Fast Growth Is Smart Growth

If you're looking for the secret recipe for Fast Growth success, look no further than the sitcom "Married With Children." Well, it's not an exact match, but at least one Fast Growth solution provider thinks there's something to be learned from perpetually aggrieved women's shoe salesman and ex-jock Al Bundy, the head of the dysfunctional Bundy clan on the long-running Fox series.

"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 [with a knife.] 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.

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.

"[Intelligent Decisions CEO] 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 [he] 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 & Co.

MIG & 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 & 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.

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