A Fast Growth Company's Recipe For Keeping Talent Happy

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Why do you think Neudesic has been so successful?

We have the best talent. Price is no object for us. Really good employees create business. Our guys have written 22 books, are regular speakers at events; they are known people. Typically, the consulting model is to hire college grads, pay them $45,000, and bill them out at $100 an hour. But that model has become commoditized. Ours is an inverted pyramid: Most are top guys. A few are offshore; we have an presence in India. That model has worked for us. With a large job, like the one we did for Kelley Blue Book, it required a massive effort. However, once we get the job done, a client might need enhancement or features added; we can hand that sort of thing off to our India practice, Neudesic Tech India.

Is it hard to retain top talent?

Braintrust is part of our company. If you have an idea, we can become your VC. We can fund it for you, get it off the ground. We've funded two in particular. The first, PriceSpider.com, is a comparison shopping site. This spider crawls and gets the data from sites. Our India practice was also the idea of one of our engineers. He came to me with this idea and I said let's discuss it and now we have Neudesic in India. In India operations have 40 percent turnover generally. There is virtually 0 percent in ours.

Do you pay more?

We do pay more, because we can. Large companies, like, say, Microsoft, have HR regulations: You can't pay more than this for that level person. We are more agile and can leverage what we have where we need it.

What's the culture like?

We have an extremely collaborative culture. There's little tension. If someone has a question, posts an email about it, he'll get 50 answers. There's a very nice, warm feeling among people. What I love about our team is commitment to the profession. Not everyone knows everything. People aren't afraid to say, "I can learn" here.

What can small solution providers do to withstand the test of time?

I have seen system integrators come and go. Most of them don't do things right. Very few were around more than 10 years ago. The reason is that many grow to 50 to 100 employees, and then become victims of the economic business cycle. They haven't expanded outside their local region. Massive amounts of people are needed nationwide. We have 11 offices. So when one economy goes down, another region picks it up.