How we run our Business | The Beginning

April 28, 2007

I’ve decided to start a bit of a series with these posts and title it ‘How we run our business’ and discuss some of the failures and successes that we’ve ran into over the years of growing our IT consulting business.

A little history

First off, let me know catch you up on how I got involved in this business. It was February, 3 years ago, and I was a supervisor at my old job where I was underpaid, unappreciated, and flat out unhappy. I got a call one day, from my Dad, to meet him for lunch where we talked about starting back up the business he was running himself prior to being acquired by a larger firm. I said I was in because of the ability to work with my Dad and to help him build something in an industry that I was interested in, the information security space.

Three of us started the business back up and we focused strictly on doing technology compliance audits for banks. Dad (Henry), Gary, and I started with four clients that Dad worked with before and was able to get them to switch back to him (he can sell ice cream to Eskimo’s). Gary was very experienced in technology auditing and there I was, clueless and trying to fit in.

So here we are…

So after 3 years, where are we now? We have grown to over 40 clients (still only financial institutions) and 10 employees providing consulting services from our patented technology audits, to doing what we call ‘Comprehensive Security Reviews’ (basically a combination of social engineering, penetration testing, and vulnerability assessment), Bank core system selection (essentially helping banks negotiate with a new or existing core vendor), and have just began our software division where we are about to come out with our first product, a risk assessment tool for banks, called RiskKey and we already have another brainstorming our next product. Exciting stuff!

Typing that out and reading it back is really surreal. Crazy to see where we’ve come over the past few years. I think a lot of credit has to go to Dad, of course, for his ability to sell so well and to provide value to our clients that make them feel like they are getting there moneys worth. It has always been our goal to kill our competitors on scope of services and still do it at a competitive rate. I think we balance that out very well.

So now you’re pretty much up to date. I plan, in the very near future, to do some posts about on topic lists like how working with the family works or doesn’t work, learning how to manage your employees that are more like friends, working with contractors when developing a product, and finally being able comfortable enough to take the reins and run the business. I’ve had to do a lot of learning, lot of soul searching, and a lot of failing to get to where we are today.

Stay tuned for more soon!

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