18 June Introducing Upendo Ventures. It’s a Pleasure to Meet You! June 18, 2017By Will Strohl | 3 MIN READ What is this Upendo Ventures thing, anyway? I mean, it sounds funny and it seems to have come out of nowhere. Also, what in the world has Will Strohl (me) been up to the past few months? These and many more questions have been coming our way, and this article hopes to answer many of them. Needless to say, we’re very excited to introduce Upendo Ventures to you. Why Over the past 3.5 years, I’ve been running Hotcakes Commerce. I’ve been responsible for all of the day-to-day activities including marketing, sales, partners, software development, and so on. My partners and I had a dream of bringing an enterprise-ready e-commerce solution to the mid-sized business. We worked tirelessly towards this goal. We had plenty of great wins, including some impressive marquee customers and penetrating markets across the globe. In keeping our original goals in mind, we knew we needed to do more to make this dream a reality. In recent months, I’ve been planning a new company who’s focus is on using technology to help businesses improve people’s lives. This is our mission. The core principle is to build a company that I always wanted to work for, and that you always wanted to work with. We believe in treating people with love and respect, and we approach everything with integrity first. Those people aren’t limited to those internally, but also anyone else we do any kind of business with. People are our passion, and when you work with us, you’ll have no doubt about that. How Simply put, our mission is to help your business change people’s lives, and we use technology to do that. We deliver this to you using a best of breed approach. Upendo Ventures is partnered with a network of boutique agencies located across the world. Each of our partners focus on one thing and one thing only. This means that what we deliver to you will be consistent over time, always using the most current best practices. You don’t have to worry about turnover adversely affecting your project. We employ a holistic approach to keep the big picture in perspective, and sometimes we may even help you generate that big picture. This way we can directly align what we do with your company’s short and long term goals. After all, we are here to help your business grow. When you grow, we grow. We deliver solutions to you that are as future-proof as possible. When your company is ready for the next phase, we won’t have to throw out or rebuild everything that we did before. As a team, we can all pick up from right where we left off. What Our company has three divisions, called Learn, Build, and Consult. Each division continues our primary mission through it’s own complimentary mission. No matter how and when you work with Upendo Ventures, we like to think we’re different, because we focus on generating partnerships, not clients or customers. At the end of the day, we’re in this together, and the last thing we want to be for you is a churn-and-burn kind of operation. We focus on providing ongoing value for the long term. We don’t just cut loose and disappear when the initial project is over. Learn In our Learn division, we focus on training and mentoring services where we help your team get to know processes and technologies better. We also mentor business owners in various ways, including sales process, leadership, and strategy. Our constant focus is on streamlining processes and techniques to decrease the amount of time people have to work on any specific task. Let's Chat! We'd love to work with you. Let's talk about how. Contact Us Build The Build division is exactly what it sounds like. We build things. Our team takes a end-user first approach where we identify how and where they’ll be using our solutions, and deliver them in a way that encourages and increases ongoing engagement. Usability is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We build websites and apps, but our passion is using a content management system (CMS) and e-commerce approach to help grow your business. After all, even if your site and app doesn’t sell anything, it’s still selling you. Consult Our Consult division is an area where we perform other services that don’t exactly fit into the other areas. When we consult, it can potentially cover a wide range of areas. We’ve done things ranging from augmenting client teams that need an extra few people to help out on projects, to solution architecture, online/offline marketing and more. Our primary goal in this area is to provide you with that extra little something your organization needs in order to take your business to the next level. Let’s Chat Now that you know a little bit about us, we’d love to learn more about you. Please feel free to leave a comment below, or contact us. Let’s talk about your project and see where we might be able to work together. If you’re interested in being part of our network, we’d love to talk about that too. Contact Us June 18, 2017By Will Strohl Business App, CMS, Consulting, Development, ECommerce, E-Commerce, ECommerce CMS, Leadership, Mentor, Training, Upendo Ventures, Website About the Author Will Strohl Founder & CEO Upendo Ventures Overall, Will has nearly 20 years of experience helping website owners become more successful in all areas, including mentoring, website development, marketing, strategy, e-commerce, and more. 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