As every year, our CEO, Thibault Levi-Martin, shares his wishes, reviews the major milestones of the previous year and presents the vision and objectives for the coming year. Here is the memo sent to the teams with some modifications to share it outside Partoo :
A year dedicated to local
A year ago, we decided to put stores managers at the heart of our strategy. By doing so, we took the opposite approach to the one adopted by our competitors and came back to our origins.
It is now clear that our decision is paying off. The number of local users using Partoo now stands at 24,409, representing an increase of 143% since last January. And this is only the beginning!
2020 has, of course, been characterised by lockdown as a result of the global pandemic. But it has also shown that Partoo knows how to stay strong. While many companies have collapsed, we have continued to grow (from 77 employees last January to the current 143), driven by the need for points of sale to bring customers in stores, thanks to our solution.
As a result, we have reached several milestones this year:
- Improving the quality of our products by releasing features such as template for Review Management, edit permission management, custom fields, direct sync with Apple, optimised category management, Google Posts and real-time reviews centralisation
- Announcing a new corporate identity with a logo that reflects what we are — professional, innovative and friendly
- Achieving over 94% customer satisfaction following interactions with our support team
- Renewing over 300 contracts with a combined value of €3.3 million, accounting for 90% of our clients
- Winning in 73% of cases against competitors
- Signing 5 international contracts from Paris, amounting to €193,000
- Signing our first contracts in Brazil
- Developing the SMB market internationally by signing several resellers
- Increasing our ARR from €4.7 million to €8 million — an increase of 71.5% (including €1 million from SMBs)
- Becoming the leader in our historical markets (France, Spain, Italy)
Never before has Partoo accomplished so much so quickly. Well done everyone!
Above and beyond everything we have achieved together, 2020 will always be memorable for me as the year that I realised the possibilities for Partoo to grow even more.
Infinite potential
I always wanted to create a company with a unique vision; I wanted us to write our own story. But it has just been over the last few months that we have finally managed, as a team, to show that there is a place for a software dedicated to store managers (and not only to marketing managers). I am convinced that this approach is the one that brings the most value to our market. Clearly, it’s people working in stores that are in the best position to respond to reviews and messages, change their opening hours, share news, manage reservations and orders, etc.
Furthermore, as we have seen, Partoo has become a ‘must-have’ in 2020. Working on its SEO cannot be considered as an option. That said, in a market estimated at over 300 million stores, barely 1% use a solution like ours.
And we are still only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The various initiatives launched by GAFAs for store managers (messages, local advertising, reservations, orders, etc.) will only reinforce the need for the latter to have a central solution that do the link between platforms that are essential to their activity.
This is what has convinced us to launch the Apolloo plan.
Apolloo
During lockdown, Thibault Renouf and I shared with Webedia the future we had in mind for Partoo. Firm in our belief that we could work together, as a company, to make Partoo a global reference, we presented the Apolloo plan to Webedia’s owner, Marc Ladreit de la Charrière. The plan aims to achieve €100 million in ARR by the end of 2025 and is based on the following 3 levers:
- International development, with the opening of offices in two new countries per year. Recruitment and adaptation to cultural specificities will be key to the success of this expansion.
- Increased investment on the SMBs market
- Product improvement, with the addition of new features. Partoo can become a reference if it evolves into a very complete tool that store managers use on a daily basis. In order to achieve this, we must keep in mind that simplicity will be our greatest strength.
This 5-years plan is the first step of a much more ambitious development plan that will undoubtedly involve external growth operations to strengthen our offering.
Our goal is to become the leading app, used by stores around the world, to boost their revenues thanks to digital. By bringing value for millions of establishments on a daily basis, we will make Partoo one of the world’s leading software companies.
Staying on the right track
As you can see, we are about to write a new page in our history. However, it is important not to forget what made our success until today. It is only thanks to the quality of our customer relations, the power of our marketing speech, the efficiency of our commercial approach, and the continuous improvement of our product that we have grown to where we are today.
Without you, your motivation, your skills and your optimism, we would not have achieved this.
Our growth over the coming years will be unprecedented. It will provide us not only with great personal opportunities (new roles, new responsibilities, continuing professional development, etc.) but also a lot of challenges that will require hard work.
In order for this new stage to be successful, it is important that we raise our standards. I already mentioned this in the 2020 memo, and it is even more applicable today. If we become even more demanding, we will be more efficient and fairer and our customers all the happier; only then will we be able to stake our claim to being the market leader.
In order to achieve this we must:
- Go to the end of initiated projects, by rigorously preparing emails and interventions (internal and external), paying attention to details, never avoid successive iterations if it brings value, and identify the causes of problems rather than just dealing with the symptoms
- Be aware of the responsibilities that come with our positions by welcoming the opportunity to speak to senior managers in large organisations, by taking a strategic approach in our interventions to make them all convincing
- Sometimes, go beyond our job descriptions by taking initiatives, by being constantly concerned and refusing to say “That’s not my problem”
- Constantly question ourselves; this means listening carefully (as opposed to reacting quickly), always with the goal of promoting Partoo’s interests rather than just ourselves or our own teams. We also need to see things more from the user’s perspective, which will allow us to design the best product on the market
- Make difficult decisions, if this is in Partoo’s best interests, without neglecting our long-held values, which include empathy
- Recruit talented people who will help us grow both individually and collectively, keeping in mind that they should be fun, curious and caring
Let’s all work together to ensure that Partoo becomes synonymous with excellence!
2021
As you can see, the last 12 months have been crucial for Partoo; they have also helped me to identify the following 5 areas of development for 2021 composed by ambitious targets (3 relating to growth, as explained above, and 2 that will make the latter sustainable):
- International development:
- Opening offices in India and Mexico
- Accelerating our operations in Brazil
- Developing our SMB operations:
- Confirming our ability to distribute Partoo in a scalable way to SMBs, directly and in multiple countries through cold calling
- Expanding our offering:
- (confidential)
- Local:
- Getting closer to local (by increasing the number of Partoo Academies with store managers and user interviews with this type of client, and by highlighting the experiences of stores on which Partoo has had a significant impact)
- Increasing the use of the app with more than half of our users that log in to the interface on average once a week
- Having more Entreprises clients that delegate the use of Partoo to store managers
- Customer satisfaction:
- Maintaining a renewal rate of over 90%
- Achieving over 90% customer satisfaction following interactions with our support team
- Having an NPS of over 50 and gradually getting closer to 100
- Demonstrating that we can generate over €50,000 in ARR through upselling without human intervention (via notifications on the interface)
Considering the success we have had in 2020, despite the current climate, I strongly believe that we will succeed in achieving our goals for 2021.
If we all continue to enjoy what we do, remain open-minded and curious, and always show our concern for others; if we truly believe that we can bring a little bit of happiness or success to those we work with, then we can’t fail to achieve even greater things together.
I wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2021.
Strength & honor.
The 1st of January 2021.
Thibault Levi-Martin
