Like many business owners looking to uncover the x-factor of a business’s success, Henry Schuck, co-founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg, a Vancouver-based sales and marketing intelligence software company, was troubled by the answer he most commonly heard.
“I would hear CEOs be asked a question, ‘What makes your company so special or what’s the secret sauce?’ and they would always say, ‘Our people.’ It was always about our people, our people, our people. I was always frustrated with that answer. And then this last year I realized that is absolutely 100 percent true. I think one of my fundamental focuses has become hiring the right people in the right roles that need attention, and then giving them the freedom to execute on the plans,” said Schuck.
Founded in Ohio in 2007, DiscoverOrg moved to Vancouver in 2009 and has since seen the quantity and quality of its staff grow. A round of financing from a private equity firm in May 2014 quickly boosted its steady growth.
“From June 2014 we went from an 80 person headcount to today around a 250 headcount, and we’re still hiring pretty aggressively. If we hit all of our growth projections, which we’re on track to do, we’ll add another 100 this year,” said Schuck.
Key to the company’s growth is DiscoverOrg’s scalable, flexible database platform, which maps out the organizational charts of companies all over the globe. The database includes information ranging from verified email addresses and direct-dial numbers to company reporting structures. This allows DiscoverOrg’s clients to easily identify decision-makers. To ensure accuracy, database entries are updated and refreshed by the company’s team of in-house researchers at least once every three months.
“Today at DiscoverOrg there’s a researcher downtown in our offices 20 hours a day,” said Schuck. “We’re now profiling international companies, so there’s a team that comes in and does Asia Pacific from 2 to 10 p.m.; a Europe, Middle East [and] Africa team comes in at 2 a.m. The only time when there isn’t someone doing research on prospects here is between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.”
With the rapid growth of his company, Schuck has had to look beyond the local area for employees. He’s brought in talent from Houston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Minnesota, California, Northern Pennsylvania, the Bay Area and Austin.
“We’ve had luck convincing people to move here from different locations,” he said. “The general sentiment of this area is good. People like the idea of living in the Pacific Northwest.”
Beyond hiring and expansion, Schuck said one of DiscoverOrg’s main priorities is to demonstrate just how viable a tech company can become in Southwest Washington.
“We want to prove you can build a really successful and vibrant technology company in Vancouver,” he said. “One of the external pressures that we put on ourselves is that we want to be incredibly successful as technology company here so we can tell the story to the outside world that you can build and grow a technology company in Vancouver. We feel that’s an important mission of ours.”
In terms of satisfying that mission, Schuck said the company may be as little as two years away.
“When we can build to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, which is in a two-year plan for us, that really sets a stake in the ground that says Vancouver is a place where you can build a software and technology company. [You will be able to] point to DiscoverOrg as a company that’s done it.”
DiscoverOrg
805 Broadway, Suite 900 Vancouver www.discoverorg.com
Founded 2007
