By Sam Elliott and Ann Marie Shambaugh
In a world where more and more businesses are relying on more and more mobile devices, Zionsville-based MOBI has prepared itself for a “wave of business” that co-founder Josh Garrett believes is just around the corner.
And as the industry has grown, so has MOBI.
Last year, the company added 110 new employees – a 70 percent growth rate – and is on pace to do it again this year. It recently took over the entire second floor of an office building at 96th Street and Zionsville Road, where it has been headquartered and expanding since 2009. And additional plans call for MOBI to expand into the first floor and grow its presence at its logistics center across the street in 2017.
Garrett, MOBI’s chief strategy officer, along with childhood next-door neighbor and now-CEO Scott Kraege, plus Tony Paris and Christian and Michael Browning II, founded MOBI in 2009, but the group has been working together since 2001. They began with a mobile device retail store at Keystone at the Crossing.
“We shut that up in 2002 because it was just a bad business model. We came over (to Zionsville) and just started cold calling companies trying to sell them mobility services,” said Garrett, who is also a Zionsville Town Council member. “Companies that have thousands of cell phones, smart phones, data devices and data cards — things like that — they’ve traditionally managed them in their IT organization, but they’ve become so complicated that we now can manage that whole life cycle for them.”
In mid-2015, MOBI announced a minority investment partnership with New York-based growth equity firm Bregal Sagemount, which agreed to invest $35 million into the Zionsville company.
“We were entirely self-funded up until now,” Garrett said. “We sort of saw this opportunity where our market is really starting to grow a lot in the last year, so we really needed more than us writing checks to the company to fund the growth. There’s sort of a narrow window here where the market is up for grabs, so we’re using that money to kind of go after that as much as we can.”
MOBI’s plans for its new investment capital call for reinvestment across the company’s departments and toward its business around the globe. Bregal founding partner Daniel Kim will be joining MOBI’s board as part of the deal, too.
“The problem MOBI solves is one that has not been traditionally addressed by a comprehensive software platform,” Kim said. “MOBI has established itself as a market leader in mobility management. Their acceleration in new customer wins attests to the enormous pain their solution mitigates.”
One of those customers is Texas Instruments, headquartered in Dallas and a world leader in semiconductor design and manufacturing – with plenty of mobile devices involved along the way.
“MOBI has become an invaluable tool to us in managing corporate mobile services and expenses,” TI’s voice, mobility and telecom expense manager David Tavakoli said. “We can now pull billing reports for a cost center’s team in a mere four clicks of a mouse versus having to create and export reports for every single member on a team, thanks to its easy to use yet powerful tools.”
And as more companies only become more dependent on systems of more and more mobile devices, MOBI hopes to keep managing them all from its Zionsville home.
“We’ll keep going as long as the market lets us keep growing and we can grow profitably,” Garrett said.
Office space
MOBI’s expanded office space is designed to encourage interaction, collaboration and even a little bit of fun.
The 60,000-square-foot space is designed with a modern west coast vibe and includes a comfortable movie theater, free local craft beer during the last hour of the workday and plenty of places to meet and discuss ideas.
“The space has been designed for people to run into each other intentionally,” Garrett said.
Gone are the high-walled cubicles that led to “prairie-dogging,” Garrett said. The new layout includes low walls to ease communication and sharing.
But just in case a sensitive phone call does need to take place, MOBI also has three completely soundproof areas that look like modernized phone booths to provide privacy.
