistent growth. For a company like Wasp Barcode, we aren’t just totally focused on top line revenue, we want to grow to live but most importantly good business has a bottom line objective as well.

Our company has been in business for 13 years and has always had consistent growth along with a very strong focus on profitability. I think that won’t change, Inc, still rewards companies for top line % growth and you have to grow the top line, that is how you see more customers, expanding the market, but you also have to be focused on smart growth, smart controlled growth, so you don’t spike up and spiral into a death bed, which happens so often when you have such quick growth and then unfortunately a quick death. Our approach is we are here continuing consistent growth on both the top and the bottom.

FB

What can we expect to see from Wasp in the future?

WASP BARCODE

There is a real passion to reach out to the business owner of small business. To bring that awareness and stimulate the fact that productivity solutions exist. That these solutions are affordable and can easily be put into place quickly and rapidly helping the business owner run their businesses more efficiently. We want to help these small businesses become more profitable and help then survive and grow more vibrant. It’s not just about selling, it’s about helping these business owners get more freedom in their life using technology to help their business grow.

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