Hi-Mark Restructures, Grows

Allowing founder and president Kevin Austin to focus on creating products, Hi-Mark Software has realigned its management following the appointment last October of Derek Beveridge as CEO. In the interim, Hi-Mark has landed data consolidation business with Travelport, Travelocity Business and such other new clients as AirPlus.

"Kevin was lamenting last summer that he was wearing too many hats and wanted to get heavily into the development side of the business, which is his forte," Beveridge said, "so he needed an operational and numbers guy, someone who had done contracts with large customers and so on." Beveridge is shouldering high-level key account relationships, including development of the account management group. "This allows me to get back and focus on products and development, and I've taken back the development team," Austin said. "One of our issues was that generally we maintained the relationships with the users more than the management and decisionmakers—the folks whose job it is to acquire the value and sell it within the organization, so we often found we didn't have that relationship at the right level. Derek brings a lot of business acumen right off the bat, but this is not something you just walk into, so he's spent eight or nine months learning about the value we provide to customers." Moving the development team back within Austin's responsibilities has allowed Tim Todd to handle consulting and tech support. Hi-Mark also hired former Maritz Corporate Travel director of strategic partnering Anne Martinez.

Hi-Mark realigned its sales division, promoting Mike Griffin to vice president of sales and allowing longtime sales exec Charlie Bradsher to focus on special projects and technical sales assistance. "We really needed someone to stay focused on sales and relationships and not be involved in a lot of project stuff," Austin said. "Mike had landed some big accounts for us, and he deserved a leadership role."

Beveridge said the company now is seeking to "find key reseller partners instead of hiring and growing our sales staff internally." That's a component of the nonexclusive deal with Travelport, in which the latter will resell Hi-Mark's corporate data consolidation and contract management and data reporting solutions to corporate customers. In the AirPlus agreement, Hi-Mark is the payment system's exclusive provider of data for AirPlus' agency merchant program, capturing and processing descriptive billing information.