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jeff mullarkey
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $45 Million from Chicago
RKON Technologies CEO Jeff Mullarkey had built a Managed Service Provider (MSP) business that I thought he could take to $500 million or a billion dollars in revenue when we spoke in 2015. Read on to learn why. Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped to $45M from Chicago
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. RKON Technologies CEO Jeff Mullarkey had built a Managed Service Provider (MSP) business that I thought he could take to $500 million or a billion dollars in revenue when we spoke in 2015. Read on to learn why. Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin at the very beginning
Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping to $45M from Chicago
RKON Technologies CEO Jeff Mullarkey has built a Managed Service Provider (MSP) business that he could take to $500 million or a billion dollars in revenue. Read how he did it. Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind
Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say that you were able to expand your margin substantially through this process? What kind of numbers are we talking? In the kind of strategic shift that you described, what does that do to the business in terms of margin? Jeff Mullarkey: After that, we delivered a much
Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: You started with the model of doing value-added resellers primarily. VARs are not hugely profitable businesses as you know from your previous experience as well as earlier versions of this one. Can you talk about how the business model evolved as you made this next strategic move into the cloud data center? Jeff
Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that next inflection point. What happened? What do you think drove that? What were the strategic moves that you made to get that next level inflection? Jeff Mullarkey: It really started with us analyzing the value that clients actually got out of working with us. We were working, typically, with
Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: For how long did the legal business run? Jeff Mullarkey: We still work with legal today. We were predominant in legal from, I would say, mid-1998 to 2000. We expanded from there. When we started to shift our focus to security, we became non-vertical specific. We worked with everybody at that point. Sramana
Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that in more of a granular, step-by-step, chronological order. Who was the first customer in 1998? How did you get that customer and what did you offer? Jeff Mullarkey: We decided to focus on the legal community. This is not our business model today. RKON stands for remote connectivity. We
