Prem Chand and the business of getting unstuck

Six months into his new company, Prem Chand had $30,000 left and no customers. He had put $250,000 into Milestone Technologies, drawing on his house, credit cards and whatever else he could turn into capital. Then the first contract arrived. For a business devoted to helping other companies move, getting itself off the starting line had proved expensive.

That recollection, shared in 2014, supplies a useful opening to Chand’s career. The later numbers are substantial: more than 2,000 employees, operations in 18 countries and over 200 clients under his leadership. But the early arithmetic is easier to feel. A founder can believe in a company for six months. The remaining cash has its own opinion.

Chand founded Milestone in 1997 and led it for twenty years. His next venture, Growth Factors, took up a problem that success itself can create: a company grows, its demands multiply, and its owner becomes occupied with keeping everything running. Having once needed a business to start moving, he began working with founders who needed theirs to stop getting stuck.

Before the office, a delivery route

Chand’s working life began on his family’s Northern California farm. The youngest of eight children, he attended school in Biggs and learned early about equipment, harvests and getting produce to buyers. Pumpkins, melons and walnuts belonged to this education. The timetable was agricultural; the subject was operations.

A bread delivery route for Togo’s followed. He took an accelerated finance course at Condie College in San Jose, then began accounting work at a transportation company in 1987. Controller, partner and chief financial officer roles came later. His route into technology passed through the accounts and the loading dock.

The opportunity emerged around corporate relocations. Moving a business meant getting its computer systems working at the destination. Chand saw room for a company that could take responsibility for that complication. Milestone began with four employees. A relocation looks finished when the furniture arrives; the people trying to work still require rather more.

“On the farm, I learned about logistics at a very young age.”

Prem Chand, 2014

The connection matters because it makes his career less mysterious. Across a farm, a delivery route and an office move, the work involves dependencies. Something must arrive before something else can begin. Money has to last until the next payment. As an organizing principle for a career, knowing what happens next has considerable range.

A clipboard in Chico

One revealing scene comes from a Chico recruitment event in 2013. Hundreds of applicants moved through interviews at Chico State’s Bell Memorial Union. Milestone was hiring for 230 positions, including sixteen supervisor jobs, for a contact center at the municipal airport. Chand walked through the proceedings carrying a clipboard.

He wore a Milestone shirt, blue jeans and a baseball cap. Family members, including his young daughters, followed him around. The scene has the pleasing untidiness of an actual working day: a founder, his family and a large number of people who would quite reasonably like the interview queue to move.

His roots helped bring him back to the region, but the decision required persuasion. Local officials had to convince him that Chico had the talent to deliver. City planner Shawn Tillman was part of those conversations. The eventual expansion joined a hometown connection to a practical hiring decision.

In 2012, the North State Innovation Awards named Chand Entrepreneur of the Year. That same year Milestone established a presence in Luleå, Sweden, supporting Facebook’s data-center expansion. The two developments put the company’s geography into focus: work could extend into northern Europe while its founder was still considering what an opportunity meant for Northern California.

Recognition continued with an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Northern California semifinalist designation in 2013. Milestone then reported more than 900 employees and over 200 clients in eighteen countries. Its business involved designing, building and operating IT infrastructure. Growth increasingly meant a continuing responsibility for systems other organizations depended on.

The jobs carried a personal obligation, too. Chand had spoken about understanding employees’ career paths and the experience they took away from the company. He wanted even someone who left to remember it as a good place to work. A founder gets to describe a culture. Departing employees get a vote.

Twenty years, then a different job

In August 2017, Milestone announced Nelson Eng as president and CEO. Eng had already spent eight months as president and chief operating officer. Chand’s twenty-year tenure was coming to a close, with a leadership team taking responsibility for the company’s next phase.

A handoff belongs in a founder’s story as much as a first sale. It changes the central question from how to build the organization to how it will operate under someone else. In Chand’s case, the change also opened a new line of work. He started Growth Factors in February 2018; the firm announced its public launch that October.

