AMI Paper List
Founded in 1968 by George's father, this bootstrapped, profitable document digitization and business process services firm works with about 100 clients at any time, with an average contract size near $100K and a government deal of $367,000. The company reported annual revenue of a little bit north of $2 million for 2015 and targeted about $2.5 million for 2016, while George develops a SaaS document management product built around a 45-day implementation guarantee.
The company's core belief is that paper documents should not sit in file rooms or be routed desk to desk, so it digitizes paper and automates business processes for enterprise clients. George is now building a SaaS product to simplify document management, because existing enterprise software has become bloated and expensive.
- •Selling digitization as a full turnkey solution, rather than just scanning or software, lets the company charge enterprise-scale contracts.
- •Five decades of profitability and delighted clients give the company a reputation that supports selling large, high-stakes government and enterprise projects.
- •Targeting the roughly 10% of features customers actually use, with a 45-day implementation guarantee, positions the planned SaaS product against bloated incumbents like IBM, Oracle, and EMC.
- •Bootstrapping for decades kept the company profitable without outside financing, which is why it could scale steadily from microfilm roots into digital services.
- 1.Sell a complete outcome (digitize, automate, and hand over a working system) instead of a single component like scanning or software licensing.
- 2.Focus on mid-level enterprise customers with a real, specific pain point, where contract sizes can reach six figures.
- 3.Use a narrow, guaranteed implementation timeline as a selling point against complex incumbent software.
- 4.Build the SaaS product by stripping an existing services workflow down to the features customers actually use.
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