Washington Tech Firm Opens Two NWA Offices

Mark Mason, founder and principal of Affirma Consulting, speaks at the recent grand opening of the company's Fayetteville location. Sitting on the front row is Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Arkansas Economic Development Commission Director Mike Preston.

Affirma Consulting of Bellevue, Washington, has opened two offices in northwest Arkansas this year, its National Engineering Center of Excellence in downtown Fayetteville and a NetSuite operation in Bentonville.

The technology services firm plans to hire 100 full-time employees in the region, to work at both locations, during the next five years.

About 75% of the new hires will be software engineers with annual salaries ranging from $75,000 to $150,000, depending on their experience, founder and principal Mark Mason told Arkansas Business in a recent interview. The rest will be financial consultants and have a similar salary range.

“My plan is that, for my U.S. base of operations, the plan is for Arkansas to be the primary growth driver,” he said. So the majority of Affirma’s software engineers in the U.S. will work from the state within the next five to 10 years, Mason said.

The firm also has offices in Los Angeles, Ireland, India and Romania.

Mason said Affirma’s revenue and workforce have grown significantly since it was established in 2002, and by about 20% every year for the last 10 to 12 years.

The firm was “a very small operation” when it was founded, but it employs more than 400 people today. Mason said he expects its revenue and workforce to double in the next three years.

He said Affirma has been successful, without external funding or investment, because of the values it lives by: client satisfaction, employee satisfaction and financial health, in that order.

The firm’s success is also due to the realization that every company must use technology effectively in order to compete. Affirma can help with that.

“We’re a technology services firm that specializes in helping large organizations, primarily, improve their performance via technology, and that can be anything from interacting with their customer center or acquiring new customers or streamlining performance, internal employee communication, really solving any sort of business problem via technology,” he said. “If that sounds broad, it’s because it is.”

The firm does application and technology infrastructure modernization for its clients, moving them from legacy systems to cloud systems, like Microsoft Azure. The digital agency part of its business is doing well, too, Mason said. That line of business helps clients acquire customers, automate marketing and more.

Affirma is also a Microsoft Gold-Certified partner; it won a Microsoft Partner of the Year award in 2009. The firm uses Microsoft technologies to solve problems for clients, and Microsoft is a client as well.

Affirma has hundreds of clients, including Vizio, Xbox, and Expedia.

Mid-market clients — companies that have annual revenue of between $20 million and $1 billion — will be targeted by the Bentonville NetSuite office, Mason said. NetSuite is enterprise resource planning software that clients use to manage their core financials.

The Fayetteville office, however, will target Fortune 500 companies, or companies that are close to being that large.

In addition, Affirma chose to open the offices in northwest Arkansas because, about a year ago, its leadership decided a new place was needed where employees could write software, as opposed to selling it as they do in Los Angeles.

This new place had to be in the middle of the country, to work for clients on both coasts. It had to offer workers affordability compared with the Seattle or Los Angeles areas, good schools and a good quality of life, Mason said.

The decision came down to Austin, Texas, or northwest Arkansas. Northwest Arkansas made the list because one of his remote employees had moved there previously.

Mason flew down in February or March and liked the area. He met with the University of Arkansas’ dean of engineering and computer science, members of the Northwest Arkansas Council and Innovate Arkansas and others who convinced him northwest Arkansas was the right choice.

“The lens I put on it is where would I want to raise my family,” Mason said, because Affirma is a very family-oriented firm. It’s been named one of the top 100 best places to work in Washington state six times, he said.

“The key is we wanted to find a place where we thought we could attract and retain very high-level software engineering talent,” Mason said.

Affirma’s Fayetteville office at 641 W. Dickson St. is about 300 yards from the UA’s Bell Engineering Center, he noted, and the firm already has three interns from the UA and 10 employees working from the new offices.