This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, I ask about Bricsys’ profitability and growth.

Steve: Do you publish your numbers?

Erik: No we don’t. We are a private company.

Steve: Can you give us an indication of what’s happening with your sales at the moment?

Erik: Last year we grew in revenue 25%. First quarter this year was up 27% over the same quarter last year. If you compare the sales in total of 2016 compared with 2015, it was 25% in growth. It means that the growth is going faster and faster and faster. That’s what we expect normally as well.

This is without any sales to Intergraph. We expect that the Intergraph deal will have an impact on our growth for sure. Mark as COO is responsible for sales and managing of that network. [To Mark] And I see you’re very occupied!

Mark: That whole Intergraph network is coming to us. It’s huge.

Erik: It’s more than doubling what we have, on sales partners.

Mark: Just to add to the numbers, we are very profitable: 24, 25%. We have very good profitability which is also significant. We’re not burning money.

Erik: Year after year.

Steve: So you’re making money every year and that’s increasing every year?

Erik: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The percentage is always around 24-25% but as we’re increasing revenue it becomes exponential.

Mark: We started in 2002 and I think we have always been profitable.

Erik: I think the first two years are what we call a black zero. We have started with an investor, but we have always kept a majority within the company. I won’t give the total shareholders but you must know that most of the people here, if somebody works here two years they get stock options and becomes a shareholder. The goal is we always keep the majority with the employees and the management.

We have a good partner investor. He’s satisfied with the growth, of course. There’s no big deal.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

• The big Bricsys interview 1 – why invite the press?
• The big Bricsys interview 2 – making money
• The big Bricsys interview 3 – looking after people
• The big Bricsys interview 4 – thank you, Autodesk
• The big Bricsys interview 5 – perpetual licensing and choice
• The big Bricsys interview 6 – lean and focused
• The big Bricsys interview 7 – the applications ecosystem
• The big Bricsys interview 8 – boundaries and BIM
• The big Bricsys interview 9 – treading on developers
• The big Bricsys interview 10 – platforms
• The big Bricsys interview 11 – free viewer?