Q&A with Nimbello founder Millind Agtey
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Milind Agtey moved from Mumbai, India, to the U.S. in 1977 for his MBA at the University of Notre Dame. Following the completion of his program, he got a job at local accounting firm, Crowe Chizek, now Crowe LLP. He rose through the ranks, became a partner and headed up the company’s tax division.
Born out of his accounting experience, Agtey set out to automate the excruciatingly manual invoicing process when he started Granger-based Nimbello, formerly Easy Access, 14 years ago. With customers across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, Nimbello is gearing up for its next phase of operations.
Agtey spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the service Nimbello offers, the future of accounts payables and how his leadership style has evolved in the last decade.
This article has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What were you doing before moving to the U.S.?
I worked in a completely different career on cargo ships. I sailed on ships for about 10 years, got my master’s certificate, which allows me to be a captain on a ship, but then I left. That’s a great career as long as you’re single. It is very difficult if you’re married because you’re on the ship all the time. I was navigating large oil tankers, cargo ships, not passenger ships. For 10 years, all I did 24 hours a day was look at water. So when people say they want to go on vacation on a beach, that’s the least interesting thing to me. I’d rather sit and look at land than look at water.
What was it like starting Nimbello after working in the corporate world?
The first 13 years, it was known as Easy Access. About a year and a half ago we rebranded to Nimbello. Until then, I was a sole shareholder but in order to increase the size of the company, I decided to bring in some outsiders and raise some funds. We wanted to create a new aura around the company and so part of that was rebranding. The service we are providing is sort of new. Not many companies are in it, so I would say for the next two to four years, if somebody is going to try to expand, this is the time to do it. Because then there will be a lot more competition and it will be much harder to expand.
Can you talk me through the service Nimbello offers?
Nimbello has developed a software which allows clients automate the processing of an invoice. For example, if you were our client, you would buy something from another company. That company would send you a shipping receipt saying, here’s what we sent you and they’d send you an invoice for that. When that invoice comes in, typically, your people would compare it with the shipping receipt to make sure the quantity is correct and then they would compare it to the purchase order to make sure that the price was correct. If everything matches up, that invoice would be manually entered into your accounting system to be paid. If something didn’t match up, then there’s a problem and you have to contact somebody within your company to find out what to do with the difference. The quantity could be off, the price could be off or something else. This whole process is all paper driven, manual and takes a lot of time.
Our software reads whatever is on that invoice, captures the data and automatically compares it with how much you were expecting to be charged and how much you were expecting to receive. If everything matches up, nobody needs to touch the invoice. It’s automatically put into your accounting system. If something doesn’t match up, it finds out what is wrong and automatically sends it to the person who needs to determine what to do with that variance. We are basically automating a very manual process.
In the 15 years since you started Nimbello, what’s the biggest difference between running your own company and being an employee?
There are quite a few differences. When you are an employee, your main task is to make sure your job is done, you don’t have to worry about everything else. You don’t have to worry if HR is working, if payroll is working, if the electricity is on, if there is enough cash in the bank. As a business owner, doing your main job, whatever that might be, is just one small component. All these other things that I mentioned take up a lot of your time. That is the biggest difference.
How does Nimbello market to its target audience? Or how do you find your next client?
There is no easy answer. You have to do a lot of little, little steps. Up till now, one of the biggest challenges we have is convincing people that what I’m telling them can actually be done. They’d say because every invoice looks different, how am I so sure that if they get 10 different invoices, my software is actually going to read all 10 of them accurately? Some invoices are horizontal, some are vertical, some are combined. Some have boxes, some have colors. So that was one.
Second, every business pays its bills, so it’s not like they’re not doing the job. They are. So I’m now trying to convince them that the job that they’re doing, that is working, I can actually make them do it more efficiently. So inertia is one of our major hurdles.
More people are recognizing that maybe what I’m saying is not impossible, because they are starting to hear about the quality of data capture. A few years ago, they had not heard about it. The University of Notre Dame was one of our first clients. We also work with Lippert Components and Forest River, in the RV business. Those are some of our Indiana-based clients.
Is your service industry-based?
Our product is not industry based, anybody who has an invoice can use our product. The difference is, if you only get 10 invoices a month, we will save you 10 minutes and you might not think that’s worth it. If you get 1,000 invoices a month, you’ll have more interest. So our product is more directed towards companies with a higher invoice volume and typically those companies are either in the manufacturing sector or in higher education or hospitals. Those are the three groups that buy it. One vendor could be sending them 30 to 50 invoices a month. Your company for example, other than your utility bills, you probably don’t have more than two or three invoices a month because you are a service based organization at IBJ Media. We won’t be good clients of our company, because we are also service based and aside from utilities, we don’t buy a whole lot of anything.
What do you see in terms of growth and development for the company?
Growth is somewhat open-ended. We have grown by almost 80% in this last year and our target is to maintain that same growth for the next few years. I don’t know if we will be able to but there is enough available market that if we are able to capture it, we should be able to and that’s the target. Then along the way as other companies start getting into this, we will have to distinguish what it is that we do differently. We have invested a lot of time and effort into refining what we do and we’re essentially focusing on companies that have complicated invoices. Before, as long as you had an invoice, we could do it. Now we are saying that our competition can handle the simple tasks but if you have an invoice with multiple pages or a single invoice for multiple deliveries, then our solution can handle that. So we’ve started segmenting the market and going deeper into more complicated issues.
And how has your leadership style evolved over the last 15 years?
I would talk about this in two groups; one is the first 13 years and the other is the last two years. For the first 13 years, it was just me. Our company was growing a little bit at a time, but in the last two years, we added a lot more people and a lot of them were at a higher level. So a lot of activities that I was doing, I had to let go and have other people do it. That in itself was quite a challenge. Not only did I not do them anymore but in some cases, I didn’t even make the decision whether it should be done or not. That was a personal thing that I had to get used to and now I have learned to not delve into the details like I used to, because I’d be undermining the person who’s supposed to be handling that. It’s a completely new role that I have to play, where I have to rely on somebody else, telling me this is what we are doing.
What’s your advice to other young, hopeful entrepreneurs from other parts of the world who have now come to America in search of greener pastures?
If you’re trying to start a business, the U.S. is probably the best place to start it. Unlike most countries, in the U.S., if you have a good idea and a good product and a way to do it, you can have success. In most other countries, besides all of that, you also have to know somebody to get a license, to get a place to work; there are lots of obstacles that are not connected with the business and unless you cross those, you cannot start the business.
In the U.S., the question becomes how do you actually start a business? Obviously, you need to have an idea. You need to have the guts to work. Most importantly, I think you need to be aware that you can fail. In fact, I once read that only 10% of businesses make it to year five. In other words, 90% of the businesses are going to fail. That’s a very high failure rate. In the beginning, you are primarily on your own, so you don’t have the luxury of having other people guide you.
So the only advice I can give is to recognize that you will make mistakes. The key is to quickly recognize you made a mistake and pivot, try something else and if that doesn’t feel right, try a slightly different approach. As long as you can do that rapidly, don’t sink too far into a hole, the pleasure of succeeding, however little that goal was, is amazing, wonderful. You don’t get that pleasure if you’re an employee.
Looking back on your journey as an entrepreneur, is there anything that you would have done differently?
To be an entrepreneur, sometimes it is better to have less knowledge because then you don’t get scared. You don’t get scared of things you don’t know about. Now that I know all the things that could go wrong. If I had known all of this when I first started, I would have continued as an employee because I would have said, this is too risky. So it’s a backward way of answering your question. But there are always things that I could have done differently, but that’s based on hindsight, which you don’t have upfront.