Geek Of The Week: Rick Carlson, CEO Of SharpSpring
SharpSpring is a rapidly growing organization that is globally known for providing services such as marketing automation on a cloud- based platform, specifically the Software- as- a- Service (SaaS) platform. They supply quite a number of businesses around the world with their services, including dynamic contracts monthly, to ensure growth and expansion in the digital marketing age.
Founded in the year 2010 by Rick Carlson who doubles as both the founder and CEO of the group, the company currently boasts of over 150 employees under its payroll. Over the years, the company can be said to be steadily growing by an average of 21% earnings per share each year, bring its total revenue growth as the previous year to about 30% growth.
Rick Carlson brings over 12 years of prior experience in executive management for the effective management of SharpSpring. He has held positions such as CEO, President and other top management positions in many other technological and internet security companies, one of which is the AVG.
By founding SharpSpring, Rick hopes that he can combine marketing analytics with various automations on an easy to use user friendly SaaS platform to serve small and medium businesses. He aims to achieve this by offering highly advanced digital marketing solutions to customers around the world.
When asked on why he popularly refers to SharpSpring as a ‘second generation’ marketing automation solution, Rick’s reply was, “the first generation of marketing automation solutions were designed by computer scientists and programmers. They were expensive and difficult to use, they were designed by programmers, and they weren’t intuitive. When we started SharpSpring, we wanted to bring marketing automation capabilities that enterprises were using down to small and medium sized businesses. If we were going to do that, we knew we needed to provide a low-cost solution, be easy to use, and be flexible. We think we’ve succeeded. Hands-down, we have the best interface. We feel like ours is perhaps the first marketing automation solution actually designed by designers, as well as programmers.”
The 46 years old father of two sons had his MBA in business from the University of Florida and when he is not busy at work, he is either found with his sons, who he believes are far more complex start-ups compared to SharpSpring, or he is spending time with his wife or playing the volley ball.
