Fast Growth Is Smart Growth

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"I'm an Al Bundy type," said Ken Fletcher, CEO of New York, N.Y.-based Quarter Horse Technology (CRN FG rank: #22). "That doesn't mean I sold women's shoes. I played a lot of team sports, through high school and college. So I see a lot of situations at companies where people blame each other and then the ship goes down. We don't play that game here."

Fletcher said the culture at Quarter Horse, an IT solution and services provider with clientele in the financial industry, is built around team success, backing colleagues when problems arise and being honest with customers, rather than personal glory, finger-pointing and jargon-filled sales pitches.

"You have to be quick on your feet and straight up with clients to do business in New York. ... We try to keep an open environment here, so if something goes wrong at a client site, we tell our engineers don't go into a gun fight and#91;with a knife.and#93; Tell us everything about the situation, don't leave anything out, and we'll have your back," Fletcher said.

Fast is a Relative Term
For a company like Quarter Horse, which Fletcher started less than 10 years ago and is already raking in close to $10 million in annual revenue, the outward appearance is that of dizzying growth.

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But there's a world of difference between reckless growth and steady, consistent performance that generates progressively increasing revenue over time, Fletcher said. Equally important--particularly in the beginning of a venture--is for management to have a healthy stake in a company's fortunes.

"When I started this company in 1999, I was 26 and it was the dot-com bubble. I saw people my age start these huge operations on other people's money. When you do that, you don't watch where the company's going as well. For me, it was my own money and it was my baby," he said.

Smart, fast growth means balancing risk-taking with the core competencies that got your company where it is, said Brady Kavulic, a marketing manager at Intelligent Decisions (CRN FG rank: #49), a systems integrator and IT service provider based in Ashburn, Va. that boasts over $100 million in annual revenues.

"and#91;Intelligent Decisions CEOand#93; Harry Martin is just a very entrepreneurial man and he instills that in staff through all levels of the company. Anybody can go to Harry with an idea and and#91;heand#93; will listen to it. It may fall through, but they can do it," he said.

Kavulic says the ratio of investment in existing business and technologies to exposure in new potential growth areas is roughly 70 to 30 at Intelligent Decisions. It's a figure similarly cited by Eric McGuardian, CEO of New York, N.Y.-based business systems consultant MIG and Co.

MIG and Co. (CRN FG rank: #25) retains one employee on its 35- to 40-member team whose sole job is to investigate new technologies and business practices in the ERP space where the firm plays. That helps MIG and Co. stay relevant in the fast-paced IT world and has proven a boon in bad economic times, McGuardian said.

"These days, we're always on the lookout for recession-proof industries. But we're not vertical and we don't want to be locked into one vertical. We want to be able to move from one vertical to another as fast as possible based on where the business is," he said.

Next: Relationships, Facing Out and Facing In

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Relationships, Facing Out and Facing In
Fletcher stresses the importance of vendor and distributor relationships in a company's growth strategy. He cites an example from a few years ago, when a Fortinet appliance that could do multiple T1 line failovers started shipping. Quarter Horse's long-standing vendor SonicWall didn't have a competitive product.

"So we go to SonicWall and we say, what's your road map on this? They say 3 to 6 months, and we say ok, we'll stick around and wait. I like to be leading edge, not bleeding edge. I like to see things bake a bit in the industry before I commit," Fletcher said.

Internal relationships are as important as out-facing ones, added Erin Driscoll, marketing director at Intelligent Decisions.

"On the corporate side, we've started to invest a lot more in our employees. We have employee recognition programs that reward years of service and performance, not just with awards but with really nice bonuses," she said.

"A lot of that comes from Harry. Harry knows every employees' first name, who's having babies, buying a new house. They don't call him Mr. Martin, they call him Harry."

Investment in employee education and clarity in a company's career advancement track are other keys to success cited by multiple Fast Growth companies.

Hub Technical Services, a South Easton, Mass.-based solution provider, has a three-tier engineering track, for example. President and CEO Joseph Levetere says Hub's training and certification process is structured in such a way that the path through the tracks is clear and attainable for those willing to work for advancement.

"Each engineer has a training plan, they have set goals and they achieve those goals by a combination of training strategies, from self-paced training to classroom training to Web-based training. If you're a Tier 1 engineer, for example, you can clearly see how to become a Tier 2 engineer. Tier 2's see exactly how to get to Tier 3," Levetere said.

If all these ingredients add up to fast growth, Intelligent Decisions' Driscoll said the final ingredient in the secret sauce of success is to be intelligent about expanding.

"We're not anywhere near a plateau. And that's because we've been smart about our growth. It's not like we went from 50 employees to 175 overnight. We don't just hire 50 people to hire 50 people. As our business needs occur, we meet them," she said.