Inmar Intelligence is a company that not only prides itself on standing on the leading edge of technology, it’s competitive advantage depends on it. That’s why the Winston-Salem based digital transaction facilitator and marketing company last week announced it was moving from its home in Innovation Quarter to the 1 West Fourth building in the heart of downtown.
David Mounts, chairman and CEO of Inmar Intelligence, said the move was necessary for a couple of reasons. First, because with its evolving Covid-inspired “phygital” business model the company needed only about two-thirds of its current 250,000 square feet. Second, it needed a blank slate in which to reimagine its digital footprint.
The company plans to move into the new space in May 2022.
After informing Triad Business Journal of the move last week, Mounts answered a few questions about the change of venue and his views of the company’s future. Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.
TBJ: How will the move from Innovation Quarter better serve Inmar Intelligence?
Mounts: The number one thing is we're in the business of helping our customers digitally transform their businesses. If you think about who our customers are — retail, hospitals, clinics — we’re bringing marketing technologies and financial technologies, supply chain technologies to them and helping them transform their businesses and make them omni channel. What the Covid crisis informed us about is that we actually could really remake our entire business and add another layer of digital transformation that would make us more effective with our clients. … We need to have a fresh palette to really get what we need done.
TBJ: The company has experienced significant growth at Innovation Quarter. Was this a difficult decision to make?
Mounts: It was not an easy decision. We had to think hard about it. We were a force for driving downtown back to life along with our partnership with Wake Forest Health to kind of get the Innovation Quarter going. The Innovation Quarter is going now. We continue to make investments in the Innovation Quarter. I personally out of my family office continue to make investments in the innovation quarter I'm going to continue to support it.
TBJ: How will the new space better benefit the company?
Mounts: The space has to have the design purposes to help us accomplish what we're trying to get done; and it should it should make it easier, it should make us faster, it should work more with what is becoming a hybrid digitally enhanced work model. We want to be first to market with this new way of working. We think it will give us a competitive advantage and so we're very focused on making that happen.
TBJ: Innovation Quarter and Inmar Intelligence grew up together. Do you have any concerns about the space you will leave behind?
Mounts: We’ve been important to Innovation Quarter and it's been important to us. We nearly tripled our revenues during the time that we were there. That’s pretty amazing for any company triple their revenues over seven years. It helped change our culture to have us emerge from more of a business services company to a true tech company. That clearly helped us make the transition and we would not be where we are today if it weren't for the symbiotic relationship between Innovation Quarter and Inmar. It is a beautiful location and I hope we get a large company interested in it because it would be it will be move-in and ready for someone. I hope that that happens, and I think it might.
TBJ: Why did it become necessary to evolve your operations at this time?
Mounts: We’re not just going to continue to kind of carry on what we've done. it’s not going to be good enough as it was during the crisis when everybody had to do this in two weeks. We have an incredible digital and IT team and they stood up our whole company for virtual in two weeks, so we're very good at that. We were on the list of essential companies because we’re servicing food and medicine and hospitals. We had to continue operating. One thing we've made clear to the team is stuff that was OK during the crisis is not going to be OK in this new digital work environment. What was okay then is not going to be good enough now. This design experience has to feel as good as when you walk into the innovation lab at Inmar. It’s got to be that incredible to the customers. They have to say, ‘now I know why I'm hiring this company to help me digitally transform because they are amazing in the way that they digitally engage.’ It’s that goal that I've given the team to really think about in every aspect.
