I have recently started a habit of writing interesting quotes on my white board. I didn’t think much of it at first but it drove a healthy amount of reactions from various folks at ilm. One thing let to another and I found myself writing a new quote every other week or so. Then it occurred to me that since I spend so much time discussing these quotes, I might as well publish them in my blog. Feel free to comment with your thoughts. I am always eager to hear new opinions.
There will be two kinds of companies in the future, the quick and the dead.
I picked this quote from a book I recently read and it immediately made my mind wonder. Luna and I have been running ilm for slightly over 6 years and have been successful in building a specialty firm from scratch. Considering that we started in 2002–in-arguably the worst economic year for IT consulting–without any prior IT leadership experience or business relationships with IT decision makers, we think we did alright.
What transpired during the 6 years after ilm’s inception is the story of the quick and the dead. Luna and I might not have been the most experienced entreprenuers but we knew that we must do everything quickly or face extinction. As a result, we were the first in the Twin Cities to start the Executive.NET seminar series. Started in 2002, this series offered plain and simple truths about the shinny new .NET framework and VS.NET to the executive audience.
Microsoft did such a poor job positioning .NET to decision makers that almost all of them decided to wait and see how early adopters utilized the technology. This approach might work for some old fashioned consulting firms who can afford to sit around for couple of years while their customers get educated properly, and in fact there were firms in the Twin Cities that did take the wait and see approach. We didn’t have that luxury. We were running under the quick and the dead mindset. So, we put together a series of on-site seminars at the local Microsoft office and started spreading the word.
Our first event registered over 20 IT decision makers, most of whom were the ones we didn’t know. They got to meet us and saw us as experts in this technology. We did 12 of these sessions over the course of 2 years. Our mindset of being “quick” with our initiatives and our fear of being “dead” by sitting around propelled our growth. ilm has been averaging over 40% growth year after year since then.
Now, I must confess where we went wrong. 2007 was probably the worse year for ilm because we finished the whole year without a single new initiative. Yes, we organized and sponsored the largest .NET developers conference in Minnesota that year, but that can’t be considered a new initiative for 2007. The Minnesota Developers Conference (MDC) was envisioned in 2006 by leaders at ilm. Once again, we worked very very quickly to take this event from vision to completion in about 8 weeks. While MDC 06 attracted a sold out crowd of 275 attendees and put our name on the top of the IT consulting game in the Twin Cities, MDC 07 was bigger and better and it met all its objectives by attracting over 375 attendees. Yet it still was a re-occurrence of the concept from the previous year.
We were getting too comfortable with our process, our format, and our service offerings. This lack of initiatives in 2007 caused the excitement level to reduce at ilm, allowed the competition to launch their own community initiatives, and risked our position as one of the technology consulting leaders in this city.
We started 2008 with a lot of frustration amongst ilm’s decision makers. After many discussions and disputes, we put forward a strategy of getting back to our roots. We have optimized our various business processes for efficiency, optimized our recruiting team and processes for un-compromised rigor, re-structured how we sell, and take the leadership initiatives among the developers community.
Now 2008 is proving to be among the most exciting year at ilm. We have formed and successfully launched the SilverLight user group, started the executive series of seminars once again, launched the IGC (ilm generated content) initiative, hired a dedicated consulting manager, started the Team System and SilverLight practices, only to name a few.
We are once again running with the mindset of being “quick” and it is very exciting.
