In a small office on the third floor of an office building in downtown White Plains, Christian Wielage oversees what he calls a “half-startup.”
Wielage is the CEO of PlanGuru, a firm co-founded by his father back in 2000, which produces software to help small businesses perform better budgeting and financial forecasting. The company is the first graduate of the Westchester County Association”™s Blueprint Accelerator Network, a program designed to draw businesses to the county by providing office space and access to funding, as well as legal, marketing and technology assistance.
PlanGuru, Wielage explained, is only a “half-startup” because it”™s actually been around for about 15 years.
- Christian Wielage, CEO of PlanGuru. Photo by Bob Rozycki
“The actual first PlanGuru software product came out in 2000,” Wielage said. “And for 11 years, it was just two developers, not selling a whole lot of software, but making a good product and serving a loyal customer base of accounting firms that used that software product.”
PlanGuru slowly moved along, partly because of a pitfall that often befalls software companies, according to Wielage.
“Developers can be very protective of their baby,” Wielage said. “I think that customer criticism sort of stopped them from doing the things that needed to be done to grow the business.”
As the software continued to improve, the business was somewhat stagnant. Wielage, who holds an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, worked at IBM, and said that he didn”™t really understand the importance of the financial modeling PlanGuru”™s software makes possible until he had to do it himself.
He eventually joined the company in 2010, brought in a friend to develop the website and convinced his brother, who had a mix of accounting and information technology skills, to leave investment banker Jefferies & Co. for PlanGuru.
“Somebody could accuse us of going out to try and find the perfect jobs to train us to go work for our dad, but we didn”™t set out to do that,” said Wielage, laughing. “It just so happened we stumbled into roles that made us understand what he was doing and why it was valuable, but also set us up to be successful.”
In 2012, the team threw out the old software and rebuilt it anew, integrating the ideas and enhancements that customers had suggested over the years.
The next year, PlanGuru and its five employees joined the Blueprint Accelerator Network, and through the program have gotten office space at 150 Grand St. from Reckson, legal advice from Bleakley, Platt & Schmidt LLP, and public relations advice from Harrison Edwards PR and Marketing ”” all free or discounted during their two-year incubation period.
“I was living here in White Plains, working from my apartment ”” we all were,” Wielage said. “It would have been really difficult to bring in and train the types of people we wanted to train without a space like this. We were able to bring in younger people with accounting backgrounds and train them how to use our software and talk to customers.”
Since joining the Blueprint Accelerator, PlanGuru has hired six employees, put out two new products and increased its revenue stream dramatically.
“It allowed us to get to a fundamentally higher revenue platform and get more customers,” Wielage said. “In the past few years, we”™ve really made tremendous strides, specifically in the accounting space, in popularizing outsourced CFO services. We”™ve made a lot of progress in popularizing these concepts and gaining a foothold in the industry.”
The company plans on hiring three more people, including another developer, in the next two months.
“You couldn”™t have asked for a better success story” for the Blueprint Accelerator program, said Marissa Brett, the president of the Westchester County Association, which coordinates the program. “They”™re creating jobs, filling office space, and growing the economy in Westchester County, which is what the Blueprint Accelerator was founded to do.”
