Why Taylor Corp Acquired MentorMate

This month, we are starting the second chapter in MentorMate’s exciting history by taking the company to yet a new level by teaming up with Taylor Corporation of Mankato, Minnesota. Taylor is a $1.7 billion group consisting of about 80 companies primarily in print and marketing with a great strategic focus on accelerating their/our mobile leadership.

Over the last 18 months or so, thanks to the tremendous progress we’ve all made together, numerous (about 70) prospective investors and potential acquirers have contacted me about being part of our exciting journey in one way or another. For different reasons, but always because I care deeply about MentorMate and our team, I declined all of them because I didn’t think they represented the best for employees, clients or owners. Taylor was different.

With Taylor we remain the masters of our intellectual destiny, keep our great team in place, and we get access to a vast channel of prospective clients, among many other benefits. Even better, our expertise is recognized, welcomed and needed on a grander scale. Over the last two years, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with the folks from Taylor Corp, and especially over the last few months, and as a result I feel very comfortable with them as people of their word. The leadership team at Taylor has worked closely with me to advance several key sales opportunities already. We share the same core values and the Taylor family is very well respected in Minnesota, and beyond. In addition, I’m not going anywhere and will continue to run the company with a great degree of autonomy.

Further, Taylor is no stranger to IT services and recently sent some of their top people to explore our Bulgarian operation, which went exceedingly well. They were very impressed by our expertise, people, management, methodologies, space and innovation among many other things. Personally, I was extremely proud to hear the entire team in BG did excellent and Jamie and James helped guide their experience very well. I wish I could have been there to see you shine in Bulgaria. Well done! The accolades from that trip are still reverberating in praise we’re getting from Taylor. We’ve come a long way since Mitko and Ivan were writing code out of Mitko’s bedroom and Stephen helped design palm pilot UI about a dozen years ago!

In 1946 a group of ten people who had been part of an innovative management science operation within the U.S. Army Air Force known as Statistical Control presented themselves as a team to transform Ford Motor Corporation. The group became known as the “Whiz Kids” for their transformational impact on Ford Motor Corporation. They later went on to have interesting careers and one of them, Robert McNamara, became the U.S. Secretary of Defense and later President of the World Bank. In 1995 in Detroit a man close to this group, Luther, shared their story with me (and a ride in his 1912 Ford Model T!). The story is relevant because today we have our own opportunity to be “Whiz Kids,” bringing new thinking not only to a much larger organization, but to their clients, and their clients’ clients around the world.

Image Source: Maxime Bhm on Unsplash