My thoughts on Mimo, Part 2 - Growth
Mimo has experienced explosive growth since CEO David Anderson acquired it in 2013. Since then, Mimo has continued to grow and evolve in terms of staff, revenue, and company reach. Read this blog post to learn more about Mimo’s growth evolution in the last ten years from President, David Anderson’s point of view:
Since I purchased Mimo in 2013, the company has grown in terms of revenue, profit, people, and verticals we operate in and sell to every year (with the exception of 2020). I believe that the path to achieving success financially is all rooted in people: your team, your customers and the relationships you build and cultivate with them.
When I bought Mimo Monitors, the company was only three people, including myself. Nine years later, we are a team of 25 dedicated, loyal people. I believe that a company is only as strong as its team and its culture, which is why I’ve prioritized sustainability-- hiring the right people, investing in them, and then keeping them for the long haul. In the nine years since being the CEO of Mimo we’ve only had two people leave for various reasons, which is an incredibly strong retention rate that I am very proud of. I do strongly believe that I’ve worked hard to cultivate a culture where people feel valued and heard while also contributing strongly to the company’s success.
When I took over Mimo, the company was mostly a B2C company selling small displays directly to consumers via ecommerce. While Mimo had their feet wet in a couple B2B verticals such as transportation and was in a few conference rooms, it was in its infancy. I saw a huge opportunity for growth and expansion for Mimo in the B2B space and knew that the company needed a lot of investment both in terms of engineering and marketing in order to have wider reach and visibility in order to grow in profitability.
While the first few years of growth at Mimo was slow, I learned the market and where we were best positioned. I identified conference rooms as the best jumping off point and the vertical we should allocate our biggest resources to. While Google was already a customer, they were only a very small segment of the business. I focused heavily on cultivating a strong relationship with Google and working to collaborate with them to create products that would maximize and optimize their conference rooms. Now, we also outfit all of their 18,000 conference rooms around the world. In addition, we’ve collaborated with other powerhouses like Lenovo, Bose and others. I was able to grow this business through cultivating strong relationships in the conference room space, but also in marketing and building our brand equity as leaders in the conference room arena. With that, we’ve also created custom products for many of these companies, solving their specific challenges with our engineering prowess and R&D. Many of them have been returning customers or customers for many years.
With this success, we reinvested almost all the profits back into the business since the beginning, funding its growth. We have always been bootstrapped, profitable (aside from 2020), and except for a traditional bank Line of Credit, we are debt free. Through this reinvestment, Mimo finished 2022 almost exactly 10x the size we were in 2013 when I took the business over, another new revenue record. Our 2023 revenue plan projections are for an additional 52% growth over 2022. In addition, we’ve been able to grow across many other B2B sectors where we previously did not have equity. We now are growing and expanding across healthcare, education, hospitality, museums, stadiums and much more.