Cape Charles Born Company chosen as Central Virginia’s SBDC Success Story of the year

When Brady Behrman founded VB Websites, and brought the company to Cape Charles, this was not only the birth a of great organization, but a notice that successful high tech could be accomplished on the Eastern Shore. Over time, VB kept evolving, and eventually found a niche in the B2B Procurement and Integrations space. This evolution culminated in PunchOut2Go, which seamlessly integrates PunchOut and B2B Procurement Integrations. Co-owners Brady Behrman and Shawn McKnight are now located in Charlottesville, but according to Mr. Behrman, “We sure do miss the Shore and know where we started. Though we had to move to grow, we’ll never forget Cape Charles, the people, friends and support we had on there.”

Read the full story from the Central Virginia Partnership for Small Business Development below:

More and more companies, institutions and entities around the globe are shifting their spending to the procurement cloud. This shift in the way they do business allows large buying entities to provide a single application for their users and purchasing agents to have the ability to interact, do business and procure products and/or services from their approved vendors. Benefits of leveraging eProcurement platforms are vast, including strong contract compliance, strong visibility and accountability, savings per order and faster automated, less labor-intensive cycles. These “approved” vendors must be able to do business electronically, specifically meaning the ability to transact together in a manner the buyer’s procurement system mandates. The problem is every system has variating factors in the way this data is dealt with. Some of the more notable Procurement systems that are leveraged include Ariba, SAP, Oracle, SciQuest, Coupa, and Peoplesoft, among many others. To date, PunchOut2Go, has connected with and maintains integrations on upwards of 60 different procurement platforms.

Procurement PunchOut is the interaction between a vendor’s web storefront and a buyer’s procurement application. The buyer leaves or “punches out” of their company’s system and is immediately authenticated through the browser into the supplier’s web-based e-Commerce application to locate and add contracted items to their shopping cart, while their application transparently maintains connection with the web site and gathers pertinent information such as Name, Email, Ship To and other identifiable information allowing the supplier to seamlessly authenticate to the vendor’s web storefront. The biggest difference with PunchOut outside the norm of traditional shopping is that when the buyer gets to the shopping cart, they will not go through a normal checkout; they instead transfer the order back into their eProcurement system to create an electronic requisition. Once the buyer, through their approval channels, approves the order, the vendor will receive a Purchase Order. The Purchase Order is often required to run through electronic channels as well to streamline the Procure-to-Pay process. While the buyer side of Procurement PunchOut has been fairly established for the past decade (in terms of eProcurement software), the supplier side has taken a longer time to develop for smaller companies, and even corporate giants, mostly due to the fact that each system has different requirements in how they electronically communicate.

Solving the problem of connecting the eProcurement dots, PunchOut2Go’s adaptable gateway solution to integrate PunchOut-Catalog functionality into existing e-Commerce applications plus plug-n-play solutions for popular e-Commerce platforms, PunchOut2Go offers an easy, affordable solution to suppliers to begin or continue selling to the most attractive buyers: the big ones who buy a lot of different products and services but who, increasingly, will only purchase from those suppliers who can integrate with the buyer’s procurement software. PunchOut2Go is the preferred PunchOut solutions company for many leading eProcurement systems and Buying entities ensuring smooth transition or onboarding support for their trading partners to maximize ROI. PunchOut2Go’s End-to-End B2B Automation just may be the Future of Business Commerce!

PunchOut2Go initially came to the CVSBDC around the end of their first year of operations, asking for assistance in Human Resources functions, especially related to hiring new employees, and for help with finalizing their business plan and packaging it in a way that would attract the investors they believed were needed to finance the young company’s anticipated high-growth. After an initial needs assessment by the CVSBDC Director, PunchOut2Go was nominated and accepted into the VirginiaSBDC Network’s Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP) through which they received a SWOT analysis, a Roadmap of steps to effectively grow the business, and some additional counseling from Subject Matter Experts (SME) regarding PunchOut2Go’s targeted industry and customers. Simultaneously, the CVSBDC formed a panel of counselors to assist with financial analysis, strategic analysis, and a business model for taking the company through the proof of concept stages of early growth. The timing of the combined assistance through the SBDC’s ICAP program and in-house business guidance couldn’t have been better — just in time to be reflected through Behrman and McKnight’s operational leadership as their company’s sales began to skyrocket. First, early adopters of PunchOut2Go’s Gateway began spreading the word about the advantages of their services and drove more business to the firm. Then, because they offered a reliable, affordable solution to a growing problem in a growing industry, PunchOut2Go began to be found by larger and more geographically-dispersed potential customers who were seeking a procurement solution. PunchOut2Go had a great concept at a good time; and they managed to capitalize on their early successes to gradually strengthen and diversify their capabilities to deliver solid e-Commerce, B2B, web-based solutions to a larger number of customers on a long-term basis.

As a result of PunchOut2Go’s successful early-stage growth supporting integrations today in 27 countries on 6 continents, they have been able to finance their company through sales, without any loans or outside investors. With triple digit growth year after year, PunchOut2Go created 3 jobs in their 1st year and added an additional 5 jobs in their 2nd year. They now have 13 full-time employees, 5 independent contractors, 3 Paid Internships in partnership with UVA and are currently recruiting for additional positions. PunchOut2Go also boasts a 100% customer retention rate.