How Portland-based Bitcadet helps manufacturers digitize sales

Dusty Dean founder of Bitcadet

Cathy Cheney

By Malia Spencer - Portland Inno

July 14, 2021, 03:56pm PDT

Bitcadet CEO Dusty Dean believes fiercely in America’s small and mid-sized manufacturers.

He has built his company specifically to serve these businesses and to offer them the tools they need to stay competitive in a digital world and reach customers, who are more and more online.

Bitcadet is part technology consultant part software company. It is aimed at helping manufacturers solve four specific but integrated problems: grow sales, increase leads, adopt e-commerce and launch direct sales.

The company takes clients through a digital transformation of their sales organizations. Dean notes it’s not meant to displace a sales team, but to help modernize and automate the process so that sales people can use their time and energy on more complex deals and relationships rather than rounding up data, sending spread sheets or faxing product information.

“I’m a big believer in the power of manufacturing to create family wage jobs,” he said. “But that requires manufacturers to think differently about how they sell and distribute their products so they can have enough darn orders to hire more people in our community.”

Bidcadet has a team of software developers and strategists who can evaluate an operation and then integrate technology to help customers implement new processes like direct sales or digital marketing. The company has built software that can be used by many different manufacturing clients with some customization.

One client was able to see sales jump from $5 million to $50 million after implementing a direct to consumer strategy. Plus, that company now sees 60% of its revenue from online sales.

The company has about a dozen clients and most of those customers have been with the company for about five years, moving through different levels of technology adoption. Dean notes that Bitcadet is basically the entire e-commerce and growth divisions for its clients.

Now, Dean is trying to take Bitcadet to the next level. He is developing a Software-as-a-Service product that will further automate Bitcadet’s own work and allow even more manufacturers to use the company’s know-how to modernize sales.

The yet unnamed software is in beta testing with a handful of existing clients and some trusted referrals, Dean said.

“Seventy percent of what we build in our platform we can use across clients, we still have to customize that final 30%,” he said. “We are trying to get that (customization) down to 10%.”

As he gets closer to launching the new software product he expects to seek investors.

Bitcadet has 30 employees and a distributed team. Dean and his wife started the company in Memphis but moved to Portland in 2017. He notes that he has the software experience and she has the formal MBA training.

Dean hopes to not only add Oregon customers to his list but also tap the region’s talent as he grows the business.

The state of Oregon has 5,400 manufacturers and 84% have less than 50 employees, according to the Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Those 84% of companies likely do not have dedicated digital strategists or marketing teams, said Mike Vanier, vice president of client engagement for the organization.

As a result, OMEP works with manufacturers on these new digital challenges and works with companies including Bitcadet to help. It’s resources that are crucial for Oregon manufacturers to be successful, especially as more manufacturers start to recognize the value of e-commerce and direct sales.

For some manufacturers getting on board with e-commerce and direct sales is a hard idea to grasp since it means putting a lot of information online and potentially letting the competition see your sales and pricing details, Dean said.

However, he noted that the pandemic has helped push some folks to explore these areas. Several of Dean’s clients are in the home improvement or fitness industries and both saw huge surges in demand in 2020. Then the idea of automation made sense.

“We’ve experienced a surge for existing accounts and folks that were interested in the past and now want to work with us,” Dean said. “I’m at an inflection point now where we are scaling our existing accounts versus developing our SaaS software. We are in a growth mode right now.”