There was continuity in the people. Jim Schultz, who had worked alongside Chand at Milestone for more than fifteen years, joined Growth Factors with financial and transaction experience. Tara Spencer brought expertise in integrating facilities, administration, human resources and IT. Victoria Iboa also brought experience from Milestone, where she had progressed from administrative assistant to chief of staff, overseeing communications, executive projects and administration. These are disciplines that become conspicuous when they go wrong and receive fewer compliments when they behave.

Chand’s new audience consisted of owners with established businesses and insufficient room to think. Their customers needed attention. Their teams needed decisions. Suppliers and partners needed answers. The company might be successful, yet its founder could spend every day tending to demands that prevented the next stage of development.

He called this condition “The Grind.” In an October 2018 essay, he described four cornerstones for dealing with it: a culture built on trust and collaboration; business systems that expose actual performance; sound finance and accounting; and a clear approach to reaching customers and selling. Each addressed a different way a company could obstruct its own progress.

The investment model made that involvement explicit. Growth Factors took majority positions in established companies and worked on strategy and execution. Its launch announcement described setting measurable indicators across the business, then using performance data to decide where work was needed. Capital came with participation in the ordinary, consequential decisions that fill a company’s week.

Advantage Metal Parts offered another example at the firm’s launch. Co-founder Phil Segundo described a team struggling to keep up with customers, suppliers and partners while deciding where to put resources. Working with Growth Factors, the company established shared goals and used performance measures to track them. The account adds something to Chand’s description of an overextended founder: the difficulty can involve choosing among legitimate demands. A customer request, an investment and a staffing decision can all matter at once. Making those choices visible to a team gives people a clearer way to discuss what the business needs next.

The machinery behind the clothes

Three Bird Nest gave this approach a setting far removed from enterprise IT. Founder Alicia Shaffer had built a bohemian fashion business, beginning with handmade headbands and accessories on Etsy in 2011. By 2017, the company’s social following had reached three-quarters of a million, and meeting demand was becoming an operating challenge.

Growth Factors acquired a majority stake in early summer 2018. The partnership allowed Shaffer to concentrate on brand, styling and design while the teams worked on the systems behind the business. Inventory control, customer service, financial planning and accounting all formed part of the assignment. A customer might arrive for the clothes; a reliable inventory count still had to help complete the transaction.

The company’s case study describes new analytics, clearer goals and changes to processes affecting customer satisfaction. The specifics are useful. They turn a broad ambition to grow into decisions about stock, money and service. For Chand, the move from technology operations to fashion involved applying familiar disciplines to a different product and a different kind of customer.

He also took his operating ideas back to Chico. On October 17, 2018, he spoke at the university’s Center for Entrepreneurship about overcoming barriers to business growth. The talk covered culture, marketing and operations guided by data. The farm kid who had once left the region now had two decades of company-building to bring into the classroom.

Back among the moving parts

In January 2025, Three Bird Nest appointed Scott Burger as CEO to lead its daily operations. Chand, speaking as Growth Factors’ founder and CEO, welcomed Burger’s experience in scaling organizations and his approach to employees. The appointment carried a familiar theme: choosing leadership for the next stage, then giving that leadership a job to do.

Another transition followed in 2025. Packiyo founder Tommy Bjørbæk announced that Chand would join the warehouse software company as CEO while Bjørbæk returned as chief operating officer. A November company announcement also identified Chand as CEO when it named Devan Avery director of sales and marketing. Packiyo serves brands and third-party logistics businesses with warehouse management software.

Warehouses make a fitting setting for this chapter. They put movement, information and customer promises in the same building. Chand’s career began with the practical business of moving things and developed into the work of organizing people around increasingly complex operations. Years later, the setting has changed again. The inventory still has to be right, the team still needs to know what happens next, and a promise still has to leave the building on time.