Mike Bennie, CEO of NetYield
Mike Bennie is the second-generation owner and operator of NetYield, a cloud-based accounting and inventory management solution designed specifically for seafood companies. NetYield partners with Wholesail to simplify and automate accounts receivable.
What’s NetYield’s mission?
NetYield’s been around for about 35 years. We’ve always been a family business. It’s a unique part of working in this industry. Many businesses we support are also family-run.
We’re a seafood-specific ERP. All of our customers are seafood operators – importers, exporters, brokers, traders, processors, wholesalers, distributors, unloaders, settlement companies, you name it. Everyone has a different way of making money in seafood, and we support all of these different business models.
Ultimately, our mission is to help people build best-practice seafood companies. A lot of folks break out on their own. They start by brokering, then they take on inventory in third-party cold storage. Eventually, they get a customer who wants them to cut some fish, so they open a facility. That’s the part we get really excited about – helping people grow and evolve their business as new opportunities come along.
What’s unique about the seafood industry?
Seafood is a business built on trust. And as that trust grows, so do the opportunities to add value to products, to expand product lines to new species, and to deepen relationships with fishermen. Everyone’s path looks different, depending on where they are and what they’re passionate about.
That’s what makes it exciting for us. Every company faces unique challenges depending on the customers and suppliers they’re trying to serve. Our role is to help them grow in ways that make sense for them. Sometimes they come to us and say, “Hey, here’s how we’re doing business,” and we’ll say, “We’ve never seen anyone do it that way so tell us more.” Then we get to ask, “How can NetYield support that? How can we help you run a best-practice operation?”
Finding ways to get them to embrace technology is definitely one of our biggest challenges. I thought if you just showed value, everything would follow. But sometimes people have hang-ups, and you have to figure out how to get past that. What we have learned is that if you make it simple enough – like just two buttons – they’re usually willing to try it.
What about Wholesail aligned with your business and made you want to partner?
Seafood is a pretty scrappy industry. Everyone’s trying to automate and streamline as much as possible, but they’re usually working with a tight IT budget.
We’re very hands-on with our clients. We know their strengths and weaknesses. I saw a joke on LinkedIn the other day that said 30% of B2B SaaS sales is just teaching people how to use a computer. Honestly, it’s kind of true. So when we bring on a partner, we’re not just asking, “Does their software work?” or “Do they deliver on their promises?” We’re also asking, “Do they approach things like a partner should? Do they really get in there and champion success side by side with the customer?”
We don’t want a partner who just sells a product and says, “Good luck.” We’re much more like coaches, and we want our partners to be that way too: hands-on, white-glove, success-driven. Anytime we refer someone to Wholesail, we know they’ll deliver. Not just because the software is solid, but because they’re truly focused on client outcomes. Wholesail makes sure success is aligned on both sides.
How do you see this partnership benefiting your customers?
Our customers are always looking to run more efficiently. The seafood value chain is constantly looking for ways to streamline, and people want technology that’s both understandable and adaptable for their specific business.
Seafood is a unique industry. You’ve got highly perishable products with issues like drip loss and fluctuating weights. These businesses are looking for software that understands those challenges and helps them improve.
What companies need is a platform that enables how they’re doing business today while making it more efficient. That’s one of the things we were excited about with Wholesail. It’s flexible and comprehensive enough to support how our customers are servicing their own customers right now, while also improving their processes.
At the end of the day, companies want to improve customer service without having to give up the custom workflows and configurations that already work for them. We saw a lot of payment solutions that promised the lowest rate, but only if you did it their way. Wholesail strikes the right balance between setting companies up for success down the road while meeting them where they are today.
It also delivers the kind of data and visibility businesses need as they grow. That’s the challenge with B2B software. Everyone wants the lowest price, but the real value comes from getting them into a system where the return grows over time. That’s true of both NetYield and Wholesail.
Improving payments with Wholesail is just the start. Once our customers see how easy it is, then they can start exploring the extras – credit statistics and new customer onboarding – that make Wholesail’s platform even more valuable.
NetYield is the same. We get people in the door at the right price point, but as their business grows and evolves they’ll have the right tools. Wholesail does a great job at not overwhelming customers up front. They start with a strong, simple value proposition: help your customers pay on time, accurately, and get access to their invoices without a fax machine. But once you're in, it unfolds into something so much more powerful, and that growth is exciting for us and for the businesses we support.
Like NetYield, Wholesail offers users the ability to grow with the software. And I think that’s something we really value. We take pride in supporting everyone: From two brothers starting their own seafood business to the largest seafood companies and everyone in between.
What's one thing that you're excited about when it comes to this partnership?
It really comes down to growth. For us, we're excited about bringing in great partners who help our customers unlock new value and opportunities in their businesses. That’s what lights me up – helping customers enable business growth.
For a lot of them, the experience on the cash-to-collection side is critical. And that’s only gotten more complex over time, whether it's documentation, payment methods, or credit scoring. Everything’s evolved, but their systems haven’t always kept up. That’s why bringing in a smart, efficient partner is key. We can’t be everything to everyone, especially as our customers grow and get more sophisticated. We're not payment experts. We're operations and accounting. Payments are their own thing. We’ve always seen NetYield as the baseline – a solid foundation. But once a company is ready to go deeper in an area like payments, we want to give them a best-practice software solution, and that’s why we’re so excited to partner with Wholesail.
We’ve worked hard to build a deep integration that makes the experience feel seamless, like an extension of NetYield and not a separate tool. We spent months building that integration so that actions taken in Wholesail flow directly back into NetYield.
What has the partnership process been like for you?
One of the things we've learned is that partnerships only work if they’re seamless. That’s why we’ve taken a narrower, deeper approach. We don’t just want integrations; we want deep, valuable connections. We’re always thinking about how to push that forward. We spent a lot of time upfront talking through how we’d put it together and how the integration would work. But it’s something we’re always excited to tell new customers about – especially if their business aligns well with Wholesail’s model. It’s honestly one of our first recommendations for improvement.
It’s become a pretty key tool in our toolkit, especially for businesses that are growing and looking to create more efficiency in the accounting office. Overall, the experience has been great. The Martinez case study is a shining example of what it looks like to take something, do great work, and really improve someone’s business.