Wells Fargo Backed SaaS Platform CommandLink Excels

Jason Ness, CEO CommandLink:

The entire world runs on corporate IT. It’s the backbone of how a business gets things done, and the expense is massive. The sprawl associated with managing corporate IT, it’s endless chaos.

CommandLink is the new way that corporate IT, from the Fortune 500 to global mid-markets, manage IT at scale.

Daniel Kenney, CFO CommandLink:

It allows customers to eliminate and consolidate vendors. It allows them to reduce spend. Everything for the customer from an IT perspective is centralized into one place, one log-in, all the workflows are centralized into a single user interface.

Ness:

We’re revolutionizing corporate IT and creating a new category.

Luke Atherton, Executive Director, Technology Banking, Wells Fargo:

I think that CommandLink is going to be a brand that everybody is, becomes very familiar with, like a household brand that people understand is foundational to the IT infrastructure space.

Ness:

We have to be able to accelerate from where we are to where we want to be every year

faster than other people believe is possible. And traditionally, when you think of hyperscale, you think of venture capital, you think of massive cash burn. And one of the very interesting dynamics of CommandLink is we’ve always been wildly focused on financial discipline.

Kenney:

Wells Fargo has been integral to filling in the gaps.

Atherton:

When you’re growing your business, there’s often a working capital need that arises. And so Wells Fargo has been able to step in to fill that need and is excited to continue to do that in the future as this business continues to grow.

Ness:

They bring perspectives to us that we may not have on our own because they work with a lot of the best businesses in the world that are other scalers that maybe are venture-backed or other technology or other strategies we can learn from them. And the constant attention on our business and our problems and our challenges and how can they be at the center of helping us accelerate our growth curve.

Atherton:

That’s one of the core values that we provide is the highest degree of service and responsiveness that we can to our clients.

Ness:

If you look left and you look right and you don’t see a network of people that have done the trailblazing or been innovative in ways that you want to be innovative with growth, you need to expand your network and find new friends.

And those friends could be a great banking partner like Wells Fargo. Those friends could be an engineering leader that’s built great things. Find a way to get to those people. Because if you can get to those people and you expand your network, you’ll change what you think is possible.

CommandLink CEO Jason Ness and CFO Daniel Kenney explain how hyperscaling is helping them revolutionize corporate IT.

Key takeaways:

Founded in 2012, CommandLink is a mature, enterprise-focused managed services and software as a service (SaaS) platform unifying corporate IT & Telco services, assets, and workflows into a single unified pane of glass.
The company’s growth strategy of “hyperscaling” typically requires venture capital, but its leaders opted for the flexible terms and deep understanding offered by Wells Fargo.
Wells Fargo’s Technology Banking Group has delivered specialized insights and recommendations to technology companies for more than 25 years. The team provides scalable support to clients in all stages of the business lifecycle — early, growth, and maturity — and combines industry experience with the strength and resources of one of the largest U.S. commercial banks. Primary sub-sector focus includes software, fintech, e-commerce, semiconductor, business and technology services, and sustainable tech.

CommandLink founder and CEO, Jason Ness, says he was never concerned about his now-mature company’s viability. Betting on himself, his confidence and faith in a well-thought-out plan was fueled by his mindset of rapid growth.

Since becoming CEO in 2018, Ness says hyperscaling has been one of the most important concepts for the business’ success.

“Hyperscaling is growing faster every single year in a very material way,” explained Ness. “So, if you’re growing by $10 million this year, you’ve got to grow by $20 million next year, and then the next year you need to grow by $50 million. That maniacal focus on hyperscale is an obsession and a challenge that must permeate through an entire organization.”

Founded in 2012, CommandLink is at the forefront of transforming how enterprises manage their IT infrastructure by unifying global internet (ISP), software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), Secure Access Server Edge (SASE), network security, and cloud-based communication solutions into one seamless platform.

As a fully integrated service and SaaS platform, CommandLink empowers IT teams to manage their operations through streamlined workflows, automation, and a single pane of glass interface. This integration eliminates the need for multiple vendors, dramatically reduces complexity, and cuts costs. IT teams gain efficiency by automating processes, enhancing visibility, and transforming technology from an operational expense into a strategic profit driver.

