Innovator of the Week
Steve Baines
Founder and CEO, Forcivity
Please provide your 30-second pitch about your company.
Forcivity has created a unified sales, marketing and operations platform, allowing organizations to leverage that which they covet the most…their data. No longer are the lack of data access, reporting and protection the things that keep admins up at night and prevent admins and technical staff from doing their jobs effectively. With our Conductor platform, the possibilities are limitless with unfettered, transaction-level protection and access to data from industry-leading applications such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Marketo, Eloqua and more.
Who or what was your best resource for starting your company?
I’ve been in the Salesforce.com space for over 12 years, spending the last 8 years as an architect and consultant for over 100 companies. By consulting in similar verticals, I discovered companies all struggle with the same problems with their use of Salesforce.com as a whole, integrating Salesforce.com with other applications or simply accessing their data housed in Salesforce.com or other Cloud Platforms. By encountering and solving the same challenges over and over again, I was in essence conducting market research in real time for Forcivity. These experiences gave me an immediate leg up on kick starting Forcivity with a product I knew the market needed. I also had the opportunity to meet and work with dozens of rock stars throughout the years and formed some great relationships and friendships with many of those people. I’m honored that a few of those rock stars jumped on the Forcivity bandwagon immediately to help get us off the ground! None of this could have happened without them, including my partner Max Lydstone, VP of Sales Brian Brady and Director of Engineering Ben Yaris.
What was your biggest obstacle in starting your company and how did you overcome it?
The biggest challenge I faced is getting the company off the ground while I still had a full time job. I’ve done startups previously with my last one happening while I was self-employed so it was much easier to devote whatever hours I needed to the new startup regardless of the time of day. In this case, I had to get Forcivity off the ground while still devoting full time effort to my then employer. Once I had settled on the direction of the company, I was able to assemble a small team to get Forcivity going while I transitioned out of my position at my previous employer. My vision was to walk into a functioning company the day I left my job and that’s exactly what happened.
What’s the best advice you have received?
“There a lots of great ideas out there that never get off the ground because of lack of execution. Assemble the right team around the right idea and that’s a recipe for success.”
What about the NH lifestyle appeals to you?
I was with some colleagues from Texas a few years ago and they spent their off hours traveling into Massachusetts, Maine and Rhode Island. They were fascinated by the fact they could hop in their car and be in another State within 30 minutes. They quickly reminded me you could drive ALL DAY in Texas and still be in Texas. That’s something I definitely take for granted but love being able to be in a big city, a small, quaint town, at the beach, or in the middle of the wilderness in less than an hour.
What does the future look like for your company?
We just recently won second place in the New Hampshire High Tech Council Tech Out competition and agreed to terms with an angel investor. Because of those funding commitments, we were able to hire Brian Brady as VP of Sales and ramp up our development resources to start chipping away at our long list of features on our product roadmap. We plan on staying right here in southern New Hampshire as we are all New Hampshire guys and girls.
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