FileBound co-founder Rex Lamb describes his company as “a little Nebraska company no one knows about.” But the numbers paint a different picture.
The company’s Lincoln headquarters house 55 employees, and FileBound also has offices in Denver and Tampa, data centers in Chicago and San Francisco and a team of 13 developers in India. Some 250 resellers in the U.S. sell FileBound’s products, and the company has distributors in Australia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Around 5,000 companies use FileBound’s software, including GE Medical, Nebraska State Patrol, Department of Motor Vehicles and First National Bank of Omaha. FileBound recently won a new contract to install its software in 500 hospitals over the next six years.
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Lamb (below) founded the company in 2001 with Mark Creglow, and they started developing software from the ground up. “We started hosting as a cloud solution for a client in 1993,” Lamb said. “We have been doing internet-based application hosting a long time.”
FileBound offers document management solutions, and the company manages all information assets including active paper documents, documents and files stored off-site, documents converted to digital images and all other digital file types. FileBound works to help companies improve the way they find, share, process and secure their documents. The company automates business processes, implements integrated e-forms and shares data and documents with clients’ systems.
The nature of FileBound’s software is such that the company has been able to weather, and even thrive in, tough economic times.
“The whole value that we deliver is that we deliver efficiencies through automation,” Lamb said. “When the economy is in a position like it is today is normally when companies like us thrive because we help companies be more efficient. Also when there’s uncertainty in the economy, oftentimes you see it in the unemployment numbers, that rather than hire bodies as the economy improves, they look for ways to replace those bodies with technology because no one wants to hire someone and then have to lay them off. So the ups and downs and uncertainties of the economy tend to drive people towards technology rather than hiring people. We’ve seen this time and time again over the years.”
Lamb said that, even as the company has grown, he and Creglow have continued to be active in the field and call on customers so that they can continue to understand what problems companies are facing and try to stay current. His advice for other entrepreneurs is to keep close communication. “In the beginning an entrepreneur has to figure everything out,” he said, “and I think a lot of people start businesses and kid themselves into thinking that they are suited to be managers.”
Lamb believes that business owners should try to understand where they are going by staying close to their customers. “Make sure that you’re willing to do everything that it takes to validate your idea,” he said. “Sometimes we want to delegate as quickly as possible, whether it’s the development of the idea or creating the messaging or actually going out and selling the idea. Make sure there’s a market for it, that you have the pricing right, the product right and the messaging right. I don’t think there’s any substitute for having an entrepreneur follow through on all of those areas and making sure that everything is sound before you start to hand off some of those duties to other people.”
For a glimpse of FileBound’s Lincoln offices, see the photos below. For more of Lamb’s take on the company, see the video interview above.
FileBound oversees data centers in San Francisco and Chicago from its network operating center in Lincoln.
Members of FileBound’s software support team are among the 55 employees housed in the company’s Lincoln offices.
FileBound “Fred Currency” is given to employees as a reward for a job well done. Employees are nominated by co-workers for doing something extraordinary and can redeem the currency for prizes.
“Emerge” is the 2012 theme for FileBound. Employees faces are put into the skydivers on the performance-based employee of the month/quarter/year wall.
Credits: Photo and video by Kate Ellingson.
