Chris Jordan spent much of his youth training to be a professional golfer. He was a state champion for Parkview Baptist High School and earned a scholarship to Nicholls State, where he played a single injury-marred season after tearing his hip at a golf scramble team fundraiser on the first day of school.
“It was a low point for me, trying to figure out where to go from there,” Jordan tells Business Report in a new feature in the current issue.
With his athletic career over before it started, he needed a new outlet for his competitive drive. After a couple more years at LSU and a stint “teaching old ladies how to play golf,” his dad got him a job selling software to construction companies in 2009.
As Jordan honed his sales chops “dialing for dollars” during the nadir of the Great Recession, he realized the construction software market was served by “a bunch of B-players” selling narrowly tailored business solutions. But what if one company offered a single program that could replace all those other applications?
After watching The Social Network, the 2010 film loosely based on the founding and early years of Facebook, Jordan decided to launch his own tech startup.
“If this dude can make $80 billion, we can make a billion,” Jordan remembers thinking.
A construction company owner might work with several different technology vendors promising to digitize different aspects of their business. Jordan, who founded Omnidek with his father, Steve, wants to provide one application that can handle everything.
“I can go in there and say, ‘I’m not saying I’m better than your payroll system.’ I’m saying, ‘I can do what the other payroll system does, and also your expense report, and every other business application that you would have inside of a single platform, and I’m half the price.’”
Customers can get a Facebook-style interface for their company’s data, he says.
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