Connect
To Top

Meet Trailblazer Janine Williams

Avatar photo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Janine Williams.

Impulsify’s story is one of grit, passion, and no shortage of miracles to be sure!

Janine Williams, CEO & Founder of Impulsify, fell in love with the hotel retail space 13 years ago when her former husband started a company to supply candy and snacks to hotel pantries through an Amazon-type- online ordering platform. In the beginning, Williams played an instrumental part in building the marketing, branding and sales efforts from her basement while raising their four children as a stay-at-home mom.

Seven years into the venture, with the children in school, Williams’ role had dramatically grown to managing key relationships with global clients like Marriott and LaQuinta. When she realized that hotels’ challenges surrounding retail was so much more complex than just supplying the products – she launched the company’s Retail Services offering to improve the retail space design and merchandising- not just supply it.

But the absence of valid purchasing data and measurement tools to really understand retail performance and consumer trends drove her crazy! The hotel industry had no dedicated software tool to ring transactions or track inventory, so the major brands had no business intelligence into what sold, what guests paid for it, what needed to be replenished.

In 2012, following a painfully difficult divorce, Williams was terminated from the company she had helped build. The loss was not unlike losing a child in many ways. She exited for the sake of the employees she loved dearly as it had become a tumultuous environment working with divorced executives in constant disagreement and turmoil.

Williams became determined to develop the Retail technology tool that was lacking in the industry.

Unfortunately, Janine’s background in no way prepared her to become the CEO of a software company. She set to work Googling “what is the best programming language? what is a software spec? how to find a tech partner.” Even more daunting, she had no income and little saving left following the divorce but four children under the age of 10 to raise and support.

In February 2013, Impulsify was founded. A venture born of equal parts innovation and desperation.

Within two months of founding the company and beginning to design their first product: ImpulsePoint, Williams was introduced to Mark Southern of Hilton Worldwide. He granted her a one-hour meeting to introduce the concept being built. “I basically had ten powerpoint slides that looked like a retail POS application, a whole lot of faith and the audacity to think I could win Hilton.”

At the end of the meeting, Southern agreed to give ImpulsePoint a chance and pilot six hotels when the prototype was complete as he had been searching for a viable product almost as long as Williams had been dreaming of one.

The pilot began in October 2013, by February 2014, the hotels testing showed an average increase of 49% and average profit increase of 220%! And Impulsify was off and running adding hundreds of hotels between 2014 and 2016.

In 2016, after analyzing a two years worth of purchasing behaviors and shrink data, Impulsify discovered that – while the revenue was dramatically improved – the retail stores were still plagued by shrinkage, disinterested front desk associates who failed to ring transactions when busy, and guests who were annoyed they had to wait in the front desk line to buy a bottle of water. This often leads to “inadvertant theft” – they would take it because the hotel made it hard to pay for.

From that discovery, ShopPoP was born. The self-pay kiosk is the first of its kind specifically built for hotel retail outlets – allowing guests to scan the product barcode in-store and charge their purchase to their room or pay by credit card using a user-friendly touchscreen kiosk.

ShopPoP became a game-changer for Impulsify. New brands quickly reached out and Impulsify’s products, data and services became the industry standard. Hilton and InterContinental Hotels Group brands combined account for over 20 sub-brands that now choose Impulsify Retail Technology – with more brands launching continuously as self-pay becomes the expected experience – rather than just a cool amenity to offer.

Seven years in, Impulsify is approaching 1,000 deployments and beginning to move into other complementary verticals where retail is a viable source of incremental revenue for a business but is not their core business. Luxury apartments, co-working spaces, and senior living centers are among the verticals that need convenient grab-and-go retail but have limited staffing models dedicated to the success of the store.

To test the theory that the ShopPoP Self-Service Kiosk will solve the issues hotels and other non-retail businesses may experience when attempting to offer retail, Impulsify recently launched Platte Street Mercantile in downtown Denver as a learning lab. The grab-and-go market appears outwardly as a convenience store serving local businesses and residences with snacks, beverages, and convenience items. But it serves a dual purpose of providing authentic learning, training opportunity, and feature testing while giving Impulsify intimate insight into the challenges retail operators and users may experience in an unmanned retail setting.

2020 is poised to be another major growth year and Williams could not be more excited about the systematic removal of ugly, unsuccessful retail that once inspired her to tackle an area of hospitality few cared about before Impulsify’s solutions and services changed the industry’s perception of the lobby retail space.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I had $13K after my divorce. Bootstrapping was impossible on paper. I began with a Chase business card with a credit line of $2,000 and worked side jobs building logos, Wix websites and marketing collateral for small businesses to take care of my kiddos and keep moving forward.

The one thing I have learned from a TON of adversity along this journey: it is not VC funding, it is not education or degrees that create entrepreneurial success. It’s not even expertise and experience in my case.

It is 100% grit and grace. The willingness to work impossibly hard, to refuse with all of your being to fail. The desire and discipline to learn the parts you don’t know and the wisdom and humility to surround yourself with really smart people to fill the holes you can’t fill. It is unwavering faith on the hardest days that you are 100% capable if you keep showing up to prove the naysayers wrong. 🙂

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Impulsify – what should we know?
Impulsify specializes in retail technology solutions for non-retail businesses with deep expertise in unattended lobby retail within the hotel industry.

Our key differentiator is our data. We hold unprecedented business intelligence into hotel guest retail behaviors, consumer trends, and unattended retail best practices that we gather from millions of transactions conducted at hotel pantries and gift shops across North America.

We are proud of the overall impact we have had on the hospitality industry in the last five years – changing the perception on the ROI and incremental revenue value of the cashier-less retail space when managed correctly with the right tools. When we started, people thought of it as a guest amenity and hoped they broke even each month, but lacked the tools to even show them why they weren’t profitable. Headed into 2020, we are working to redesign multiple global brands’ retail program and provide them with the tools, data, and services to increase revenue and provide a better guest experience.

We won Colorado Companies to Watch this year – proudest moment by far was when our whole team rushed the stage to accept the award as a team. Most companies send up a founder or two who stand, smile, shake. Our team piled in 20 people from the executive team to the support staff, from software developers to trainers. We built it together – we won it together!

What we are most proud of though… is what we do with our own profits. Every year we build more houses and schools in 3rd world countries through our passionate partnership with International Hope Builders where we put children in homes and schools to break the cycle and effects of devastating poverty. It is core to everything we achieve, everything we work for and everyone at Impulsify plays a key role in that effort.

Finding a mentor and building a network are often cited in studies as a major factor impacting one’s success. Do you have any advice or lessons to share regarding finding a mentor or networking in general?
Step 1. Find one! I felt very alone. Very isolated for too much of my startup journey. I didn’t want people to know that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing – and I thought if I sat down with really smart people and told them how badly I was struggling they would ask me what the heck I was doing trying to run a company or tell me I should quit. I was so wrong. The best leaders are the ones who aren’t convinced they know it all. Find someone who knows more and learn everything you can.

Step 2. Know that there are a variety of mentor types out there. It’s not always someone in your exact field or network. For me, it was finding women leaders or groups who are successfully juggling being a good CEO, a good wife, a good mother while maintaining my faith and friendships and health – it made more impact than finding someone who had deep expertise in Point of Sale or Software Development. There are A LOT of personal and professional aspects that need to be mentored to lead successfully, to stay healthy and to enjoy the experience. Not just connections and networking.

Contact Info:

Image Credit:
All photos provided by Impulsify.

Suggest a story: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.

Related Items

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in