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ProntoForms taps veteran tech ‘turnaround guy’ Deck to spur sales growth

February 21, 2023
4:48 PM
ET

Organizations: ProntoForms

People: Alvaro Pombo, Philip Deck

New co-CEO says Ottawa firm – which develops “low-code” custom mobile apps that allow field workers in heavy industries such as oil and gas to collect, send, and receive data like maintenance and compliance reports – is “just scratching the surface” of its potential.

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A veteran tech executive who describes himself as a “turnaround guy” has joined ProntoForms as co-CEO to spearhead the Ottawa software firm’s pursuit of bigger customers and more lucrative contracts. Philip Deck has moved into ProntoForms’ C-suite after spending the past seven-and-a-half years on the company’s board of directors, the firm announced last week. Deck says ProntoForms – which develops “low-code” custom mobile apps that allow field workers in heavy industries such as oil and gas to collect, send, and receive data like maintenance and compliance reports – is “just scratching the surface” of its potential. “Our R&D team has done an amazing job at positioning us in the enterprise segment,” he says. “Now, it’s a bit of catchup on the sales side to take the product out to a lot more customers.” Deck says his No. 1 priority will be mapping out ProntoForms’ go-to-market strategy, leaving founder and co-CEO Alvaro Pombo – an engineer by training – to devote more of his talent and energy to keeping ProntoForms’ software platform on the cutting edge. “It’s a company that we both recognize can just grow much faster and be a much bigger business,” says Deck. “Some of the things that Alvaro wants to do on (the product side) are really exciting in terms of the kind of capabilities we can build, and I want him to spend more time doing some of that.” The Queen’s University economics graduate has a track record of engineering significant sales gains at other publicly traded Canadian tech firms and hopes to lean on that experience in his new post. As chairman and CEO of Mississauga-based Certicom from 1994-99, Deck oversaw the company’s initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1995. Certicom became a global leader in encryption technology for wireless communications before it was acquired by Waterloo-based smartphone pioneers Research in Motion (now BlackBerry Ltd.) in 2009. In 2001, Deck joined Waterloo-based MKS as chief executive. Deck helped resuscitate the TSX-listed software maker, which was floundering as the dot-com bubble burst and could barely make payroll when he arrived. By the time he left a decade later, MKS’s annual revenues had surpassed $70 million. The firm, which helped Fortune 500 companies manage the maintenance and development of their software assets, was sold to Boston-based Parametric Technology Corp. in 2011 for nearly $300 million. Deck says he sees similar upside in ProntoForms. The firm, which will report its full-year 2022 financial results early next month, earned revenues of more than US$19 million in 2021 and posted quarterly increases in the 10-per-cent range throughout last year. “We have a huge market,” Deck says. “Alvaro and I just keep talking about how much of the market is left for us to penetrate and how fast we’re going to have to grow if we’re really going to address it.” ProntoForms’ bid for a starring role in Ottawa’s tech ecosystem has been a long time coming. Pombo launched the company in February 2001 after spending five years as a senior executive at pioneering data and voice networking firm Newbridge Networks. The native of Colombia, who previously worked in IT for ExxonMobil, knew the frustrations field workers in industries like oil and gas felt when filling out paper forms to document maintenance and other tasks. Pombo designed a platform to make that process more efficient by allowing workers to fill out digital forms on new mobile devices such as the BlackBerry and PalmPilot. In 2005, the fledgling enterprise, then known as TrueContext Mobile Solutions, went public on the TSX Venture Exchange. But the young company struggled to gain traction. Pombo now says the technology was “too early to the market,” and it wasn’t until 2010, when Apple debuted its iPad tablet, that sales really began to take off. After initially targeting small and medium-sized businesses, ProntoForms – which adopted its current name in 2013 – shifted its focus to enterprise-level customers about six years ago. Today, the company earns about half of its revenues from 150 or so multinationals that include Chevron, Shell, elevator manufacturer Otis Worldwide, and medical equipment powerhouse Philips Healthcare. The rest of its sales come from 1,500 smaller enterprises. But Deck says he expects large customers’ share of that pie to grow as ProntoForms fine-tunes its go-to-market strategies. One of his main goals is creating a “more proactive” marketing and sales culture that emphasizes the return on investment customers gain from the platform, which ProntoForms claims can save field workers up to 90 minutes a day. “The payback on our software is enormous,” Deck says. “We have probably 50 major enterprise customers that could all use five times, 10 times as much software as they already have. A lot of the really big opportunities that we see are just within our own customer base.” Deck also wants to penetrate deeper into growing verticals like medical equipment, where ProntoForms now has about two dozen major customers under contract. “We know the companies that we should be in,” he says. “Now it’s a matter of just targeting them and taking the story of what we’ve done with their competitors and focusing on those accounts.” Pombo agrees the company, which has more than 140 employees in Ottawa, the United States and the United Kingdom, has a much higher ceiling. He hopes bringing Deck into the C-suite will fast-track its ascent. “This is the time to put as many shoulders behind the ball as we can, and there wasn’t a better guy that we could find (to help with) that piece of the story,” Pombo says. “We all want to succeed, and we just want to get there faster.”