Bridgepointe Touts Organic Growth, Big-Name Clients at Annual Tech Summit

BRIDGEPOINTE PARTNER SUMMIT — Technology advisory firm Bridgepointe Technologies is moving into 2025 with increased organic growth and platform adoption.

Bridgepointe has gone on a tear of acquisitions, investments and high-profile hires since Charlesbank Capital Partners first backed it almost three years ago. While Bridgepointe's M&A activity is well-known, the company is also highlighting its organic growth. Gross bookings from Bridgepointe's IT advisors – not including newly acquired agencies – have organically grown in the mid-teens year-over-year. The firm is also celebrating up-market growth, citing wins with large enterprise customers ESPN, Coca Cola, Mastercard, GE and Netflix.

"We're telling them they have a right to be in any part of any customer that they can meet with. Our Fortune 50 customer list has gone through the roof over the last year," chief strategy officer Scott Kinka told Channel Futures.

Bridgepointe's Scott Kinka

The ESPN deal came through on the customer experience (CX) side, fueled by Bridgepointe's acquisition of consultancy PPT Solutions. Bridgepointe bought PPT and professional services provider Cannon Group as part of what it called "strategic adjacencies" to the technology advisory business IT strategists had already been performing.

Related:Packet Fusion Gets Investment from Bridgepointe

And partners like Brandon Gentry say they're seeing new at-bats through the new resources at the company.

"Without them, I wouldn't be in some of the opportunities that I'm in. They come with such a deep level of expertise. These companies Bridgepointe bought have been doing their thing for 20-plus years before we bought them. They're experts in their craft," Gentry told Channel Futures.

Moreover, those new practices bring well-known customer references that Gentry and his peers can use.

Bridgepointe's Brandon Gentry

"They've done projects with really big household name brands, which makes it easier for us to establish credibility quicker with the prospect. Because you can reference these customers, and it resonates," he said. "A lot of the customers they work with are spread out across different industries and verticals, so there's a high likelihood you can namedrop somebody that's in the same vertical as the prospect you're talking to."

Gentry said Cannon Group's life-cycle management services has made tight budgets a non-issue of sorts.

"A lot of customers are looking at cost savings, identifying where they can save money. A lot of that is cloud connectivity. It can be network spend. So the life-cycle services team has been crucial in helping me get into those conversations where we can help the customers save money, but also improve technology at the same time," he said. "It seems like we're in the right place at the right time. The customer may not be adding business or vendors. They may be reducing vendors, but that's still an opportunity for us to make money."

Related:Bridgepointe Cross-Selling Play Hinges on IT Cost Management

Carrier Solutions Group (powered by Bridgepointe) has similarly started to use Bridgepointe LCS (Life Cycle Services), which is based on Cannon Group.

"Management is always an area that has been challenging — the hardest part of the sale is often not the actual sale but rather the onboarding," Carrier Solutions Group managing partner Linda Gattis told Channel Futures.

Gattis said also said her firm has leaned into Bridgepointe's marketing resources, as well as its account management team.

Bridgepointe strategists, suppliers and employees have gathered this week in Palm Springs for the company's annual Bridgepointe Tech Summit.

What Is Bridgepointe Technologies?

Kinka has told Channel Futures that although the company sits in between technology suppliers and technology advisors, the company has never viewed itself as a technology services distributor (TSD). For one, the company's IT strategists differ from the average technology advisor/agent. While they are not employees of Bridgepointe, most of them bear the Bridgepointe brand and Bridgepointe email address as "card-carrying" agents of the firm. That lends an air of exclusivity to the relationship that is rare in the rest of the industry. Moreover, the close tie-in with its advisors gets Bridgepointe involved in the sales process at a very early rate. The company is now processing all of its orders through The Signal — which is both Bridgepointe's partner portal and its CRM. That number was at 70% last year, Kinka said.

Related:Getting 'the Reps' In: Bridgepointe Shares Secrets of Diverse Partner Base

"The idea was that we could operate like a unified sales operation, not just waiting for the orders to show up. We perceived it to be the industry's first marketing automation and CRM system — not an order processing and commission system. We want our partners to run their plays out of our system," Kinka said

Moreover, Kinka said Bridgepointe is offering a deeper level of services that go beyond "advise-design-procure."

"We have one billable professional services person for every four agencies. We've got roughly 400 people that we send a check to and 250 that are booking something every month. We've got 100 billable consultants inside this company," he said.

As a result, Kinka said the company is looking to take customers from the big consultancies.

"Our aspirational view was that we think we're a competitor to the big five consulting firms, not a competitor to the TSDs, because we're all operating under the Bridgepointe brand, and we're getting out there," Kinka said. "And we have proven that in CX, and we've proven that in our data center practice, and we believe we can prove that in other areas."

The technology advisor community broadly is seeking ways to sell more technology lines. But advisors across the industry say this is a challenge, particularly when their customers remember them for the first product they sold. And technology expertise is costly to acquire, whether through hiring or buying. While some agencies working with Bridgepointe have acquired in-house skills (and in some cases, after receiving investments from Bridgepointe), many of the IT strategists are taking a third option to widen their portfolio: partner.

"Bridgepointe’s continuous addition of skilled talent has strengthened our offerings across the board, particularly through their CX team’s expertise, which covers every aspect of customer experience, including business process outsourcing (BPO)," said Josh Mitchell, managing partner at Bridgepointe equity partner Arkitech Group. "Their supplier management team has broadened our access to a diverse range of suppliers, providing unique products and services that open new revenue streams through nontraditional suppliers. Additionally, Bridgepointe’s engineering resources and their robust connections with supplier leadership have been invaluable in efficiently resolving challenges as they arise, further solidifying our role as trusted advisors for our clients."

Partner Base

Channel Futures has covered many of Bridgepointe's investments in equity partners like Mitchell. Kinka said Bridgepointe has more than 50 equity partners. Some of these partners were previously partnering with Bridgepointe, while others, like BlueSky IT Partners's Meg Toups, have joined more recently.

However, Bridgepointe has been bringing in a large number partners without investments. Kinka said in the first three quarters of this year, Bridgepointe recruited more non-acquisition IT strategists than it had in the previous two years — nearly double.

"We built up a training and onboarding team to marshal them in. But to be clear, this isn't just sign-up, and we're not largely doing it with inexperienced partners," Kinka said. We're seeking people who are already in the industry, who see the value in coming under the Bridgepointe brand as a strategist, who do this full-time and are focused on midmarket and enterprise."

The debate rages in the channel: Are there enough new technology advisors entering the market to replace people who have sold their businesses? But tech advisors tell Channel Futures that they increasingly see their peers engaging on the customer level. With customers more aware of tech advisors than ever, Mitchell said he and fellow Arkitech managing partner Man Wong are looking to expand their reach to new customers.

"With the significant growth in this space, what was once a well-kept secret among a smaller circle of agents in the indirect seller community has now become highly competitive," Mitchell said. "We find ourselves competing for the role of trusted technology advisor against experts from all corners of the technology ecosystem. While this is a challenge, we’re well-equipped to rise to it, and our customers continue to find tremendous value in partnering with us."