May 28, 2018
Creating a company that can be successfully taken global while simultaneously creating a community of raving fans and clients and anticipating where the market needs will be is not an every day occurrence. Yet my guest on this episode has done this all while staying connected to his roots.
We did not have a chance to talk about he time he swam the English Channel but we did talk about how he first got the idea for the business, how he and his brother made their mom's home address seem more like a business to the outside world rather than a bedroom on the second floor and how he has successfully merged numerous companies.
A previous guest on the show, Daniel Burrus, told us about how we can become "Anticipatory Organizations." Arnie Bellini and ConnectWise could be the poster child for the model. Arnie shares how he got the ideas to merge with different businesses versus create the products they had created on his own. He also shares the one thing ConnectWise was not created to be about and the one thing it strives to do above all.
Arnie Bellini is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tampa-based ConnectWise, Inc., a B2B technology company that creates and supports business software solutions. In 2017, the company earned $200 million in revenue and has a valuation of $1.2 billion. Arnie serves as the chief visionary behind the company's long-standing success in the information technology industry.
Over 35 years ago, Arnie astutely recognized the impact that microcomputers would have and created a managed services provider company. In 1998, Arnie took the company's best practices and transformed them into an integrated, workflow-driven business management solution to help technology services companies run more efficiently. The result was the creation of ConnectWise Manage™, the ConnectWise business operating system.
Arnie's passion to continually drive operational efficiencies and deliver excellent customer service makes ConnectWise one of the most admired companies in the technology services market. ConnectWise solutions automate the full lifecycle of IT services delivery, from sales and service to project tracking and back-office functions. These solutions are used by more than 21,000 technology services companies across the globe.
Arnie is a Certified Public Accountant and earned a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from the University of Florida and an MBA from the University of South Florida. In 2014, Arnie won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year™ award for Florida in the Technology category. He was honored for growing ConnectWise into a highly innovative, best-in-class software company, and recognized for inspiring the growth of the Tampa Bay technology sector.