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And it’s sad because they produce something good. If we were around at that point we could have saved the Weekly.”
“Traditional companies are very structured and box-like,” adds Stringfors. “We can reach a wider audience without needing the tools traditional companies use. For that reason, our company and the companies we help take off much faster than they would in the traditional system. When that happens, it’s vital that every single person in the company be able to expand their creativity and potential. And this really makes employees in tech start-ups work harder than they would in traditional companies.
“It’s also why collaboration between companies and between skill sets is so important,” continues Stringfors. “Employees in traditional companies tend to work within groups that share their skill set, but the problem with that is their creativity reaches a cap very quickly. When you collaborate you view a problem from different perspectives, which makes the end product, the solution, stronger and helps us reach it faster.”
“When I first started programming, a lot of the resources for software development were locked up in industries,” says Wheeler. “Now that the Internet has … evolved to the point that it’s at now, a lot more of the powerful resources for programmers have become available for anyone to use—it’s called open source. Because of this, 15-year-old kids like David Karp are able to build tumblr. So things are definitely very different today than they were even 10 years ago.”
“Think about the difference between how Google started and how Goldman Sachs started,” elaborates Paran. “You can see how that new environment is treating both at this time. It’s the difference between going in for a six or eight-hour day and staring at expense reports until your mind goes numb and having a client that needs a solution in six months or their business will fail. At that point the team has to find a solution which forces us to think creatively and look for outside-the-box solutions.”
That being said, MuBeta doesn’t just target small businesses for their brand of solutions. They also target mid-sized companies and large corporations too.
“Corporations tend to want more detailed, focused work done in a specific area,” explains Stringfors. “Small businesses tend to lack the same level of organization, and so we have to do more general structuring.”
“One thing that I’ve noticed is that larger companies tend to say, ‘well we’re already using this, how can we make it more efficient and can you do it for the same price?’” says Paran. “Whereas when we work with small businesses it tends to be more like teaching them how to think creatively and develop new strategies for growth.”
“We like working with both types,” adds Jones. “They each have their own challenges and personalities.”
“And because we get to work with different types of companies across different types of industries, it keeps our work interesting,” says Stringfors. “Every time we work with a company it’s a different customization, so it makes our lives a whole lot more fun.”
“Right, and we learn from them too,” says Paran. “Different companies have very different things to teach us, and all the while we’re teaching them too.”
[Sub] The MuBeta Difference
All four founders are at the top of their respective fields and met through Hawaiʻi Pacific University networks. Paran was the student body president at HPU while Jones was president of the Akamai Advertising Agency, a student-run organization there. Wheeler is a competition programer at HPU who has led teams of programmers to victory over schools like Stanford and MIT. Stringfors was a student senator for the College of Business two years in a row, co-founded the HPU Health Club, was vice-president of Students for Free Enterprise and founded his first company (in the healthcare field) when he was 20.
Because of their leadership skills and networking abilities, if a client’s problem requires solutions from outside the MuBeta team’s expertise, they are capable of tapping their contacts across varied networks to collaborate with a variety of potential ad hoc team-members to come up with the proper, quality solutions to the problem.
“We’re pulling in people from different majors, different backgrounds, different skill sets to solve these new, modern business challenges in a modern way,” says Paran. “We are capable of pulling in the right people for the job, no matter what it is.”
Although the MuBeta team feels confident that they could custom build the right business model for any type of company, they won’t be offering their services to just any business.
“We want to be known as an exclusive company,” says Jones. “We want people down the road to say, ‘MuBeta Solutions is helping you? How can my company get their help too?’ Companies can inquire with us and we’ll sit down and talk to them, but in the end we decide which clients we’ll take.”
“We’re passionate about what we do, so we’re careful about which companies we choose to approach,” explains Paran. “We look at a company’s ethos. What do they care about? We want to work with companies that care about their people and are hard-working themselves, not businesses that are just there to exploit people. We really want to make sure our clients’ views are consistent with our ethos.”
“We want to be able to control our own work in order to maintain a certain level of quality to it,” explains Stringfors. “If we try to take on the masses, it will water down our product and change us into another wholesale solutions company, instead of a customized solutions company. That is one of the biggest things companies face once they start taking on too many clients.”
Just as Stringfors explained about tech start-ups and their ability to expand rapidly, MuBeta is already growing rapidly.
“We have another four-member team that mirrors our setup already in place and working on other accounts and we’re already training other teams as well,” says Paran. “We’re already looking at expanding to different states and countries. We’re part of that wave of high-growth start-ups, and instead of having to export our start-ups to Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley will have to come to us.
“I think there’s a unique way people do business here,” continues Paran. “So one of our goals for ourselves is to be able to marry the two: to have that aggressive team around a client that will get the job done efficiently and correctly, but—and I know this sounds kind of cheesy—but also to have that aloha about. You have to talk story—that’s how you do business here.”
Jones agrees: “We really care about helping other companies out. That’s what makes us happy. We have to take care of each other here in Hawaiʻi.”
This attitude of helping others that are in need is also why the team started a nonprofit called the MuBeta Foundation. A separate entity from Solutions, the foundation has already raised money for relief efforts in the Philippines following the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Haiyan, and will raise money for future relief efforts around the world as well.
“We’re working with several nonprofits in the Philippines to receive the money we’ve raised and distribute aid from those funds,” says Stringfors.
“Like I said earlier, we care about our communities,” says Paran. “It’s probably been pounded into your head, but it’s true: Think globally, but act locally. We’re acting locally by partnering with other small businesses to give to the relief efforts. …
“That’s the other thing that kind of comes from our generation,” continues Paran. “We’re still competitive, but it’s a collaborative, community-based competitiveness that’s based on making each other better, rather than beating each other down. I think, maybe because of social media, our generation tends to think larger—like the whole globe is our community. That’s what the foundation is about and, in a way, what MuBeta Solutions is about too.”
To inquire with MuBeta Solutions about whether their brand of custom solutions is right for your business, visit their website at mubetasolutions.com/contact and send them an email.