Case Study Flexco

🪏 Zero to Six-Figure ARR in Year One, Launching Manufacturer's First SaaS Product

Jump to: The Situation · My Role · What I Did · The Outcome · Hindsight

Operationalizing a 100+ year old manufacturing company's first subscription product. Turning its customers’ biggest unplanned expense into recurring revenue.

THE SITUATION

Conveyor belt unplanned downtime is one of the most expensive failure modes in bulk material handling. Operators hauling aggregates, coal, gold, platinum, or recycled materials could lose $5,000 an hour or more when a belt went down. The root cause was often preventable: a manageable tear in the belt, left unchecked, could progress to a full rip that took the entire line offline.

The existing solution was manual and inconsistent. Technicians walked belts to check the condition daily or weekly at facilities which ranged from 50 to 50,000 acres. Caught early, a tear meant a quick patch. Caught late, it meant replacing the belt entirely; a cost that dwarfed the price of a patch.

Flexco's answer was Flexco Elevate: a system of IoT sensors deployed across belt cleaners, feeding a 24/7 analytics dashboard and alerting technicians before minor issues became major ones. But this was Flexco's first pursuit of a SaaS product. None of the business infrastructure existed yet including subscription provisioning, licensing, device management, and more. The company needed to build the operational capability to convert a one-time hardware sale into predictable recurring revenue.

MY ROLE

Flexco's CMO set the strategic direction to pursue a subscription model. I was hired to operationalize it by leading product through development and market launch, coordinating across software architecture, hardware and electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, internal IT, marketing, and sales. I owned the business capabilities Flexco didn't yet have as a hardware-only company: subscription provisioning, firmware update strategy, remote device management, and unit serialization.

WHAT I DID

Stood up the subscription infrastructure a hardware company didn't have.

Flexco had never sold software before, so there was no process for provisioning subscriptions, managing licenses, or tracking devices at scale. I worked directly with internal IT and the electronics manufacturer to design that infrastructure, alongside real-time firmware update capability and remote device management for sensors deployed in the field.

Decoupled the sensor from the subscription.

Beta testing surfaced a real installation problem: tracking hundreds of physical sensors across a site was error-prone, and installers couldn't guarantee the right hardware landed on the right belt. I designed an onsite mobile pairing model that let installers assign a subscription to any sensor in the field, at the moment of install. Once paired, hardware and software were tracked as a single unit to put that real-time decision in the installer's hands instead of requiring exact hardware-to-location matching.

Turned raw vibration data into a decision a technician could act on.

Early feedback made it clear that raw sensor data was too complex for customers to interpret on their own. I spent over 1,000 hours in the field studying how gyroscopic vibration patterns corresponded to different belt events. A large rock striking the belt reads completely different than a small hole repeatedly hitting the belt cleaner. That work led to a bedding-in period, typically 0.5 to 5 hours of runtime, where each sensor learned its baseline vibration pattern before the system would flag anomalies. Building that translation layer between the raw signal and a plain-language incident description was what made the Insights dashboard something customers actually used.

Matched the launch sequence to sales strength and downtime risk, not convenience.

The eight-country rollout in North America, the EU, and Australia wasn't opportunistic. I sequenced markets based on where Flexco's existing sales teams already had strong regional relationships and where mine sites carried the highest revenue-per-hour exposure to belt downtime. That combination meant reps could sell into accounts they already knew, on a problem that was maximally expensive for that specific customer, which mattered given the team had never sold software before and needed the strongest possible case to lead with.

THE OUTCOME

HINDSIGHT

I would have built a lower investment on-ramp before asking customers to commit to the full IoT system. The mobile app that came with Flexco Elevate to make field notes and store belt condition photos turned out to be valuable on its own—independent of the sensor data. Positioning that as a standalone, lightweight product would have given customers a lower-friction way to trial digital condition monitoring before making the much larger investment in IoT hardware. Instead, the full system was the only entry point, which likely priced out or slowed down customers who weren't ready to commit to sensors on day one.▫