Julien Sellgren is currently working on his fourth startup. The 41-year-old tech entrepreneur started his first company, a point-of-sale system for pool halls, before he had graduated from university. In 2001, he founded software firm Metalogix; he sold it in 2008 and stayed on as CTO until 2011.
But it was at his second company, a software consultancy firm he started with three other programmers, that he says he learned his most valuable business lesson.
"I had kind of landed this project on my own, so it was a big deal for me," said Sellgren. "I was working on it pretty much just myself, and it got off to a terrible, terrible start."
"The client was not happy with the deliverables, with me, with how things were going."
Sellgren, who was in his twenties at the time, realized if the project failed, his reputation would take a hit and the consultancy would falter. "I decided that I was going to please the customer if it was going to kill me," he said.
"I worked as hard as I could, I pulled all-nighters, I just kept the pedal to the metal and I involved them in the process. Over the space of maybe a week, I was able to win them back."
As well as pulling three all-nighters in a week and cancelling an upcoming vacation, Sellgren said he over-communicated every aspect of the project, gradually forming a strong bond with the previously disgruntled clients.
It's a lesson he took with him when it came to getting and keeping clients for Metalogix. When a client was trying out Metalogix's product as well as a competitor's, Sellgren recognized customer service was key to winning the "bake-off."
"I discovered that the way to win was to let the customer know that if there was a deficiency or if there is something that they need, we'll do that and I'm pretty sure the other guy won't," said Sellgren."If there was a feature missing, we would build it to win the deal."
While pulling all-nighters isn't realistic for every project, Sellgren said he learned that showing the client that "you're fighting for them" was key to winning business.
"You need to let them know that when things get tough, you're going to pull out all the stops," he said.
