2007 Fast Growth 100: Company Profiles

ITERATION2

For iteration2, success has come from picking the biggest horse and hitching its wagon to it without looking back—a pretty good strategy if your horse is named Microsoft.

Since its start in 2004, iteration2 has made selling Microsoft Dynamics software a multimillion-dollar business, raking in $22 million in 2006, up more than 500 percent since its inception. And next year should be even better. The company expects to bring it at least $30 million in 2007.

"We started the business to become Microsoft's best partner," said Mike Gillis, CEO of the Irvine, Calif.-based solution provider. With partners Gary Peterson and Greg Carter, Gillis came out of retirement to start the company.

"We really saw a vacant hole in the marketplace. We had come from SAP and Oracle backgrounds, and we believed that Microsoft was the only vendor in the world who could integrate all the stack products—all the products we were familiar with—and in the end make it easier, cheaper, less complicated [to deploy them]," he said.

From there, after drawing up a meticulous business plan and setting up shop with a helping hand from Microsoft, all it took was a leap of faith. "It was almost like religion for us. We know what we wanted our lives to be like. We knew what we wanted the value to be that we were able to give to our customers," Gillis said.

The company specializes in Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft stack software deployments, and Gillis said he thinks the software will continue to be more relevant to growing businesses as Vista deployments gain momentum in businesses, in turn driving growth for iteration2.

On the flip side, Gillis said the company's biggest obstacle to growth is its ability to recruit enough qualified employees to maintain its upward trajectory. The company courts potential hires, visiting them at home and wooing them over, sometimes even before they're ready to take the plunge and join the iteration2 team, to make a favorable impression. "We look at recruiting in the same way that a top college sports coach would. Recruiting is the No. 1 thing in our company. We have to recruit the top professionals in our industry in order to have a best-in-class program," Gillis said.

Jennifer Lawinski