Friday, April 3rd, 2020, BELLEVUE, WA., – Blueprint Technologies, a nationwide technology solutions firm that specializes in helping companies accelerate their success through digital transformation, announced they were awarded the Most Innovative Company by 425 Business Magazine.
For Bellevue-based serial entrepreneur Ryan Neal, everything is about efficiency. Cutting waste and speeding up processes, he said, have been at the center of the more than 15 companies he has purchased or started over the course of his career.
So, even as a self-admitted “nontechie,” Neal saw an opportunity in 2013, when he and a business partner recognized massive inefficiencies in the traditional consulting industry.
“The way that technology is changing and rapidly improving renders the old traditional consulting model obsolete,” Neal said, referring to many consulting companies that have long provided only strategic guidance, or acted only as staffing agencies, without filling the gaps in between or holding themselves accountable to results.
“We think that’s a very inefficient, broken model,” Neal said. “So, we decided to create a company that helps businesses across industries with strategy and delivery and then hold ourselves pretty hardcore accountable to the ROI for the solutions that we create.”
That’s how Blueprint Technologies began: as a small, ambitious startup in Bellevue with one employee and a big mission. Originally, the company focused solely on consulting but pivoted two years ago to include a focus on aspects of technology. In seven years, the company has grown into a global brand, with more than 700 employees, making it one of the fastest-growing private companies in Washington state two years in a row.
Neal credits Blueprint’s trajectory of success to its high-quality technology products and solutions, which until a few years ago were marketed solely by word of mouth.
“For the first four years, we didn’t have a marketing department, and for the first five years, we didn’t have a sales department,” Neal said. “We wanted to grow quickly but without those things because that means that your customers are exceedingly happy with what you’re providing them, and they want more of it and want all their friends to have more if it, too. For years of our growth, it was almost entirely referral-based, both for our customers and for our employees. More than half of our talent acquisition (still) comes from internal referrals, which I think is also a big measure of our success.”
“We call it the Amazon effect: What Amazon is doing forces everybody else to move two to three times faster,” Neal said. “It’s putting an intense amount of pressure on traditional industries, and these companies that have been around for generations are now going out of business. So, the fact that all of our products and solutions are.
And rather than use a classic model of establishing contracts with companies meant to last five or 10 years, Neal said that Blueprint is staunchly built on a firm belief of “working ourselves out of a job.”
“Most of our projects are anywhere from 90 days to 18 months,” he said. “If the customer chooses, we move our solutions into either a licensing model or value-based pricing that allows them to tie the money that they’re paying us for the solution to an actual business outcome they want to achieve.”
The approach of cutting waste, serving customers and employees with integrity, and working out solutions for different industries in its own innovation lab keeps Blueprint Technologies in the enviable position of consistent growth without having to cut quality. For this, Neal thanked his team of employees, saying that the company has found success by “finding good people who like to work together on cool projects.” — ZB
This originally appeared on 425 Business.
