Expert to know: Martin Pellicore (Q&A Interview)

Martin Pellicore is the President at Pell Software (based in Denver, Colorado), listed on 50Pros as a top 50 firm in Software and Mobile Development.

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In this Q&A, Martin shares his in-depth perspective, unique background, robust experiences, and insightful tips.

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How did you get into your industry?

I started in software development in high school by taking several programming courses. I loved the problem-solving nature of programming and coding and I sort of organically grew more and more interested in it. When it became clear it was something I enjoyed, something I was decently good at, and something I could turn into a career, I decided to pursue it as my major in college.

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After college, I started working full time at an eCommerce development shop near my home town in the Chicago suburbs. I worked there for about 8 years while also doing freelance programming work on the side. Those freelance projects slowly grew and grew, as did my client base, and I eventually brought on some contractors to help me. Those contractors grew into full-time roles and I formed a formal LLC back in 2019. The process of Pell Software becoming what it is today has been intentionally organic and very focused on calculated, deliberate growth backed by strong systems and most of all strong employees!

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What inspired you to start your agency?

During my time working as a software engineer, I saw a clear need to bridge the gap between scoping out business requirements from a business strategy perspective, and turning those into technical requirements from a software development standpoint.

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Most of the code that was written, and this is still true today, is written by someone who has very little understanding of the actual business they are writing the code for. Programmers are given story boards or user stories and told to "get to work" without ever investing the time to get to know their users or their clients' business.

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At Pell Software, we focus on truly getting to know our clients. We place huge value on collaboration, face-time, and other tools and methods to ensure our software engineers can act as true consultants and help our clients not only realize their ideas but also design and come up with new ideas to begin with!

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Building custom work management applications, custom ERP systems and custom web portals is complex work. Seemingly small changes or tweaks to the user experience can make massive differences in a company's ability to work efficiently and see ample benefits from their investment in the software system. Therefore, our method of close-knit partnership with our clients makes us an extension of their team and allows us to provide the type of feedback that you cannot get via the traditional software development process.

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What do you like most about your industry?

The thing I like most about our industry is that it's competitive and ever-changing.

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The world of custom software development is evolving as fast as any industry out there. New technologies and frameworks come out every day and have the potential to make software development easier, faster and cheaper for our team to develop custom applications for our clients than ever before possible.

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However, there is a balance that comes along with that. New technologies are not always stable, secure, or long-lasting; and therefore they don't always make the best investment for a business. Our senior software engineers invest a lot of time and effort to stay on top of trends in our industry in order to ensure we can recommend the best and most sustainable technologies for our clients projects.

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We build custom business software: custom business portals, API integrations, work management systems, and all other kinds of back-office business utilities. These types of systems are often large investments for our clients and therefore it's critically important that we steer them in the right direction when choosing the appropriate technologies.

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What do you wish people knew about your industry?

I wish more people understood the power of owning their own software system for their business

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Owning your own IP not only increases the value of your business in the same way that owning a house increases your net worth versus renting; but it also gives you full control of the workflows you implement in your business.

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We very often work with clients who have ideas for new strategies that they want to implement to help their business grow. This can be a tweak to a sales commission plan structure, or a change to the order in which they install a new product, or the way they follow up with clients post-installation. It's not uncommon for these types of strategies to be infeasible due to the software systems they use to manage their business. If the software cannot adapt to the new idea or strategy, then you simply cannot implement it; thereby forfeiting a potentially massive advantage in your industry.

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We wish more business owners realized the huge advantages they gain by owning their own software. There are no licensing fees as there are with big name ERPs; the feature roadmap is yours to control and modify; it allows for you to diversify your business' value; and it almost always provides for a more first-hand representation of how you actually work and therefore increases productivity!

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When you first started, how did you get clients?

When Pell Software first started, we relied heavily on word of mouth; and we still do!

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Referrals have been great for us because we have amazing clients and we work extremely hard to make them happy. It's very common to get requests from your network seeking a vendor in a specific area, and when our clients' hear they have an opportunity to send someone our way they jump at that chance, knowing how dedicated and hard working we are.

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We stand by our work and we stand by our clients, acting as true partners. We truly invest ourselves in our clients and their projects by getting to know them and developing truly world-class business software applications for them. This translates to our incredible testimonials and high rate of organic growth!

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What is your approach to continuous improvement and learning within your agency?

We rely heavily on feedback from our internal staff members and our clients, and we have internal processes and meetings specifically for addressing such feedback to help us grow and learn.

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Being a young company, we know we don't have all the answers. We look at every situation as a chance to grow and improve; from our marketing strategy to our sales, operations and maintenance packages.

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We ultimately seek to offer our clients a reliable, long-term software development partner that is 100% US based and they can rely on for years to come. To do this, we must first listen to them. We readily adapt our project management techniques on a per-client/per-project basis, since every custom software project is slightly different.