“It’s just a matter of time until every CEO will use a tool like Howwe to run their business”

Howwe Technologies CEO Ulf Arnetz talks about his company’s origins and current state as a SaaS provider. With the help of their software, businesses may achieve rapid expansion and alter themselves on all levels, resulting in quantifiable financial gains.

What is the need for a product like Howwe?

Every CEO, management team, and Board of Directors has a company strategy and goals. For the most part, these objectives and strategies are tied to increasing sales and profit over a given period. The plan needs to be carried out by Howwe to ensure that the essential improvements are made and financial goals are accomplished on schedule.

As an Enterprise Execution Software, or EES, Howwe is designed to facilitate execution throughout the whole corporation. What are your thoughts on the future of this type of software?

This is a brand-new, massive market that is seeing rapid expansion. As a result of the lack of prior digitalization in this area, businesses frequently fall short of their intended outcomes when putting their strategies into action. Until this point. Globally, there is a growing demand for CEO-specific support, which helps the CEO lead the entire organization more effectively, in an organized and faster manner.

In a comparable field, Monday.com is a well-established global player. In contrast to Howwe, Monday.com and other similar companies have software that captures the vast majority of the everyday work. However, their growth is a testament to the increasing demand: They claim that they’ve only taken a slice of the market so far, with 127,000 customers. Microsoft / Ally, Gtmhub, and Asana are just a few other well-known software businesses offering useful applications. However, these solutions are not designed to assist the company in execution, i.e. to improve tomorrow, today.

In today’s world, it is impossible to run a finance department or a sales department without a financial system or a CRM system. With products like Howwe, it’s the first time a single product has been developed for measuring how well a company’s CEO executes the company strategy. A new generation of products will emerge, and Howwe continues to break new ground every day. As with many trends, it may take some time before firms reach a more mature stage of adoption.

I like to compare the evolution of execution software to the digitalization of the music industry, which we’ve already experienced. We transitioned from CDs to iTunes, where you had to perform your own search for the music you wish to hear. Spotify transformed the music industry with its built-in intelligence that makes it easier to find exactly the right music for you from a wide variety. When it comes to the most crucial actions for a company to fulfill its strategy and achieve its financial goals, Howwe revolutionizes the method in which firms operate. System support like Howwe will be as natural to a CEO in a few years as Spotify is to the typical music user.

You’re located in the United States. Are there any differences between the market there and the Nordic market in terms of maturity?

With players like Monday.com, Asana, and various OKR software companies—all of which have already been mentioned—the US is left out in many ways of what we might call “day-to-day operations.” Neither one of them is designed for ‘enterprise implementation’. According to that perspective, Scandinavian countries are 3-4 years ahead.

How does Howwe’s positioning in the market compare to competitors?

Besides having a long lead in technology that allows cross-organizational execution, we also have proactive and integrated business assistance based on 10+ years of experience from clients and their thousands of employees. In the form of actionable insights, data on best practices for how to actually succeed in medium- to large-sized organizations is provided to the right person at the right time. Aside from that, on a weekly basis, we have meaningful and observable acceleration based on business cases.

Ulf Arnetz is convinced Howwe will continue to hold one of the top spots in the industry due to its lead in terms of product advantages and all of the built-in business assistance it provides. 

What is Howwe’s vision?

This type of product will have a massive market. Every CEO who is focused on growth will use a proactive application to ensure that execution occurs on time. In ten years, Howwe will be a new Salesforce in its niche. Consider a sales manager who does not use a CRM application such as Salesforce today.

What is the business model that will get you there?

Currently, we’re using a direct sales approach, but in a few select markets, we’ve also begun using a partner sales approach. We only engage with partners who have a direct impact on the CEO or other senior executives – those who implement and are judged on their ability to support Howwe. With a proven sales technique and a proven product, all of our customers have achieved a ROI of between 10 and 25 percent within a year of signing up with us.

On Howwe’s path to expansion, what obstacles do you see?

While the market’s demands are evident, it’s not necessarily mature enough for novel business models like Howwe. However, the current trend is already here. This is a huge and growing industry that we’re poised to take advantage of, according to Gartner, a global leader in IT research and consulting.

You’re about to go public on the stock exchange. What does Howwe’s IPO mean?

The IPO is important to us. This means, among other things, that we gain recognized legitimacy, which is important in our CEO sales at large and medium-sized companies.

What can a shareholder expect from you as a company?

As a shareholder, you can expect unusually strong growth with unusually high margins as a result of our SaaS model and partner sales, which generate high profits per customer. There may be an initial delay depending on how quickly the trend grows and the customer’s maturity and understanding of the need proposed by Gartner.

Where do you see Howwe in five years?

Howwe is on track to become one of the top three global providers of enterprise execution software in the next five years. We have the opportunity to become Salesforce for enterprise execution, or SAP for enterprise resource planning. In light of the developing trend, we may expect to see more and more global competitors with radically different economic forces. Despite this, we’re hard to beat because of our product advantage and all of the built-in business assistance we provide. As a result, we are certain that we can continue to hold one of the top spots in the industry for the foreseeable future.

Howwe Technologies AB (publ) is a Stockholm-based international SaaS company targeting larger organizations. Its SaaS application Howwe® is a proactive tool that helps organizations to execute their strategies better and faster by visualizing, steering, and measuring the business and strategy acceleration in real-time throughout the entire organization. Howwe helps its customers to create provable and measurable financial results.

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