Today we have selected Matthew Tate to take his interview. He is the Marketing Manager/Sales Director at Flowtrac.
First of all, how are you and your team doing in these COVID-19 times?
On track to be our best year to date in over 35 years in business.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?
My name is Matthew Tate; I’m the Marketing/Sales Director at Flowtrac. I have a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership and am based out of Fort Worth, Texas, with my wife and 4 children.
How does your company innovate?
We innovate by offering an inventory management system with the ability to customize it on a client-by-client basis. When the pandemic hit, we moved from offering a perpetual licensing program to offering the same platform as a SaaS product. We also lowered our minimum required number of starting users to one. This allowed many companies to pilot or test our program and services with shallow risk and low investment.
We have also focused on exclusive partnerships with other companies with the same culture and mindset as Flowtrac. At the start of 2021, we became the exclusive inventory management software connected to a government-focused accounting system called Unanet.
https://unanet.com/news/unanet-flowtrac-partnership
How does the Coronavirus pandemic affect your business, and how are you coping?
Here in Texas, the first few months of the pandemic through late 2020 were scary and unknown for many software companies. We were a 100% US-based, non-remote working software company that was already rare in the space. When the pandemic hit, we transitioned to “work from home” with only a few leadership roles in the office. We have now returned to 100% of our staff back in the office.
Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?
The difficult choice we made was employee retention. We kept 100% of our staff when other businesses stopped requiring our services for almost an entire quarter. We learned that you have to push through the hard times and keep grinding to do a good job, and good things will happen. Hard work and dedication pay off.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
At Flowtrac, everything has settled back to our new normal of primarily providing a SaaS product to small and large companies. I’m a strong believer in managing by walking around. Having eyes on employees allows you to greet, form personal long-term relationships, and hear innovative ideas from your employees while creating that buy-in from them that gears a company up to focus on the business as a whole. Everyone moves to accomplish a single goal.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
We are unique and don’t have direct competitors. Our main focus is providing professional services alongside our full warehouse management system (WMS)/inventory tracking software solution. Everyone in our industry has focused on cookie-cutter software with poor outsourced customer service. Flowtrac went against the grain and customized every base package upon request while keeping 100% USA-based support, development, and customer service for over 35 years.
- Spokesperson: Matthew Tate
- Company: Flowtrac
- Website link:http://flowtrac.com/