Today we’d like to introduce you to Grant Gochnauer.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
When I graduated from Northwestern in 2002, I went to work for a private consulting company which was later acquired in 2005. It was here that I met my co-founders and was able to work closely with customers in life sciences building enterprise marketing solutions. My co-founders and I wanted to commercialize our solutions using open source and brought the idea to senior leadership.
Unfortunately, they were not interested. However, we felt so strongly about this opportunity to dramatically reduce the cost and improve efficiency using an open source that at age 25, with my co-founders, we all gave notice on the same day. The “entrepreneurial bug” was a combination of an idea to solve a significant customer/market problem with the strong belief that we could do it (naive optimism perhaps). We’ve always been of the mindset that anything is possible if you put in the work and have the grit to stay committed. Having gone through an acquisition, we also realized how important people are in achieving anything great.
Our culture and people have always been priority #1 for us and being able to build a company that brings together such amazing diverse people has been one of the most rewarding aspects of being a founder. I am lucky and fortunate to be able to work with my fellow Vodorians each day. In the span of 12 years, we started with building and growing a consulting agency focused on providing end-to-end services including digital strategy, design, web development, and systems integration. With our long-term relationship based services model, we learned and refined our understanding of product opportunities within the space.
In the last few years we have been building out our enterprise product portfolio to help manufactures in life sciences create, review, approve, and publish their promotional and marketing materials. We’re seeing the tremendous excitement in the market for a purpose-built product to tackle some of the most complex and challenging marketing, regulatory, and healthcare problems. Our mission is to improve the health and well-being of people around the world by simplifying complex communications and our products and services do exactly that.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The entrepreneurship journey is never smooth. 😉 If it were, it would probably mean we weren’t pushing ourselves to achieve great things together. In the 12 years of business, we have worked through HR, financial, client, technology, and hiring challenges.
Evolving the business from a pure services business to building, supporting, and selling enterprise products has been our most significant and longest-lasting challenge. I am thankful for my founders who I have a very close and trusted relationship with as well as our entire Vodori team who rise to meet every single challenge we have faced as a company.
The most important thing we’ve found working through significant company challenges is communication and transparency and by aligning the team in a way to solve the issue at hand. We are systematic about inspecting why problems occur and what we can do to prevent them in the future.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Vodori – what should we know?
Vodori provides software products and consulting services that help life sciences companies expedite the highly complex and highly regulated approval of promotional content relating to their products. Vodori’s software and services help lower associated costs and risk and improve sales and marketing effectiveness. Due to the complex nature of our customer’s environment, we believe a solution specifically built to address the need is a significant differentiator compared to many repurposed or generic solutions that were not meant to directly solve this need.
We are very proud of the design and approach we have taken with our products informed through a customer advisory panel that has helped us validate our approach along the way and has been instrumental in providing key insights during the development process. Our long-term relationships with our services business has also opened the door to learning key customer insights about how best to create beautifully designed differentiated solutions.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Understanding how to build high performing organizations I believe is one of the keys to any successful business. As a founder or senior leader, it’s your job to find the right people (culture, experience, passion, career trajectory) and figure out ways to enable each of your people to excel individually and collectively to achieve your company’s goals.
Leading with purpose (our why), servant leadership, asking great questions, pushing authority and ownership down, and coaching/mentoring have been key pillars to our success and culture. Of course, we wouldn’t be anywhere without our customers who have believed in Vodori and our products over the last 12 years. We have always favored long-term investments in our customer relationships over any potential short-term gain for Vodori. We deeply believe that our customers’ success is what drives our success.
Contact Info:
- Address: 315 N. Racine Ave STE 200
Chicago, IL 60607 - Website: https://www.vodori.com
- Phone: 312-324-3992
- Email: grant.gochnauer@vodori.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vodori/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vodori/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/vodori
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vodori/
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