City software company partners with U.S. tech firm

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/01/2022 (1370 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Permission Click, the Winnipeg software company started in 2013 whose platform allows school teachers to create digital permission slips for field trips and every manner of communications between teachers and students and their parents, has been acquired by the U.S.-based global technology company, Intrado.

Founded by Chris Johnson, one of the four founders of North Forge, the company has grown steadily — Permission Click now has more than one million users — doubling sales every year. But the challenge of breaking into the notoriously difficult education space prevented sales from growing even faster than they might have.

In fact last year Permission Click partnered with Intrado — a company active in many sectors of the digital marketplace, especially around mission-critical services like 911 emergency networks — to leverage the larger company’s sales force in the school sector.

Intrado has a service called SchoolMessenger which also provides a digital communication platform between schools and parents.

That partnership went so well that both sides decided it made sense to fully integrate and for Intrado to acquire Permission Click.

Johnson, formerly the largest shareholder, and his team of 18 employees at Permission Click will all remain with Intrado and the company will continue to develop the software platform and remain working in Winnipeg.

No financial details of the transaction were disclosed, but Johnson said “it was sold at a strong multiple” with further incentives for Johnson and his team if sales hit certain thresholds.

Intrado, which has a dominant market share in the education space in the U.S., referred to Permission Click in its press release, as “a pioneer in education technology” and Vik Krishnan, general manager of its Digital Workflows business said adding its “powerful tool” to Intrado’s solutions will advance “our leadership in the education marketplace.”

He added. “We are excited to add Permission Click and its stellar team to our SchoolMessenger business to expand our suite of solutions and provide a powerful tool for forms and workflow automation, policy compliance, and risk management. This acquisition further strengthens our leadership position in communications, workflow automation, and safety in the K-12 education market and beyond.”

With the sale, Permission Click becomes the model for other Winnipeg technology entrepreneurs looking for an example of a company starting with little-to-no personnel resources and becoming an international success.

The company actually emanated out of a Ramp Up Weekend event, a startup competition which bring teams together in an ad-hoc fashion over the course of a weekend where business ideas are pitched, teams formed and basic market research and concept validation are rapidly undertaken.

The company’s first office was in the current site of North Forge’s fabrication lab (then called AscentWorks).

Curwin Friesen, the outgoing chairman of Permission Click’s board (and an investor in the company) said, “It shows that a Manitoba startup can build world class software that can catch the attention of one of the dominant players in the world.”

Johnson, 39, has been a high-profile leader of the startup ecosystem for several years while engaged in all the heavy lifting that goes along with trying to start a company.

In addition to being hands-on developing the product, Johnson was also the company’s sole salesperson.

“I had just got approval from our board for a huge expenditure to grow our own sales organization. We were going to hire a 10-person team and really get going,” he said.

Almost simultaneously they had made a sales-representative agreement with Intrado.

“The moment we met Intrado, they closed a couple of quick sales and I went right back to the board and said, ‘No, we have to go to the reseller path’,” Johnson said. “Then it all happened so quickly, over a couple of months. They just saw a good thing and we did too. It was a perfect fit.”

Johnson said it was frustrating and satisfying at the same time to see Intrado make sales to the same schools that Permission Click had been unsuccessful at in the past because of Intrado’s existing relationship with schools and school divisions.

Johnson said while many had asked him about his “exit plan” — monetizing founders’ sweat equity through a sale or an initial public offering — he always said he did not have one, choosing instead to take a more careful approach focused on product development rather than increasing revenue quickly.

“Investors say you need to target yourself to who we want to sell to,” Johnson said. “We did not do any of that. We just focused on building something great and counted on someone finding it.”

He said the process of being scrutinized by a multi-billion dollar company in the due diligence process was something he was not mentally prepared for.

“We would have three people on our team and they had 60 people in the (online) meeting,” he said.

But Johnson said it was a “deeply satisfying outcome” especially in terms of championing Winnipeg as a place that can support technology startups.

“It can happen in Winnipeg,” he said. “You can raise millions of dollars, hire internationally talented people, get multi-billion dollar customers to buy your stuff, sell long-term contracts for software-as-a-service all from your garage in Winnipeg. That can happen.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca