For those wondering…
So, we (my company, iTickmark) are getting close to ready to have our official launch party. It has been a crazy couple of years and many of my friends and even family don’t understand where I’ve been, the things that transpired, and how we’ve ended up with our third business name even though it has only been a couple of years. Well, for those wondering, here is the chain events…
Leaving Corporate America
A few years ago, I left my job at Ernst & Young. I didn’t know exactly where I was going but I did know I wasn’t happy there and that I had big ideas and could find enough service work to get by for as long as I needed to. So, Trimtab Business Technology was born. The idea was that I had some great product ideas and I could provide technology and accounting-related consulting services for as long as necessary in the interim until I could find the time and resources to build one of them. I did a lot independent consulting in college so this was no stretch, just picked up where I left off except with much more experience behind me. It was a nice theory, all except everything changed very quickly. Just a couple months after I got started, two of my ex-coworkers approached me asking if I would be interested in joining them to start our own accounting firm. They are fantastic people and I agreed to roll Trimtab into a partnership we would start and just like that… Linford & Company LLP was born.
The rise of Linford & Company
L&C did good for awhile, then absolutely killed it for awhile, then had a rough patch, and is now really rolling again (more on that later). Starting L&C has tied working for my dad’s retail store when I was 15 years old for the best professional experience of my life. I learned extraordinarily important lessons about having partners, needing sales, building a team, and following your passion all in an extremely short period (I am convinced you couldn’t learn the same lessons I learned in two years working for someone else, like E&Y, in twenty years).
A short time after starting L&C, we decided to do something we knew the market needed. As professional auditors we had been intrigued by the idea of creating a better way for doing audit confirmations. Performing confirmation procedures is this crazy, “old school” process of sending out paper letters to various third party entities to verify certain account balances as part of a financial statement audit. We started down that road and found that thanks to the unique combination of our team’s intimate knowledge of the audit process and my background in technology and software, we could easily pull this off.
In December of 2008, we did exactly that and launched AuditConfirmations, which provides web-based software for doing audit confirmations electronically on a per-transaction fee basis. AuditConfirmations was an overwhelming success both in terms of building a successful internet-based company and (more importantly) building extraordinarily well engineered software in an agile and resource-constrained environment. We discovered, that with the right team, we could build things that likely took less than one tenth of the time and financial resources that it takes other, larger companies to do similar things.
The (re)birth of iTickmark
A more important side-effect of AuditConfirmations was that I remembered I had left my corporate job to build products… I had left my job to engineer and architect things that would someday take the pain out of what I experienced in my early post-college years, things that were real, things I could tell people “I make this”. So, in mid-2009, I reached an agreement with my partners to MOSTLY leave day-to-day client service. I retained a partnership interest in Linford & Company LLP so that I could keep in touch with public accounting practice and client service, but moved mostly into a position to build software.
As a result of this decision, we rolled Trimtab out of the practice along with me. Trimtab was back in business and was now able to focus specifically on building software for professional accountants. This is our niche in the world, but unfortunately the name “Trimtab Business Technology” means nothing to anyone in the world of professional accounting. So we decided to change the name… and iTickmark LLC was born.
Where we go from here
iTickmark is quickly growing up into a fabulous little company. We are still launching new features on AuditConfirmations that I believe will it in time to being the premier product for electronic confirmation services. We are also on the verge of the launch of workpapers.com, which will be hands down (at least in my opinion) the best, most productive software on the market for working paper and project management for risk and control based audits. Most importantly, we have a small team of great people located all around the world that are starting to making things really click.
Finally, what becomes of Linford & Company? We re-focused from broad service lines to what we really do best and we are absolutely KILLING it lately. This is thanks mostly to my business partner Newel who is driving our growth, particularly in the area of SAS70 audits. He is the driving force for the company day-to-day as Managing Partner and I am helping him as necessary. You would have to ask Newel, but I think we make an extraordinarily effective team under this arrangement.
iTickmark’s future
And that brings us to tomorrow… we build software for professional accountants (auditconfirmations.com and workpapers.com), produce content on the professional accounting and software industries (eatinghours.com and simplicityrevolution.com), and provide limited professional services. I am very proud of our progress, excited about where we are going in the immediate future, and the team we have supporting us at our young age.
