With over a combined 60 years in business, Matt and Michael have so many case study examples to choose from, putting them on this site seemed like a herculean challenge.
Here are some highlights to help you understand some of the things they did as leaders of their own efforts or as consultants for others:
Having founded their systems integration company together, Matt and Michael made several important early-on strategic decisions that led to the Company’s dynamic growth over the course of fifteen years. These decisions included selling only leading edge products, depending on their vendors to provide leads, and targeting only early adopters in corporate accounts to buy these products and services. Other important decisions included: understanding that investing in marketing was critical to generating sales; focusing on sales training, including the science and art of selling, was critical for building an expert and successful sales team; and most importantly creating a can-do business culture where coming to work was fun. Together, all of these decisions were the keys to rapid growth and success. These decisions and their execution resulted in the company becoming an Inc. 500 company two years in a row.
As an outside consultant, Matt took a leadership role in analyzing how the systems engineers for a managed services IT company were interacting with, and under billing, their clients. Working with the firm’s partners over a period of six months, getting involved in the day to day activities, Matt was able to help the Company save $100,000 monthly, as well as implement a series of other changes to increase revenues and streamline systems.
After being in business for four years, and in transition in moving to a new and expanded space, Michael and Matt decided to create an ancillary training business to their network systems integration company. This strategic decision to complement their current business demonstrated their technical leadership in the networking systems arena and solidified the Company’s reputation as a leading technology service provider in the metropolitan area. In the course of just a few years, the Training Center became one of the best Novell, Lotus Notes, Microsoft and Citrix training centers in the United States training several thousand corporate and technical end users during that time.
As Acting Marketing Director for a systems integration company that recently had gone public, Michael was engaged to re-purpose all of the firm’s marketing and sales collateral to enable a ten person sales team to transform the business from a singular focus on hardware sales to both product and significantly higher margin services. The systems integration world was in flux at that time, and being able to charge appropriately for service was a critical element in the firm’s overall re-positioning strategy, as well as increasing its top line revenues and profit margins.