Editor’s note: This is 16th in a series of profiles of companies that presented at Venture 2003.Total Billings is bringing invoicing and billing into the electronic age.
“TMM has made the transition from physical to digital bill, statement and invoice presentment and payment virtually seamless,” says Patrick Donahue, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Fayetteville firm, referring to its Total Mail Manager product.
Long before e-billing, or digital billing, and terms such as “customer relations management” became buzz words, Total Billings was focused on faster, more efficient means of helping companies and government agencies transact business. The company has been around since 1990,
Total Billings is looking for an additional $3 million to expand its growing business. The firm expects revenues to increase 98 percent this year — to nearly $6 million — and expects to hit profitability in the fourth quarter.
As it did a year ago, Local Tech Wire is featuring in-depth profiles of presenting firms for Venture 2003 built around a Q&A with a company executive as well as a Fact Box of important information. One profile will appear each day.
LTW put together a Q&A designed to not only produce facts about the presenters but also to give each a chance to state the case for venture capitalists to invest.
Answers for Total Billings were provided by Donahue.
Venture 2003 took place last week in Chapel Hill. (Previous profiles – Engineous, Hemocelluar, Elsinore, Gentris, A4, SmartPath, Dynogen, ViASIC, Norak, Kucera, Micell, MindValve, Regado, Bloodhound Software AND ues can be found in LTW archives under Executive Q&A category.)
Times are tough. If you had only one chance and one paragraph to convince an investor, how would you answer this question: “Why should an investor choose your company?”
Total Billings has a proven business model. first quarter revenues for 2003 are 55 percent ahead of last year. All of its services are provided under multi-year contracts (average 3 years) that generate a continuously increasing and recurring revenue stream. Total Billings is the only company in the industry that has solved the issues of physical and digital convergence, combined with a collaborative, real-time, web-based platform. Through this integrated solution set, Total Billings has positioned its clients to take advantage of the pending revolutionary migration to digital billing and payment transactions.
Total Billings is a pioneer in offering a wide range of outsourced bill presentment and payment services. We have solved the issues related to physical and digital convergence and offer our clients their choice of media and distribution channels. We accomplish this via a web enabled platform that puts our clients in complete, real-time control of the entire process. This unique platform enables our clients’ customers to painlessly migrate to electronic presentment and payment solutions at any time they choose.
Due to this unique set of integrated solutions, Total Billings is the fastest growing bill/e-bill service provider in the Eastern United States
What makes your company unique? Do you have a proprietary and/or a patented technology?
Total Billings is engaged in providing businesses and government organizations with a wide range of billing services. Since its inception, TBI has been a pioneer in offering its clients “Best of Breed” solutions for the outsourcing of invoice design, production and distribution. TBI recently launched Total Mail Manager (TMM), a web-enabled software application that allows customers to maintain complete control over their outsourced transaction processing functions and choose from a wide range of web-enabled transaction processing services.
This interactive application fulfills the market’s need for enhanced back office / front office processing efficiencies by providing functionality that streamlines Customer Relationship Management, Process Management and Distribution Channel Management.
TMM has enabled Total Billings to connect the dots between traditionally disparate billing and billing related functions. TMM has made the transition from physical to digital bill, statement and invoice presentment and payment virtually seamless. It combines, numerous billing and related functions that heretofore have required multiple vendors, into an integrated solution set.
Total Billings recently received a ‘Notice of Allowance” on our Bulk Mail Tracking patent and has three additional patents pending.
What makes your product(s) and/or services unique vs. your competition? (Who is your competition, and what do they offer?) If you have no competition, why not?
Total Billings provides physical mailing, e-billing, e-payment and on-line bill archival, retrieval and viewing delivered through web-based, interactive applications. The platform for these services is a process management tool that enables real-time collaboration with customers.
This unique solution set is the first offering that links the biller, their service provider and the US Postal Service for physical communications and utilizes the same customer interface for management and tracking of digital communications.
These products have been developed on the Microsoft Windows platform with highly scalable N-tier distributed architecture. By employing leading edge technologies, such as .NET, J2EE, Web Services, XML, etc., TBI has provided an open framework that can easily integrate with various billing software and financial systems.
TBI’s best-of-breed solutions are backed-up by an industry-leading disaster recovery strategy that is based upon a fully redundant technology infrastructure that guarantees 99.9 percent or higher availability of services.
