Womply was founded in San Francisco in 2011. They also have an office in Portland, Oregon, and after years of measured success, it was decided that another location was needed to help maximize growth. So like any smart, young startup, Womply began examining options. They spoke with other companies who had also expanded throughout the United States, weighing the possibilities before circling in on one particular area: Lehi, Utah.
Womply met with the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) and structured a deal that would add up to 175 jobs to Silicon Slopes, starting with the opening of a new office in November 2016. It is now March 2017 and over 100 of those jobs have already been filled, with Womply beginning to fill out a leadership team that grows, protects, and simplifies in Utah.
“Womply has a lot of business traction but also a lot of potential,” said Brad Plothow, Head of Communications at Womply. “Womply is doing a rare thing for Utah — rather than just bringing a sales floor or call center into Utah as a company headquartered in San Francisco, Womply is expanding a lot of its functional leadership and departments in Utah. This is a good thing for Utah, it shows Silicon Valley is taking notice of not just the sales talent, but of the functional talent as well.”
Plothow — most recently a partner at Method Communications — is part of this newly formed leadership team, joining some other Utah-based talent to round out the squad: Dave Rogers as VP of Sales, Kelly Morris as VP of Marketing, and Scott Sanford as VP of Operations.
Boosted by a recent $30 million growth equity round from Sageview Capital, Womply has been able to quickly ramp up efforts across all three locations and Utah is seeing a portion of that benefit.
“Womply ultimately decided to choose Utah for a handful of reasons,” said Plothow. “Industriousness and quality of the workforce….and the cost structure of running a business in Utah is much more advantageous than some of these larger markets that have major infrastructure costs. Obviously, there is a lot of room to grow here.”
Until now, Womply has flown mainly under the radar — this has been intentional, content to stay quiet until they were completely confident in what they offered. This article — and more importantly, the newfound emphasis on growth — should tell you that’s about to change.
“There are a lot of advantages to not telling everybody what you’re doing from a product and strategic standpoint, until you get to a place you’re established — in Womply’s case, good distribution and a solid product,” said Plothow. “To its credit, Womply has been really deliberate about waiting to make sure that both product and distribution issues are really figured out, where the company can start scaling before they tell everybody what they’ve been up to.”
Womply’s offerings concentrate on the world of small- and medium-sized businesses, providing a technology and data platform that helps to manage their front office functions. This comes from a variety of products, most notably a platform called Insights that helps with many different issues confronting small businesses — finding/identifying your best customers, finding/understanding revenue changes that occur over time, maintaining/improving your online reputation, and tracking your competitors and receiving notifications when they do things like alter hours of operations.
“It also looks at the way your customers spend money,” said Plothow. “If you want to make a promotion that’s going to resonate, you will have some data visibility into what exactly is working for customers and how they’re spending money with you.”
So what’s the next step for Womply? Well, more growth. They will continue to expand in Utah while searching for other ways to improve the company. What happens after that remains to be seen…
“To this point, the company has focused a lot of its attention on providing this suite of services to small businesses,” said Plothow. “We have a product strategy that includes launching individual products that are more specialized for small businesses, so there’s lots and lots of room to grow on the product side.”