Colin Moreland, CEO, brings a passion for technological innovation and customer service to MPP Software Solutions. He can quickly visualize what a software product would look like that addresses customers’ needs and he understands what work and people are required to make it happen.

Colin is a team builder who has a mantra he regularly uses to describe his job, “find good, motivated people, create an environment for them to succeed, and then get out of their way.” MPP embodies that mentality with a strong focus on employee autonomy and personal accountability, with light management overhead and direct day-to-day management. This culture breeds innovation and was instrumental in MPP Software being recognized with a Business of the Year Award in 2021 for Innovation and Technology.

Finally, Colin is the rare breed of CEO who has put the time in “in the trenches,” and so he has a strong strategic mindset of where the company needs to go, but also what it needs to do to get there. Many organizations struggle with the “strategy execution gap,” but MPP has been built around a strategic framework that ensures long-term success and growth.

Colin’s business role model is Tony Hseih, founder of Zappos.com. Colin aspires to replicate Hseih’s culture of “zealous pursuit of customer excellence” and employee empowerment. All new employees to MPP Software are taught that MPP’s most important customers are its employees, and if the employees don’t believe in the brand, then no external customers will. This has imbued the company with a sense of ownership and customer-mindedness that keeps the leadership team honest and focused on employee satisfaction to maintain priority on client satisfaction.

According to the steadfast leader, balancing time between conflicting priorities are his biggest challenge. Outside of MPP Software, Colin holds an executive position with Calgary-based CalTen Software, sharing his experience starting a new software company with their leadership. He owns Lethbridge Sports, an independent media company based in Southern Alberta focusing on local sports news. Colin became a father to his second son as MPP Software was starting. Balancing those conflicting priorities can be exhausting, he says. Colin is the President of the Lethbridge Steel football association of the WWCFL and is a big supporter of women’s sport in Canada.

Client First Approach

Whether interacting with clients’ application or their staff, they expect an experience that is a “cut above” and ready to cater to their most elite requirements. A simple example of the difference starts with the call center. “If you call MPP Software, you won’t receive a computerized answering service or a Siri-knockoff trying to understand you explain your problem. You’ll receive an answer from a real human, located at our headquarters, who knows what we do and how our software works. This is just one example, but exemplifies how we focus on service delivery over cost savings,” says Moreland.

Their applications are developed as SaaS (Cloud) based solutions that utilize the most recent development technologies and responsive design that allows the web-based applications to operate across several platforms using the same code base. One of their solutions integrates with an industry-leading digital lockbox utilizing the client’s Bluetooth on their phone as a proxy service for interacting with innovative offline hardware.

One of MPP Software’s significant differentiators is illustrated in how they engage with their corporate partners. Many of their solutions are B2C or Business to Client applications, where the “user” is a person and not a business. However, they partner with other companies with good ideas but don’t have the skills or experience to bring an idea into existence as a product and take it to market. “Unlike the thousands of development body shops in the world who charge a flat hourly rate and rent people by the hour to do development, we look for partners whose ideas we support and engage them as equity partners in their businesses,” says Moreland. “We go in as partners in the solutions, which often enables these partners to bring a product to market in a much faster and much lower cost way than they had originally planned.” Once the product is developed, MPP retains a portion of interest in the partnership and a revenue share of the profits. By taking on the upfront cost and risk (and reducing it by being a proven team of product designers and developers), they become equity owners in products that benefit from an abnormal market advantage from their outset. “This “delayed gratification” model made things difficult during our first year of operations, but now that we are gaining the benefits from our first such partnerships while working on the next ones, the value of this model is orders of magnitude higher than the traditional body-shop approach to development partnerships.”

Offering Unique Solutions

MPP Software’s partner Charmed Family Resorts achieved a 64% reduction in their online hosting fees for their fairy tale-styled cottage resorts by switching to EligereDirect’s bespoke booking solution from Lodgify. This is allowing them to accelerate their plans to expand their resort with more cottages.

Another MPP partner at JustRingTheBell.ca (JRTB) struggled for over three years to bring their vision of realtor-free home showings to the market. After several failed technical partnerships and a substantial sunk cost, MPP Software partnered to bring this vision to life. Over four months, the concept was realized and brought to a beta state, ready for final testing and commercialization.

MPP Software’s flagship product has enjoyed a 30% monthly increase in users since launching and, over their last two fiscal years, have seen a 4800% increase in year-over-year revenue. These two numbers tell the story of their rapid growth profile.

MPP Software is in partnership with CalTen software on a next-generation land asset management solution to address the complexities of corporate land leases in today’s regulatory frameworks. It is working on a pair of personal projects they are unable to disclose at the moment. Still, they will have a significant opportunity for unique empowerment automation in 2022 for the days to come.