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Artificial intelligence looks like opportunity to Pankaj Monga.
“Everybody knows it’s going to have a massive impact on their business,” Monga said. “They can’t quantify it clearly because it’s moving so fast. It’s so disruptive, and the disruption is so fast.”
Where many economists, CEOs and workers see potential lost jobs as AI replaces human workers, Monga sees a tool for increases in productivity.
“There’s a new use case every day,” he said. “Now it’s just the inspiration and imagination and what use cases can we come up with.”
Monga, founder and CEO of Hiawatha-based Channel Fusion, expects AI will increase the productivity of his company’s 180 employees – even if just
how
that happens is yet to be determined.
“It’s a force multiplier like we’ve never seen before,” he said one recent morning. “Our lives are going to look very different in a year from now, six months from now. That’s how fast this is changing.”
Connecting big brands with local businesses
Channel Fusion connects such global names as John Deere, Michelin, Pella Windows & Doors, Timberland and Johnson Controls to their thousands of local and regional dealers around the world.
“The ‘channel’ is the partners we work with,” Monga said. “That’s our audience. The ‘fusion’ is all these tools we offer. We get the brand’s most prized possession, their dealers.”
Operating essentially as an extension of a brand’s marketing, Channel Fusion staff works with dealers to create locally focused media campaigns while ensuring they’re compatible with established messaging.
“(Dealers) can come in and say, ‘I want to run a newspaper ad,’ and it shows them all the templates and you can drop in the pictures, a map, the logo,” Monga said. “We check the legalese for compliance, and they send it to The Gazette.”
Through secure web portals for each brand’s dealers, Channel Fusion manages clients’ co-op advertising, in which the manufacturer or distributor covers a share of the cost of a media project.
“If you’re a John Deere dealer and you say ‘I want to do an event at my dealership, and the first 100 consumers that come in we want to give them a hat,’ we give them the portal, they can order the hat and they get it the next day,” Monga said. “The cost of the order can be deducted from their co-op dollars. If they want to run a rebate program, we execute that.”
Such consumer incentive programs are a Channel Fusion specialty.
“We have six of the 10 largest tire brands in the world,” Monga said. “If you’ve bought a Hankook, a Michelin, a Falken, a Pirelli, a Kumho, a Nitto tire in the last 10 years and they give you a $70 gift card, that’s coming from us. We take your rebate form and make sure it’s legit. We capture all that information and we send you the debit card with a Michelin logo on it.”
From India to Missouri to Iowa
Growing up in Chandigarh, India, Monga, 52, was recruited to play tennis at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Mo.
“I came as a 19-year-old in late 1991, went to school in the spring semester,” he said. “I came to southwest Missouri, big Baptist country. Incredible people, and it was interesting to be exposed to the concept of leaving doors unlocked, sometimes people would leave their keys in their cars. Iowa was the same way.”
With a degree in information systems and marketing, Monga came to Cedar Rapids to work at the ad agency CMF&Z, which went out of business in the early 2000s.
“I was running a group there that was doing co-op advertising and management for John Deere,” he said. “The agency went under, (and) I was young, qualified on information and technology.”
Monga consulted his father – Dr. Ram Monga and Kamal Monga now live with their son’s family at their Marion home – and a mentor on his next move.
“I was single then, and my coach said ‘If you’re going to go work for IBM you might as well own it,’” Monga said. “That was his mantra. I said, ‘OK, we’ll give it a try,’ and I started my entrepreneurial journey.”
Channel Fusion started small
Working out of his basement, Monga launched a joint venture in 2003 with the New York agency Omnicom’s Des Moines office.
“It was a handshake one fine morning in Des Moines in a Starbucks, that as we grow they were going to let me split off,” Monga said. “Those guys held up their end of the bargain. In 2011 they were kind enough to give me the opportunity to split off, so I bought Channel Fusion from under the Omnicom network.”
The company then had 33 employees working out of one corner of a second-floor space that’s now completely occupied by Channel Fusion. Two years later, Monga added an office in India to work with clients there. Channel Fusion Mexico came in 2021.
The staff – now about 80 at the Hiawatha office – manages more than 120,000 local dealers for 45 global brands doing business in dozens of countries and languages.
“The goal is that our tools and our solutions help dealers who are generally not marketers,” Monga said. “They are very good at selling, so we give them all the marketing prowess that the brand offers. They don’t have to worry about marketing. They can focus on the demand that the marketing generates.”
Nearly half of Channel Fusion’s employees are in its Tech Solutions Group, ensuring the dealer portals are operable and secure.
“Sometimes our clients will hire hackers to make sure we’re in compliance,” Monga said.
Operations staff field calls, emails and chats from dealers, while an accounts team coordinates sales campaigns with the brands’ home offices.
“If you’re a John Deere dealer you have an account person you talk to and work on strategy, and the operation teams execute that strategy,” Monga said. “They have to be in sync.”
Capturing AI’s potential is a priority
Monga and his staff have adapted to new media.
“We have a digital team we formed about five or six years ago because of the dealers’ need to be more active on the digital side, mostly on social media,” Monga said. “Reputation management, responding to reviews. We give them the whole solution.”
The relationship with Deere helped Channel Fusion attract other big clients. More recently, the company is shifting to some smaller, regional brands.
“Our bread and butter the last 20 years has been (companies with) a billion dollars or more in (annual) revenue,” he said. “We’re talking to some companies that are in the $50 million to $100 million range in revenue, and they are new to the market. They can’t afford some very complex products, so they come in and we turn them around quickly and give them that access to grow their dealer network.”
Capturing AI’s potential is Monga’s top priority these days.
“We are an AI-first, tech-enabled, customer-obsessed company,” he said. “It’s there, we need to use it. I understand there is a lot of discomfort around ‘What is this going to do to my job?’ There are (CEOs) who feel, ‘I have 200 people and I can do this with 20.’ That’s one side. We feel we have 200 people, but now we (effectively) have 600. What more can we do? AI’s not going to replace your job, but maybe you can get replaced by someone who knows how to use AI, so you need to get going.”
Channel Fusion’s success earned Monga the 2024 Howard Hall Excellence in Business Award, named by the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance.
“I’m always amazed at how many great companies we have here,” Monga said. “We’ve got the Collins and the Transamerica and the big ones that everybody thinks of, but we have some very fantastic businesses and business leaders in the community.”
Monga and his wife, Pari, have three sons. Pranay, 17, will be a senior this fall at Xavier High School. Pranav, 24, lives in Washington, D.C.; and Pranavi, 28, lives in India.
