Entrepreneur journal: Jason Tham, CEO, Nulogy Corp

TORONTO (Reuters) - For many large companies, outsourcing is the norm as they seek cost savings at almost every level of production. Jason Tham, a former Kellogg's (K.N) consultant, saw an opportunity to help reduce the risk of something going wrong at each outsourced step. His solution: to create software that would streamline the supply-chain process and reduce costs even further. The following is a personal five-day journal written by Nulogy co-founder and CEO Jason Tham exclusively for Reuters.com:

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Day 1: Monday, September 14

Happy Monday morning! I'm a bit sore from running a 10-kilometer (6.2 mile) charity race on Sunday, but pleased to know that I'm recovering from a month-long injury. Speaking of running, it will be a very busy few weeks ahead. With summer winding down, fall is bringing the usual: trade shows and the busiest season for our customers. I'll be on the road today with my recently hired VP of business development, Sacha Diab, for a first-time visit to a prospect. These guys have won some awards, have over a 100 full-time employees, and I believe come in at just under $20 million in revenue, so it's a decent-sized opportunity. We're meeting with the CFO/COO, which is typically the right audience for an owner-operator contract packager. I've been looking forward to this meeting as I understand they are a market leader and serve some of the Fortune 50, including one of the largest consumer household brands in the world.

In we walked, and not surprisingly, they were skeptical. It's not their fault; it's just that most packagers have never come across a solution that meets their true needs. In this case, they ended up force-fitting Microsoft Dynamics, and building paper-based processes around it. The good news is that the two-hour meeting was very productive, next steps are established and the customer already sees the savings from both replacing the current system and advantages of having real- time cost, inventory and production information. I could see the prospect going live within the year. Very good start to the week!

Day 2: Tuesday, September 15

Today is the Global Home and Beauty Aids global show in New York, and several customers and prospects are attending. This is the first time we've attended, and we opted not to exhibit, but to walk the floor instead. We also decided to send a couple folks from our sales team, instead of me going. Over the past 6 months, since we received some funding, the focus has been to not only grow the business, but ensure we hire and train others in our marketing and sales functions. I'm looking forward to not always being on the road, as it will give me more cycles to grow strategic relationships.

In fact, the one we're building with the large consumer packaged goods company I saw again last week still has me thinking a lot. They're looking to standardize on our new PackPortal application because it can add a lot of value by streamlining the communication and collaboration involved in the product-launch process. A number of their contract packagers already use PackManager too, so they'll get the integration benefit which is huge. I'm hopeful that we'll be moving ahead shortly as this will be a great step toward our goal of working with both packagers

brands to be the platform for both collaboration and execution of new packaged product launches.

I think I might get some thoughts from the folks at my CEO roundtable meeting tonight. It's definitely one of the bigger developments since last month's meeting and they always seem to have had similar challenges with their high-growth tech companies.

Day 3: Wednesday, September 16

It's an early morning, as I'm trying to get my body used to running at dawn, because our marathon is 10 days away. Today is a track workout of 10 x 3 minute fast intervals. Yasso 800's is the funky name for it. I love speed work!

The bulk of today will be our quarterly planning meeting. About a year ago, a few of us founders spent a day with Verne Harnish. He's a knowledgeable guy, and we've put into practice his notion and structure of frequent meetings, ranging from daily pulse checks to quarterly planning. Every quarter we come up with a theme. The best one we've had so far was last quarter's "2 legit 2 quit!" We had a lot of focus and objectives around building up and highlighting our legitimacy: processes to sustain our growth, customer case studies, marketing collateral, etc. This upcoming quarter, I think our theme should be "Just do it!" Because while we've grown over 70 percent this past year alone, there is a strong potential to grow another 50 percent over the coming quarter, so we're not going to be in planning mode - it's up to us to "Just do it!"

It's going to be another late evening as I have another call with a prospect in Australia. Looking to expand beyond North America, Australia sounds cool, but the time difference is going to be a new challenge.

Day 4: Thursday, September 17

Overnight, we got a sign-back for the next phase of an alliance and partnership we've fostered with a global ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) vendor. We're starting to work closely with them, as several of the supply-chains we serve also use their platform, but they don't have our Enterprise Performance Management capability.

I'm spending the afternoon with a prospect we first met a week ago. They serve and package goods for several brands, including one of the top 3 beverage companies in the world. This meeting will be a closed-room session to get to next steps.

The meeting went well, and we've scheduled a walkthrough of our PackManager system with their data for the following week. This is typically one of the final stages prior to contractual agreements and negotiations, so excellent news!

I got back to the office a bit later than expected. We're supposed to have our Nulogy Town Hall to review the past month and also announce and discuss the upcoming quarter goals and theme. We started at 4:30 p.m. ET, and adjourned at 6:00 p.m. ET with everyone pumped and looking forward to a strong quarter!

Looking forward to a nice long swim tonight.

Day 5: Friday, September 18

Three meetings scheduled today. First up is a customer meeting with Schenker and Unilever. My COO, Kevin Wong, is reviewing the deliverables of the deployment and results gained. The findings were positive and therefore the team is looking at applicability of the software platform in other facilities.

The second meeting was with a potential investor. Unfortunately, I had to make a last-minute cancellation because of timing. The truth is we're continuing good organic and profitable growth so additional investment is currently not a primary focus. Once we reach some internal milestones and we're poised for the next stage of growth, we'll focus on this more.

The afternoon was spent with another customer, this time a local one, that serves one of the largest confectionary brands in the world. We went over our mobile strategy, which will let traveling executives check in on operations with their BlackBerrys and iPhones, and also wireless handheld terminals that are designed for warehousing environments. We've been trialing the functionality for some time, and coming out of the meeting, the customer decided they will be adopting and going live in the coming month with it!

All in all a very productive week and looking forward to the weekend. This is the last weekend before my wife and I do our first marathon… that means last real run before the race! Goal time is around 3 hours to get to Boston, but I have no clue what to expect. Being injured isn't cool…at least Nulogy covered some good ground this week in its own marathon of growth!