I was having lunch the other day with one of our developers and we were discussing all sorts of interesting technical challenges that he was working on. After we were done, he asked me if Billtrust was going to be OK with the economy seemingly on an endlessly downward spiral.
Billtrust just finished up our best quarter ever in terms of new sales and revenues so of course I assumed that everybody knew that we were OK. Uh...wrong. Winds up that more than a few people had been talking about it. I then got to thinking, if employees felt this way, what must customers be thinking when they have even less insight into how good business is?
Billtrust gets a fair share of our business from the Wholesale Distribution market – a lot in construction supply. One of the big market changes that has occurred over the last two years is the decrease in new homes being built. Our customers who supply supplies to home builders, have seen a little fall off in business. However, the fact the people aren’t buying new homes means that they have to fix things in their current homes (meaning buying supplies for repairs). Overall, we’ve seen very little fall off in bill volume from our existing client base.
Another effect of the bad economy is business are less likely to be focused exclusively on growing top line revenue and more focused on profitability. My belief is this is one of the reasons that Billtrust has had so much success in a bad economy is because we are the perfect cost savings project. We save clients money and bring them more value.
Billtrust is in excellent shape, even with all the external bad news we keep hearing. I worry every day about what I could be missing, what events are we not anticipating, what effect will the election have, are we truly a recession proof business? None of these situations seem to impacting us negatively.
Our customers love us, we keep getting more of them every month, and we seem to be distancing ourselves from our competition. That’s a great place to be.
