Bootstrapping To $45M From Chicago

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RKON Technologies CEO Jeff Mullarkey built a Managed Service Provider (MSP) business that he could take to $500 million or a billion dollars in revenue. Read how he did it.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Jeff Mullarkey: I’m from the Chicago area. I grew up in a modest environment. I went to Illinois State University. I graduated with a Marketing degree with little clue of what I want. Right at this moment in time, personal computers had started to emerge. I frankly had never even used one. I stumbled into taking a job selling PCs. That’s how I got into the industry. It was a little bit by fluke. It was a very small industry at that time. This was 1986. That was how I got into IT.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next?

Jeff Mullarkey: I had a variety of jobs, but I started getting involved in working with customers who had a lot of challenges making all this stuff work together and doing it cost effectively. I eventually moved into technical services management. I saw the gap in the market. These infrastructures grew up overnight and people didn’t know what to do with them. They were spending a lot of money in the wrong way. I started becoming aware of that. Eventually, that led to me running a company that was kind of a product reseller company that turned into a service company. I presented some ideas on how to capture the emerging service market to the owners. They empowered me and we grew it to a $30 million company in about three years.

It was mid-90s when I thought that the market was going to narrow. I saw some interest in this thing called the Internet in about 1996. I had a lot of thoughts that this was going to change the game, and that there will be a lot of opportunities to get involved in helping organizations leverage the Internet and use that as a tool. At that time, I left that organization and formed RKON with my partner. Our go-to market strategy was helping organization leverage the Internet as a cheap alternative to network. That was how the whole thing started.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Jeff Mullarkey: That was 1998.

Sramana Mitra: RKON was started in 1998. You built this other $30 million reseller company before that?

Jeff Mullarkey: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: What was your equity position in that previous company that you ran?

Jeff Mullarkey: I had no equity position.

Sramana Mitra: When you were coming into RKON, did you have much capital with which to start RKON or was it a relatively shoestring situation?

Jeff Mullarkey: Total shoestring. We had no capital whatsoever. We opened a bank account with $100. My partner is on the technical side. We knew some clients who needed our help right away. We completely self-funded this.

Our conversation continues here.

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