“We’re revolutionizing telecom; we’re revolutionizing the network,” Ness said. “We’re revolutionizing corporate IT and we’re creating a new category.”

In the early phases of hyperscaling, Ness warned of a mistake many executives often make: allowing known problem areas to linger in hopes of resolution.

“You have to be able to fail fast,” he said. “Everyone is fallible. Where we’ve made mistakes in the past is not taking action fast enough… Leaders are so busy on this thing on the right-hand side that you’re not actively dealing with the left side right away. So, replacing the leader you know isn’t going to work out, changing the process that’s constantly creating issues… it’s about not letting those things linger and hinder your rapid growth.”

Another common pitfall of attempting to hyperscale is cash burn, or how quickly a company spends its cash reserves. Because some organizations choose to use venture capital — a form of private equity financing typically given to new businesses — they have a mandate to grow above all else.

CommandLink took a different approach.

Daniel Kenney, the company’s CFO since 2021, has worked closely with Ness to shape a disciplined and innovative approach to financial management. Together, they have embraced a dynamic modeling strategy that aligns growth with real-time performance and marginal free cash flow. By moving away from traditional corporate budgeting and hiring processes, this approach enables the team to maximize growth without spending ahead of the company’s own ability to fund that growth.

The proof is in the company’s exceptional performance to date. In just over three years since Kenney and Ness teamed up, CommandLink has grown from a team of 25 personnel to more than 200, while run-rate annual recurring revenue has grown tenfold over the same period. No private equity funding has been required to fund CommandLink’s growth during that period.

This alternate growth route forced Ness and Kenney to look for a different financing solution. This led them to Wells Fargo’s Technology Banking Group, which has more than 100 technology bankers throughout the U.S., with sector expertise across software, sustainable tech, internet and digital, fintech, hardware, and business transaction services.

Ness offers these six tips for hyperscaling your business:

Find the problem first, and then develop a solution. In other words, don’t be a solution looking for a problem.
Create initial governing processes.
Build systems for scale.
Design new, durable revenue channels.
Fail fast. Don’t let known problems linger.
Develop a financial model that allows your business to grow without burning through cash reserves too quickly.

“We wanted someone who understands our industry and situation,” said Kenney. “You can talk to a lot of people at banks, but most don’t quite understand the challenges of a high-growth scenario, particularly early on — simple things like access to a business credit card to pay vendors. We were looking for someone to work with us and cater a capital solution to fit our current and near-term needs and goals.”

Luke Atherton, a relationship manager with the Wells Fargo Technology Banking Group, has worked with CommandLink for years.

“It was clear from a very early stage that this was a management team that was experienced and had a great product and there was a lot of demand for it in the marketplace,” Atherton said. “They had a clear need for a partner like Wells Fargo to provide growth capital, a banking platform, and expertise to help scale their business.”

Today, CommandLink counts many Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies all over the world on its client list. With these changes and growth comes a need for new products and services from Wells Fargo.

“We’re committed to helping entrepreneurs be successful, and that’s often done by helping them maintain a larger stake in their business,” Atherton said. “That can be accomplished with banking solutions like those provided by Wells Fargo.”

Ness cited Wells Fargo’s ability to offer flexible terms and a deep understanding of CommandLink’s business as reasons the relationship has worked well.

“Wells Fargo dug into our model with us to understand how our business works,” he said. “I think the other piece goes back to the human component — the relationship and the people are critical.”

CommandLink’s leaders believe it’ll soon be a multi-billion-dollar company because of its emphasis on hyperscale growth with financial discipline.

“There are a lot of pieces that are like a train on a track, set in motion,” Kenney said. “We have an exceptional team, a great market fit with our core set of platform products and services, and rapid adoption by the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, and global mid-market customers around the world.”

Added Ness: “CommandLink in the future will be more global, with more global teams, more products, more product verticals, and more things that are really driven by the core feedback we’re hearing from our customers so we can help them transform the world.”

How CommandLink is revolutionizing corporate IT

Key takeaways:

Ness offers these six tips for hyperscaling your business:

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