Total Billings’ target markets are highly fragmented. No single service provider has achieved a dominate position. The competitors that Total Billings encounters on occasion include: South Data, Mt. Airy, NC; Mailing Services of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; and Southeastern Data Cooperative, Tucker, GA. These competitors lack TMM functionality and integrated EBPP solutions. Total Billings has been successful in penetrating each of these competitors markets.
Additionally, our differentiated product offering and the unique functionality of TMM have caught the attention of two of the industry’s largest players, DST Output and SunGard Mailing Services.
Total Billings has achieved first-mover advantage with TMM and is one of the first billing service providers to offer integrated paper and e-bill/e-pay solutions on a collaborative, web-based platform.
Does your company already generate revenue? If so, how much? Are you cash flow positive?
Net revenues for 2002 were $2,951,000. Net revenues for 2003 are forecast at $5,846,000, a 98 percent increase. We expect to be generating positive cash Q3, 2003 and a net profit Q4, 2003.
What is your target market? What is the size of that market in terms of dollars? What share of that market do you believe you can win?
Total Billings is focused on a sub-segment of the extremely vast outsourcing industry known as Co-Operative Outsourcing or Co-Sourcing. This sub-segment includes several business functions that revolve around the creation, production distribution and management of billing and billing related processes. The US market for these functions is currently estimated at $5 – $7 billion with a potential of more than twenty billion of dollars.
Total Billings targets government agencies, as well as second and third tier commercial clients who routinely send high volumes of statements, notices and letters to their customers. Ideal customers are government tax offices, public and private utilities, telecommunications companies, health services and financial service providers.
What will you do with the invested funds? What is the timeline for product delivery? If you have existing products and services, how will additional funding help you expand your company, if that is the intention, or will you develop new products?
Total Billings is currently seeking an additional $3 million. These funds will be used to accelerate our nationwide market expansion and add to our intellectual property. Specifically, these proceeds will be used to expand our direct and indirect sales channels beyond the Eastern US and to establish state-of-the-art production facilities in the Midwest the West Coast. We will also continue the aggressive enhancement of TMM and our e-service offerings.
Our product family was completed in Q4, 2002 with the launch of our Electronic Bill Present & Payment, On-line Document Viewing and Digital Archival services. Future development efforts will be focused on increasing levels of integration and a constant flow of feature and function enhancements. Scheduled for release by Q4, 2003 will be a link to the United States Postal System’s Confirm program which will allow mailers to track any individual mail piece from the time they transmit their file to Total Billings’, via our TMM platform, all the way through the postal system down to the final carrier route. Some other early enhancements will include ad hoc reporting, alarms and thresholds, and on-line design approval.
What do you want from an investor other than money?
To be actively engaged in the evaluation and refinement (as required) of the company’s direction.
To provide input on all strategic decisions.
To assist in the identification and establishment of partnerships and alliances.
Identify and cultivate additional opportunities that will expand our market reach.
What is the exit strategy for the investor from your company? Are there potential strategic alliances with larger companies? Do you wish to take the company public? Or do you wish to grow the company and either sell it or acquire other companies?
Sell to or merge with a larger player who can leverage our unique technology and position in the marketplace to accelerate their own growth and increase their value.
Potential strategic alliances:
- Larger outsourcing bill service providers
- Software billing solution providers
- Electronic Billing / Document Storage companies looking to offer a more complete solution by integrating physical production and process management services
- The United States Postal Service
- CRM solution providers
- Major Businesses in the mailing (or related) industry looking to expand their market reach
Why would an investor be impressed with your management team?
Our current investors have been impressed with the vision, passion, leadership ability, breadth of industry related experience and complementary skills of our senior team. Additionally, they take comfort in that: 1) our solution set is already in the marketplace; 2) our infrastructure is in place; 3) our growth rate is far exceeding the industry average, and 4) our intellectual property.
Gregory C. Stadermann founded an outsourced mailing services business in 1990. He built that business into a profitable enterprise. Throughout the 1990’s, he maintained a customer base of approximately forty clients concentrating on providing the highest levels of customer service.
That company gradual evolved into what Total Billings is today. With the advent of the Internet, Mr. Stadermann recognized a unique opportunity for the company and in 1998 began developing web-based software solutions for the mailing industry. These unique offerings provide Total Billings with a strong competitive advantage.
Just the Facts on Total Billings: www.localtechwire.com/article.cfm?u=3989
