PACEfunding’s Business Executive Is Shocked When The Vendor He Hired Fails To Deliver The Software Required!

By Brett Martin

Mark Schmidt, COO at PACEfunding faced a PROBLEM.

His company PACEfunding helps homeowners get financing to make clean energy upgrades through both its channel partners and direct salespeople.

Mark was a non-technical C-level executive without a CTO. A Chief Technical Officer would be accountable for helping his organization grow, not just in infrastructure, but in leading the design of products that create sales demand.

When tasked with sourcing and hiring the right software outsourcing partner to help a business grow, it’s no surprise if non-technical executives might feel a little ill-equipped in their new role as the de-facto technology advisor.

Stressor:

When responsible for decisions around helping his organization adopt emerging technologies and understand the long-term impact, all software outsourcing consultants look alike. Mark fell into a buying trap of choosing the low-bidder to build the loan portal for his business.

Unfortunately, his initial software vendor failed and was ultimately fired. Now, Mark was stuck.

“I had moved away from one vendor, and I had no idea which software vendor to turn to.

And a vendor coming onto a software rescue project has a greater liability to accept: quality of the code, can ALL the bugs be identified and fixed, a client who is clearly irritated, jaded, and drained of budget. I understand we were a risky project for Closeloop Technologies to take on!”

PACEfunding’s project was seriously behind schedule (6 months late!) and the company still needed to automate and scale its revenue process for loan approval and administration.

To further increase the pressure on Mark, his company’s loan process was substantially more complex than a typical loan approval. There were more steps and paperwork required and external partners were involved. Finally, the loans are funded and contractors are paid after ensuring all work has been performed and accepted by the customer.

Our Thinking:

The customer needed to correct software errors and deploy the right technologies and process the software development lifecycle approach. Our focus was to deliver the working “PACE Power Tools” system with the correct software designed and deploy a fully custom software platform supporting all aspects of PFG’s business.

The Software Manufacturing Solution:

We teamed up with the customer to solve their problems by applying CTO-level business Accelerator 2.0 discovery, brainstorming business outcomes, and technology design. We also documented CLEAR requirements to govern the project. Finally, we selected the right technology, not just choosing tech for tech’s sake. Need our team’s help to build custom software for your business?

We provided our specialists for each area of Mark’s project – database engineers, front-end developers, mobile engineers, smart project management, and decision-making in integrating with several 3rd party vendors and also a full set of APIs for external partners to connect to it.

Results:

We completed work in 4 months and successfully delivered PACEfunding’s loan portal. This included UX/ UI, Solution Architecture, Technology Selection, Coding (PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, XML, iOS/ Android Mobile Apps).

After the iterative testing ensured quality control, good output, and final acceptance, training and final deployment were completed. The customer appreciated our weekly communication that reduced ambiguity, maintained an aggressive project rescue schedule, and managed needed process stability.

Shortly after, management entered discussions with investors and succeeded in raising $1,000,000 in funding to grow the company!

Congratulations Mark!

Need our team’s help to build custom software for your business? Maybe we can help.

Brett Martin
415.233.0775
Director, Customer Solutions
Closeloop.com