Patrick Sandone has a simple message for entrepreneurs: “The best ideas come when you're intimate enough with an industry and can fill a need.”
For Sandone, that insight spawned a company in 2007 with a few part-time employees in 500 square feet at the Scranton Enterprise Center. Today, Net Driven employs 30 full-timers, is steadily hiring and has seen triple-digit growth every year.
Sandone worked at a Wall Street investment bank and a Boston venture capital firm before returning home to a family business that distributes and sells automotive supplies. He quickly realized that tire and parts dealers, auto repair and body shops and used car dealers needed the functionality of a sophisticated website that allowed users to see descriptions, comparisons and availability of products and services, get quotes, schedule jobs and more.
Net Driven builds and maintains customized websites, offering a breadth of Internet sales and marketing tools for their clients, who essentially rent their websites. Sandone says the firm partners with large Fortune 500 companies with vast dealer networks and mom-and-pop retailers, serving a total of more than 3,000 customer locations in the United States and Canada.
Sandone sees a clear road ahead. “Our pace of hiring is accelerating. We'll hire more people this year than last. Our goal is basically to grow the number of new clients by triple digits year in and year out,” he says. “We have big plans where we want to go and we need people to help us get there.”
Source: Patrick Sandone, Net Driven
Writer: Elise Vider