P R O F I L E
Justin Nelson ’00 Banking On Success
Photos by John King Keisling
J
ustin Nelson points with pride to the wall he and his business partner built in their modest loft-style office in downtown Houston. “I guess I did get to use my engineering background after all,” he says. Surprising words from an engineering science major who received his bachelor of science from Trinity in 2000 with a concentration in mechanical engineering. But not when you realize that Nelson is into construction of a different sort these days. As founder of Strongroom Solutions, Nelson is building a company and a product that he hopes will end up in banks everywhere—a treasury management product called Payables Lockbox that does for banks and their business customers what services like Bill Pay do for consumers. “There are more complexities for a business paying their bills than a bank customer paying personal bills,” explains Nelson, 31. “Just like the banks offer Bill Pay to us to simplify our lives, they also offer similar services to businesses to simplify theirs.” In short, Strongroom enables banks to make bill paying simpler and more secure for their business customers. Nelson and his former and original partner, David Caldwell ’00, started toying with the idea in 2004, when Caldwell—who had worked in property management—noticed “a lot of inefficiencies in accounting. He also saw that banks were very interested in getting property management companies as customers,” says Nelson. “We talked about how we could do things differently.” With the help of a Denver development company, the result was an accounting application interface that banks could resell to companies that manage homeowners’ associations, property owners’ associations, and condo associations. The first nibble came from Sterling Bank in Texas, who had a community association management company customer very interested in the new program. But there was a problem, according to Nelson—the first version of the program wasn’t up to the task. “We knew we couldn’t do it with
our existing product. We had to start anew, create it ourselves, and build it in-house.” Enter Scott Mury ’00, a fellow engineering grad and “sharp kid” who had done a senior design project with Nelson. “Scott can build just about anything,” says Nelson, who brought Mury on as a partner and chief technology officer. Several months later, the new and improved version was just what the bank ordered—and it attracted even more business. “A year ago we had five customers. Now we have 24.”
It also put the company on the national radar. Recently, a top-selling master planned community—who uses one of Strongroom’s management company customers—was looking to switch banks, and the race was on to snap up such a lucrative client. On the requests for proposal to the various banks, they wanted to know: Do you offer Strongroom’s Payables Lockbox? Nelson laughs. “We got a call from Bank of America asking, ‘Who are you guys?’” They may not be wondering for long. “We just signed an agreement with Northbrook Services in Dallas for them to resell our product to all 50 banks in their net-
work,” says Nelson. In the past year, thanks to word of mouth and referrals, Strongroom Solutions has obtained customers outside of Texas in California, Florida, Nevada, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Virginia, Arizona, and Tennessee. He looks around the office, with its hardwood floors, high ceilings, and exposed pipes, and sighs. “This has worked well for us up to this point, but we’re going to have to expand soon.” That includes “looking for funding to really grow this thing, maybe bring on additional sales and development help.” Nelson says he hasn’t had a full week of vacation since he started the business, but plans to remedy that soon with a trip to the Grand Canyon. After 50- to 60-hour work weeks, he relishes time with his girlfriend and his 100-pound chocolate lab, Charlie. An only child, Nelson credits his mother, Karen, for her influence in “pushing me to attend Trinity to get that liberal arts background. Without it I would have had a much more narrow focus on engineering instead of entrepreneurship.” Another key aspect was landing an internship at global management consulting firm Accenture after his junior year, thanks to Trinity’s career services office. “That opportunity gave me a lot of confidence in my abilities, and it really set me up on a business path instead of engineering.” Not that he doesn’t appreciate the synergy of the two fields. “I think they both involve that feeling of creating something and watching it work. I think entrepreneurship and engineering share that, and that’s what I enjoy—building something and seeing it stand on its own.” He glances again at the wall he and Scott built. “It’s as simple as that.” Julie Catalano
JULY 2010 37