‘Pedal to the metal’ for retail tech provider FieldStack’s national expansion
Photo / Jim Neuger
Brett Wickard, founder and CEO of FieldStack, expects the Portland-based tech company to hit $10 million in revenue soon.
Brett Wickard is probably best known as the founder of Bull Moose, a Portland-based music and entertainment retailer that opened in 1989 and now has 11 locations. Earlier this year, he sold Bull Moose to employees and stepped down as CEO. That allowed him to devote his full attention to a company he founded in 2013 and still runs, Portland-based FieldStack.
FieldStack provides a cloud-based suite of lean retail applications built to work together and leverage real-time data, advanced analytics and automation. Serving mid-sized and large omni-channel retailers such as department stores and specialty retailers, FieldStack has 34 employees and is heading toward annual revenue of $10 million.
As CEO, Wickard has beefed up FieldStack’s executive ranks and plans to expand nationally. Mainebiz asked Wickard about how FieldStack evolved and what he expects for growth. Here’s an edited transcript.
Mainebiz: You provide a cloud-based suite of lean retail applications. What does that mean?
Brett Wickard: Retailers operate in a complex environment. There’s e-ecommerce, stores, warehouses, special orders, point-of-sale devices, curbside pick-up, self-check-out units and more. Our platform integrates all of those operations, in real time, by allowing them to ‘talk’ with one another across the organization.
When all of the operations are talking with each other, the retailer can react a lot more quickly. Say a client is selling out a product in one of their stores. That’s communicated immediately up their supply chain to their warehouse, which places orders with their vendors to prepare for future demand.
MB: What was the lightbulb moment that inspired FieldStack?
BW: Bull Moose was just this little retail chain in Maine. We were contacted by Universal Music. They had been analyzing their customer data and found that Bull Moose had been running far more efficiently than their other customers. They showed us their metrics. Our inventory coverage was much stronger, and returns were far lower. They said, ‘Whatever your secret is, could you sell it to the rest of our customers?’ And we did have a secret. It was having our operations talk to each other in real time. We realized that this could be valuable for all retailers.
MB: Going back, how did you come upon this idea of integrated operations?
BW: One great thing about retail is that you get to know your customers really well. We were having the conversations: Why do people choose to come in? Why does somebody buy something? If we could find a way to capture that information, we could get ahead of other retailers.
Early on, we realized there are certain people who, when they bought something, everyone else was buying it a few days later. One guy — his name was Jack. Now we call him ‘Magic Jack.’ Jack would buy something and then everyone would buy it. So we started thinking about how we could use that information to be more predictive. We started a frequent buyer program and measured what people were buying. The secret was that we were also getting products sold back to us for resale. That mattered, too, because it helped us predict what people wanted and didn’t want.
MB: How did that concept unfold as a software business?
BW: Folks who were selling music heard Bull Moose had some sort of secret and they wanted the Bull Moose system. When we officially launched FieldStack, I hired our first director of sales and we reached out to other types of retail stores.
We make a compelling case. We’re very cost-effective compared to other solutions, and we can prove that we can do what we say we’ll do. When we’re talking with potential clients, we analyze their operation using their own data and show them what their operation will look like using FieldStack. So we can help people feel comfortable with FieldStack before it even goes in. And because we’re born of retail — and almost everyone here has worked in retail or we make everyone go out and work in retail — clients know that we’re a software company that eats, sleeps and breathes retail. That makes a difference.
MB: So you actually send new hires out to work in retail, if they haven’t before?
BW: We’ll have mathematicians and top-tier developers and we tell them to work in a retail store. It’s incredibly beneficial. There’s a technology phrase called ‘dog fooding’ [using software to work out the kinks]. Using FieldStack in the wild, you get an experience you wouldn’t have unless you’ve been faced with a line of customers, wrapping up orders for them. We love having folks experience that, because it changes how we write our software. We write with the clerks in mind; the clerks are the ones under the most pressure. Our strategy is to make it so clerks can just start using our software and not feel they have a giant learning curve.
MB: How large is the team?
BW: We have 34 employees now, with three starting this week to work in client success and product development. Pre-pandemic, recruiting folks to come to Maine was challenging. That has gotten much easier. Now Maine is a selling point.
MB: What has your growth looked like?
BW: We’ve grown every year. Right now we’re growing much more quickly — more than 40% year-over-year. In fact, we’re already more than 40% this year over last year, and we’ll probably be significantly ahead of that. Next year looks to be the same. And we’re able to scale. The great thing about the cloud is that we can take on every retail sale around the world. We don’t have to own infrastructure. We can add clients with incredible speed. So we’ve got the pedal to the metal and will grow as quickly as we can.
MB: How much have you invested in the company?
BW: I’d say $10 million to $20 million from the revenue generated by FieldStack. We’re self-financed. We plan to put off taking on investors until money becomes an impediment to our growth. We believe we’ll likely take on investment in about two years. But for now, we’ve reinvesting every penny back into the business and we’re profitable.
MB: What are your revenues?
BW: We haven’t crested $10 million a year yet, but we expect to do so soon.
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