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Maine Entrepreneur Finds Success Overseas

MTI grants received: 1 Seed Grant and 2 Development Awards

Portugal isn’t what you might think of when you think about small businesses in Maine. But that’s where Chris Houle and Peter Murray found their largest client in the early days of starting Quantrix, a small desktop software company based in Southern Maine. It opened their eyes to the potential of their product in international markets; six years later and now half of their clients are overseas. “We would never think of ourselves as having just a local market,” states Chris Houle, CEO of Quantrix. In 2002, Houle co-founded the company with Murray, Chief Technology Officer, and it has grown by leaps and bounds largely because of this very attitude. While the United States is the country with the single most sales, the other 50 percent of Quantrix’s sales is entirely international.

Both Houle and Murray had an international focus to their business plan from the very beginning; Houle previously ran a European software company in the Netherlands, Murray knew the product he was designing was going to be useful for business people worldwide and both were interested in capitalizing on international markets. This focus provided the foundation for the company’s rapid growth. Murray started the company with only Houle and a Support Manager and Quantrix has since expanded to employ eight full-time staff.

“If you’re building desktop software, it’s the right decision to think about internationalization,” says Murray. “It involved a lot of hard work in the beginning but it was an undertaking that paid off.” Internationalization allows for the translation of menus and the user interface in the application into different languages; it basically creates a flexible program that can be utilized by people around the globe. In order to get the capital needed, Quantrix applied for and received two research and development awards through MTI. The development awards were crucial in accelerating Quantrix’s ability to fund the internationalization and localization (the actual process of translating software into other languages) of their software program, the Quantrix Modeler. Without the capital MTI provided, the ability to sell to overseas clients would have been stalled. Through the awards’ support, Quantrix was able to quickly build a product that is marketable in many countries.

“International business can certainly be intimidating,” says Houle. “But the internet provides a really valuable mechanism to get to new markets. Also, with internationalization and localization you are able to tailor your message to different markets and we can do it from here in Maine. We don’t have to be there.”

Houle says that they view doing international business as just a standard part of business. “Everything we do, all the decisions that we make, we need to think about how we communicate and how we develop products that can be used by people all around the world. It’s always been our intent that we would have an overseas market.”

And it’s clear why they made that choice. Their product is now sold to 44 countries, including Mexico, China, the United Kingdom, France and Chile. In the past year alone Quantrix’s sales have grown by 50 percent. When asked what advice they would give to other small business owners starting a company, both Houle and Murray voice the same opinion: plan a budget that includes research and development for internationalization. This will help to create a product that has the potential to be used worldwide. It will open up overseas markets regardless of language barriers and if you could sell to the entire world, wouldn’t you?

Quantrix
428 Fore Street
Portland, Maine 04101
USA

www.quantrix.com

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