The Personal Touch

"We're getting much more involved with customers on integration with the front and the back office," Haynes says. "We've been strong in the past with back-office things like high-volume transaction processing. Customers recognize the requirement to have an Internet presence on the front end and, in many cases, some of them have gone out and done some of that work," he says. "But then it's not been tightly tied to the back office, and they realize they're not getting the real value out of it. One of the things that's changed is our pooling together of that knowledge base of back-end and front-end talent and working with our customers to integrate it."

Another thing that's changed is Unisys' approach to doing business with other companies. Recently, the company has taken on several new joint-venture agreements in the managed-services space, for example. "In many cases, multiple companies,some of which have been competitors before,now provide a managed service that offers increased volume and lowered costs to all of them. We also share in the risk-reward," Haynes says.

For example, late last year, Unisys partnered with Barclays, one of the largest financial services groups in the United Kingdom, for a payment system. "We had already been doing work there for four or five other banks, but if you know anything about Barclays, they are fierce competitors," Haynes says. "But we have come together for this joint venture. There's a consortium of about 10 banks there that we're processing for."

The bigger a company becomes, the more likely it is to lose the personal touch that customers crave, something solution providers the size of Unisys down to Buchanan must carefully guard against. "I would be naive to think that has not happened," says Jim Buchanan, who began doing his radio ads about five years ago.

Regarding future business, Buchanan says he is much more focused than before. Rather than obsessing over a list of 100 to 200 companies to target as potential clients, he now concentrates on a list that has between 15 and 20 companies.

Buchanan Associates has been able to grow by not attempting to overtake a particular market, Buchanan says. "We may have 50 people in Chicago and Toronto, and that's still a small organization that's going to provide a high level of service," he says. "Everybody knows what's going on."

As does Buchanan's wife, when her husband fields calls from customers at home.

"She understands we're in the services business and we're in the business of convenience," Buchanan says. "You can talk about methodology and value-add, but it boils down to a customer coming to us because they have a question or a problem they can't get answered within their own organization," he continues. "Or maybe they need additional resources to help support a project or an initiative that's going on. In those situations, we have to make ourselves available."

Perhaps other CEOs' spouses will be as understanding.