The 2017 CRM Market Influential Leaders: Farid Dordar, Founder and CEO, PerfectMind

Kickboxing and CRM might seem like strange bedfellows, but not for Farid Dordar, founder and CEO of CRM company PerfectMind. Prior to founding PerfectMind in 1998, he was known as Master Dordar, a world-renowned kickboxing champion with dozens of professional fights under his belt. Dordar opened a martial arts studio after finishing his kickboxing career, and before he knew it he had 700 students attending classes there. It didn’t take long for him to recognize a dearth of tools suited to managing customer relationships in that industry. With this in mind, he taught himself how to code from a magazine and launched PerfectMind, a CRM company that today serves industries ranging from health and wellness to parks and recreation.

“One thing that was always different between us and other CRMs was the fact that we were combining everything into one product, one solution: marketing automation, billing and processing, and the CRM itself,” Dordar says. “Any business that does subscription or membership or a recurring charge of their members, any business that wants to have events and scheduling and do that type of management online, being able to allow the customers to book for events on the web or on mobile, and any business that wants to rent out their facilities or their parks…will be able to use our product.”

Today, PerfectMind, which is headquartered near Vancouver, is used by more than 5,000 businesses in 21 countries. Since April alone, the company’s products have been implemented by more than 20 major Canadian cities and school districts. In 2016, the company brought on more than 70 cities throughout the United States and Canada as customers.

“We really get our customers involved…and are able to build things exactly as they need them. Our product managers take pride in getting our customers involved early on in product development and feature development. As a result, our customers are getting what they really need,” Dordar says.

Going forward, Dordar expects this winning attitude to yield more victories for the company. “We have a great team here, and we all have similar attitudes—we want to win, we work really hard, and we try to always be the best,” he says.