Last week, Valsoft Corp., a Canadian firm that acquires and develops vertical market software businesses, added a popular name in the security industry to its portfolio when it announced it acquired WeSuite.
WeSuite is a leader in sales management software solutions tailored for the city and technology service sectors, and has grown effectively and organically since its founding in 2008.
Valsoft said the purchase strengthens its position in the alarm and security vertical and it marks the first company in the sales management software industry to join the Valsoft.
Working with Aspire Software, Valsoft’s operating division, WeSuite will have the opportunity to strengthen their presence in the market and be positioned for product and service improvements while leveraging the Valsoft network.
WeSuite’s founders – President Tracy Larson and Michael Fazio, Chief Technology Officer – will maintain their current roles at the company, which Valsoft said will “ensure continuity” of leadership and innovation at WeSuite.
Larson and Chris Malouf, an investment partner at Valsoft, spent time at ISC West this week talking to customers and other industry stakeholders about the acquisition. Malous told SecurityInfoWatch.com it’s meant to strengthen both sides of the equation and WeSuite will have a bright future under the Valsoft umbrella.
“We will employ a decentralized management approach with their businesses, meaning that brand will live on with their offices in place, and the employees stay in place,” Malouf says. “Our preference is for the senior staff to stay on board, and Tracy and (co-founder Michael Fazio, Chief Technology Officer) are staying on board, which makes us really happy.
“At the end of the day, all the companies we buy are very vertically focused. You have to have an understanding of your industry. We consider ourselves to be software generalists with best practices on how to streamline the businesses that we acquire, but we understand that the people in the businesses are the ones with the industry knowledge, and that's what's going to let us drive over the long haul.”
Malouf says what Valsoft looks for in acquisition partners is mission critical products that are part of the daily workflow of the user, of the software.
“WeSuite checks all those boxes. And when talking to customers, the feedback has been, ‘We can't live without this. We can't run our business without this.’ Because they’re so ingrained with the customers, we have the opportunity to sell them so many other things to them if we have the products.”
Larson says she is very excited about the acquisition and the future of WeSuite.
WeSuite was founded in 2008. Larson and Fazio had run a top-performing systems integration company that delivered security projects. Despite their success, they saw firsthand where the sales process fell short, making it hard for companies to grow profitably.
Their goal was to produce sales estimating software to save time, close organizational gaps, increase profitability and automate branded company sales documents.
WeSuite’s solutions include WeOpportunity, a platform designed to boost sales prospecting, lead generation and pipeline management to help position businesses for success in a competitive market.
WeEstimate offers sales teams control over configuration, pricing and quoting, complemented by a framework for approvals, contracts and commissions. And QuoteAnywhere caters to field sales professionals with real-time, interactive quoting through visualization and product positioning.
WeSuite was recently named as a winner in SecurityInfoWatch’s Readers Choice Awards for business management and software solutions.
“The biggest thing for us is to find a really good home for our team. Our core values are very important to us. Our clients are really important to us. And just ensuring the future of both in a good way was kind of the, the primary driver,” for the deal, Larson says.
“And with Valsoft we have access to so many more resources. If you look at our roadmap, it will help us to go there faster and better than us continuing by ourselves,” she says. “So we look at it as just a great way to expand the business, maybe get some other verticals and invest in the future of the product and our team.”
“We're not buying to make it look pretty and the flip it in three to five years. We're not a private equity firm,” Malouf says. “We buy the companies for the very long term.”
