CEO Spotlight: Nik Froehlich – Business Development in Technology

Only a few decades ago, investing in technology was strictly the domain of technology companies. Today, companies across industries and verticals recognize the need to utilize the power of technology to improve business radically. 

Nik Froehlich, CEO of Saritasa, has made it his mission to help organizations understand and harness advancements in technology to enhance their performance and achieve their business goals. 

Early on, Nik realized that technology was a massive differentiator for business success, but few businesses were adopting the tech they needed to embrace change, innovate, or even stay relevant. It was important for companies to understand that technology would impact their business and then find the right tools to gain an advantage, stay competitive, and succeed.

Nik has been passionate about technology ever since Apple came out with the Apple IIe, and during this time, his high school offered a class in BASIC programming. This brought actual programming to anyone that could get access to a PC. Using his entrepreneurial spirit, he learned how to use off-the-shelf software and custom software to make his first business more efficient. After having started and successfully run a construction-related service for businesses for 20 years, Nik realized that he wanted to use his experience and passion for technology to make a difference to any company that needed to utilize technology to achieve business objectives. 

The result of this passion was Saritasa, named uniquely by combining the first syllables of the names of Nik’s four children. Saritasa was founded in 2005 as a technology consulting company for both small and large companies, ready to take the crucial step to transform their business digitally. 

Custom Software For Digital Transformation 

When it comes to technology consulting, there’s always the question of SaaS versus custom software solutions. Clients often ask about the difference between using SaaS tools and taking the next step to building custom software. SaaS offers a low-cost, low-barrier way for businesses to utilize technology. While many are fantastic tools, Nik strongly advocates that SaaS tools should not be a one-stop-shop for technology advancement. 

In some cases, businesses become “hostage” to their SaaS tool. They may need to adapt their business process to accommodate how the SaaS tool is designed, or they may be prevented from adopting newer technologies that the SaaS tool does not yet (or may never) support. Having a 3rd party business (the SaaS provider) having access and potential control of their data and pricing structure to use their tool is not always ideal. It can also become challenging to migrate from one SaaS tool to another (perhaps a better one) once the business has become reliant on the tool. Many businesses locked in with a SaaS tool can experience frustration or limitations on what they can do or how they can grow. All of this may indicate that it’s time to transition to custom software and put the business on the right track for optimal growth. 

There are some things to be aware of for those looking to upgrade to custom software. Nik wants businesses to understand that a custom solution is something they own and must maintain and support regularly, just like any other asset they would purchase. The long-term costs need to be considered and weighed against the benefits that a custom solution will offer the company. Too many stakeholders can lead to a bloated product. Instead, it is best to start small, get internal buy-in, and then plan for a long-term program to incrementally improve, maintain, and evolve the product to meet business needs.

Headquartered in Newport Beach, CA, with offices in 5 US cities, Saritasa has completed over 1,700 projects in the ten years since its inception. Major clients include Toyota, Sony, Masimo, and The Cheesecake Factory. Saritasa works with clients of all sizes to develop custom technological solutions to meet their business needs and bring their ideas to life, regardless of their technical expertise. Nik has brought together a brilliant team of engineers, developers, and project managers, allowing clients to bring ideas to fruition without understanding the technical side of things. Saritasa offers technology consulting across web, mobile app, virtual reality, software, systems architect, and IoT solutions. The company also enables businesses to integrate existing tools with new technologies and facilitates training and education within the client’s team. 

With Saritasa taking on several new and transformative extended reality projects, Nik is excited about the future for both his team and his clients. The future key advancements in security and scale, continuous integration of software changes (DevOps), and of course, Virtual and Augmented Reality open doors to new ways of learning, training, and interacting. 

That’s the beauty of technology – it keeps evolving, and with it, so must we.