It's a long way from Tallaght to Wall Street but Fleetmatics, a Dublin-based provider of GPS-based fleet management systems, has managed to navigate the journey very effectively. Nearly two years after the company successfully floated on the New York Stock Exchange in an initial public offering (IPO) that raised $132 million, it now wants to move beyond the markets it currently operates in and go global.
Jim Travers (63), the man tasked with taking the software firm public, is bullish when it comes to the group’s future prospects. These entail taking the money raised from the IPO and using it to push Fleetmatics products into new territories through a mixture of organic growth and acquisitions.
“This year is a very significant one for the company in terms of expansion, with moves into three new regions,” he told The Irish Times on a recent visit back to Dublin.
“We’ve been telling investors that we’re keen to expand into Europe and began selling into Holland earlier this year. We’ve also started making inroads into Mexico, which is a big move for us, as Latin America is a market where we’re keen to make it.
“We also started operations in Australia recently on the back of the acquisition of the Sydney-based firm Connect2Field, which gave us a good opportunity to get going there.”
With the company this week reporting a 30 per cent jump in revenue to $55.3 million in the second quarter, it seems it’s onwards and upwards for the group, which retains a major presence in Dublin.
“Business is doing very well and we continue to see good demand from our customer base. We have a lot of new applications coming out around our core product and we’re busy expanding so things are looking good right now,” he said.
For a man who tends to keep his cards close to his chest, this is fighting talk, but then again, Travers has plenty of reason to feel confident about the future.
Since he took over at the helm eight years ago, the company has grown the number of subscriptions it has for its software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite of applications from about 15,000 to more than 472,000.
Growth over the last few years in particular has been impressive. The Fleetmatics workforce has risen from 187 employees at the end of 2009 to more than 600 presently. About 100 of those are based in Dublin, where the firm maintains its core intellectual property development.
Revenue at Fleetmatics rose by more than 39 per cent to $177.4 million last year while gross profit jumped from $92.5 million in 2012 to $134.5 million at the end of December. Operating income, meanwhile, was up 79.4 per cent to $23.7 million. Earlier this year, the company forecast that full-year revenue for 2014 would be in the range of $228 million to $230 million.
The company develops and sells fleet-management software to more than 23,000 small and medium-sized businesses across multiple industries. Its technology tracks the location of vehicles and gives fleet operators a host of information on fuel use, speed, mileage, delivery times and so on.
This enables them to reduce operating and capital costs. In Mexico, companies use the software to help them trace stolen vehicles, a common problem in Latin America.
In Ireland, clients include DHL, Sierra Communications, Munster Joinery, KN Networks, South Dublin County Council and UPC.
Further afield, Fleetmatics has scored particular success in the telecoms field, with giants such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable among its customers in the US.
Travers joined Fleetmatics as chief executive in 2006, two years after the company came into existence following the merger of the Irish technology firms WebSoft and Moviltec, and just six months after it began actively selling into the US market.
At that stage, the newly formed company was operating in a market that wasn’t yet fully established, and in a world in which tech firms were viewed with suspicion following the fallout from the dotcom bubble a few years earlier. With Wi-Fi technology in its infancy, it took some time for the group to get fully established.
Online sales
“In the early days, we were growing well, but there were barriers on the tech side that slowed growth initially. Costs were higher, wireless networks weren’t great and the coverage they offered wasn’t great. This was all rectified though as the internet became increasingly popular and mobile technology took off,” he said.
“What really accelerated growth for us was the ability to sell our product over the web without making a physical call to customers. When I started with the company, we had direct sales people driving to see clients around Dublin. To get as big as we are now was largely down to us looking at how we could become more efficient and realising that selling the product online was the way to go out to a wider market”.
Travers, who hails from Philadelphia, but now resides in Atlanta, Georgia, was brought in to take the company further down the road. With more than 30 years of industry experience working for companies such as Texas Instruments, Harbinger and Agillion, he had successfully built and sold a number of high growth tech companies in both the public and private sectors.
“Coming out of college, what I really gravitated towards was working with customers and I also consciously selected technology as an area I wanted to go into based on the growth curve.
“One of the motivators in seeking to run my own businesses was that there’s a lot of bureaucracy in companies and that frustrated me. I wanted to be in a position where I would influence whatever decisions were made,” he said.
Demanding boss
To get as far in business as he has, you need to be hardheaded and Travers admits that he can be a demanding boss, although he also describes his managerial style as being collaborative.
“I set high expectations for myself and for others,” he said.
Prior to joining Fleetmatics, he served as senior vice-president of Geac, a producer of enterprise resource planning, performance management, and industry specific software that had an annual turnover of $500 million.
Before this, he was interim president and chief executive at the customer collaboration and content management provider Agillion, where he was responsible for reorganising and restructuring the business for near term profitability. He also served as chief executive of Harbinger, a publicly traded provider of e-commerce solutions. He oversaw its sale to Peregrine Systems in a $1.2 billion stock transaction in 2002.
It’s easy to see why Fleetmatics wanted Travers on board, but what did he see in it that persuaded him to take over the management of the fledgling company?
“I was attracted to Fleetmatics because I believed we could build a significant company and thought there was a real market opportunity for the product. When I looked at it, what excited me was that the market was really underpenetrated and the founders had built a really good, scalable product,” he said.
Travers has previously described the company as being “hardware agnostic” – meaning it can roll out its products quickly and easily no matter what platform customers are using.
He insists that building the business further is what gets him out of bed in the morning and says he sleeps soundly at night, no matter what is happening on the work front.
With a large number of competitors including Masternaut, Teletrac, Trimble and Tom Tom all offering similar solutions, Fleetmatics has its work cut out maintaining its current client base and gaining new subscriptions. Nonetheless, Travers is keen to point out that the company continued to grow during the recent global economic crisis and he expects that to continue to be the case.
“I’m excited about what happens next. You work hard to get a company to this level and I think there are still significant opportunities for us to grow. We have a very strong balance sheet and have been very careful about how we spend our money. I think we have a good chance of establishing ourselves on a global stage,” he said.
“I’m proud of the fact that we’ve built a very significant business that is repeatable and global,” he adds.
Given the company’s expansion plans are at full throttle, Travers is rarely in one place for very long. “Most of the time you’ll find me en route to or from an airport. I have a million plus points with Delta Airlines from all the flights I take,” he said.
As someone who visits Dublin at least once a quarter, he’s seen Ireland’s economic recovery up close and he’s impressed by the way the country has sought to deal with its problems. He believes that companies like Fleetmatics have played their part in helping Ireland get back on its feet.
However, with Fleetmatics continuing to spread its wings around the world and with much of its customer base outside of Ireland, can the company still be considered Irish?
“We’re very proud of our history. The company was founded here and Dublin is still a significant location for us to build off from . . . I’d say we’re a company that has an Irish heritage, but is very much a global business now,” he said.
CV Jim Travers
Name: Jim Travers
Position: Chairman and chief executive of Fleetmatics, a Dublin-based provider of GPS-based fleet management systems
Age: 63
Family: Married and living in Atlanta, Georgia but a frequent visitor to Ireland. As a man whose ancestors hail from Co Cork, he has given good old-fashioned Irish names to his four grown-up children – James, Sean, Patrick and Megan
Education: Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Pennsylvania State University
Hobbies: Golf, tennis
Something you might expect: He describes himself as a high-energy individual
Something that might surprise: He played basketball for Penn State, a Division One basketball college
