Emiel Bril, an entrepreneur since age 14, has a solution for property owners and managers that will help them better work with vendors.
Bril is Founder and CEO of VendorPM, which began in January 2020 — a software-enabled marketplace that streamlines the vendor sourcing & procurement process while giving head-office centralized control & visibility.
“I used to be a service vendor. I worked for a high rise window cleaning company many years ago. So I worked with thousands of property managers, serviced many, many properties, including retail of course, and was very shocked – blown away – at how much money these management companies and owners are spending on these service vendors. But how inefficient, old school and decentralized the vendor sourcing and procurement process is,” said Bril.
“So working with vendors is inevitably an old school process and of course it comes directly at property management’s expense or the property owner’s expense.”
That’s how VendorPM started. Bril wanted to start a software-enabled marketplace that empowers property managers, ultimately addressing the existing market imbalance.
“The way we’ve done that is we’ve automated the vendor sourcing and procurement process, focusing on key areas like planning services, getting quotes, finding new vendors and even vendor compliance,” said Bril.
“And in turn, because we’re automating historically manual processes, we’re now giving head office or senior leadership in these owner and management companies far greater control and visibility than what they had before.”
Bril said the company’s reach is across Canada right now and has ambitions to grow globally.
“We’re a venture-funded start-up. In January (2020) we raised venture funding and hired world-class talent from our industry which helped us quickly grow with some of the most recognized brands in real estate. The government of Canada has also been a great support in supporting our R&D, innovation and job growth in Canada,” said Bril.
“Our intent is to become the operating system for property management. We plan to scale into the US this year and eventually IPO within 4-6 years”
For businesses, Bril said there are several benefits for using VendorPM.
“Property managers today are using Excel spreadsheets, word of mouth and email to complete these tasks which becomes very, very time-consuming and inefficient. Simply put, we’ve built a better way for them to work with vendors to ultimately save them a lot of time and a lot of headaches. Because these things were done manually before, there was no way to track data, improve and optimize. So by automating them, at the site level, it then gives head office control and visibility to make better decisions” he said.
“Vendors today still rely on old-school means of sales & marketing. So think of this like the HomeStars or the Yelp but specific to our industry. So in other words, it’s the most cost-effective way for vendors to grow their business.”
Bril started his first business at the age of 14 when he was knocking on doors selling window cleaning.
“I needed to make some money to help out my family at the time but very quickly fell in love with the business. I ended building a pretty big business. By the age of 20 we were doing about a million dollars a year in revenue with 50 employees and grew a pretty big window cleaning company,” said Bril.
“Eventually I exited that business and started working at a high-rise window cleaning company. That was the transition from selling to homeowners to selling to property managers to service these buildings or these retail properties. It was my experience then working in the commercial space, working with property managers, that ultimately led to VendorPM.”
In about a year, VendorPM has successfully scaled its platform across Canada accumulating thousands of vendors and is utilized daily by real estate owners and managers of all asset classes both large and small as well as major institutional Canadian real estate corporations.
To utilize VendorPM in your business click here.
