Since the inception of InterWorks, we’ve been firmly rooted in core values that have guided us through every triumph and challenge. Relationships, Service and Excellence aren’t just words to us; they’re the pillars that have carried us from our very beginning in 1996, propelling our success and distinguishing us in our field. These values are timeless, transcending the evolution of technology and remaining our greatest assets to this day. As we continue our journey, it’s imperative to remind ourselves of the unique qualities that define us and our approach to business.

Deepening Our Core Values

Relationships: The power of relationships lies at the core of everything we do. Through genuine connections, we grasp what is paramount to our clients, partners and each other. This commitment goes beyond professional necessity; it’s about valuing each other’s goals and needs, laying the groundwork for the best interactions possible and fostering a culture of mutual respect and collaboration.

Service: Our approach to service aims to transcend basic expectations, creating experiences that genuinely delight. Focused on what’s truly important, we craft moments that resonate personally, reflecting our commitment to enrich the lives and businesses of everyone we touch. It’s these moments that highlight our dedication to providing the Best Work.

Excellence: We’re on a relentless pursuit of excellence, always striving to surpass what’s been done before. By infusing everything we do with a standard of excellence, we reflect our deep-seated drive to excel at our craft and exceed expectations. Excellence for us is not about meeting benchmarks but setting new ones, a testament to our commitment to continuous improvement.

The Essence of Our Mantra

Our mantra, “Do the BEST WORK for the BEST CLIENTS with the BEST PEOPLE,” encapsulates the essence of our core values. It’s the BEST PEOPLE who make these values a reality, embodying the dedication and expertise that drive us forward.

A Timeless Commitment

As we share our journey with the broader community, our commitment to these core values remains unwavering. They are not merely principles but the foundation of our culture and identity. InterWorks is more than a company; we are a community that stands for something extraordinary, united by our shared values and goals.

We believe that by adhering to these values, we can continue to create meaningful impacts in our industry and beyond. Our dedication to Relationships, Service and Excellence defines not only how we conduct our business but also how we contribute to the world around us.

The post Embracing Our Timeless Core: Relationships, Service and Excellence appeared first on InterWorks.

Every journey is filled with pivotal moments. This is just as true for organizations as it is for individuals. In the case of InterWorks, we often talk about our origins, as well as the development of our overarching company culture. Much of that lore circles around the idea of doing work we love for clients we enjoy, but we’d be remiss without mentioning another group of people who have been vital throughout our journey: our partners.

Our partners are just as much a part of our story as we are in theirs, and our partnership with Tableau Software is perhaps the quintessential story of symbiotic growth between a vendor and a consulting firm. Our history with Tableau “officially” begins with us becoming the very first Tableau Gold Partner in 2011, but there’s always more history than what can be found in a press release. To get the full story of how we met, where we’re going next and everything in between, I sat down with InterWorks CEO, Behfar Jahanshahi.

Discovering the Hidden Gem of Tableau

Q: When did Tableau first come to our attention and why?

Behfar: A lot of this starts with Dan Murray, our Director of Strategic Innovations. Before coming to InterWorks, Dan was working for a company called Blastrac. Dan held various roles there, including COO and CFO. Blastrac was one of our IT Services clients, so we worked closely with Dan on a lot of different projects. At the time, we were not yet into the BI space, but Blastrac had an IBM AS400 mainframe full of data and Dan wanted to see what he could do with it. He contacted me and sent me on a quest to find the best way to pull out that data.

We started talking with folks at Oracle, Microsoft and a few other places, but Dan found the proposed solutions too expensive and personnel heavy. We’d be dealing with a lot of consultants at the end of the day. Dan does a lot of reading, and he’s a solid networker, so he emailed someone who, at the time, wasn’t well known to me: Stephen Few. Today, Stephen is a famous data and analytics author. He told Dan to check out Tableau—an up-and-coming tool that was only just entering the market—and he also became involved in the consulting process alongside us.

Dan checked out Tableau and fell in love. He would not stop talking to me about it. For our first Tableau project, we used a combination of MS SQL to bring that data out of Blastrac’s IBM mainframe and visualized the results in Tableau. We learned a lot about the tool through that project and all came to love it.

For me personally, the big “Aha!” moment happened on Christmas Eve of that same year. I was at my in-laws’ house and decided to download Tableau on my personal machine to see what Dan was buzzing about. Five minutes after downloading it, I was connected to InterWorks datasets, building crosstabs and other visualizations, and generally being blown away by how easy it all was. I came from the world of Crystal and SQL reporting, which involved a lot of coding. By contrast, Tableau was simple and elegant yet possessed the same level of sophistication as any other major tool on the market.

Striking up the First Tableau Partnership

Q: How and when did InterWorks officially become a Tableau Partner?

Behfar: If you look at how InterWorks operated in 1996 compared to now, there are many similarities, especially when it comes to delivering exceptional service around products we truly believe in. In our early days, we would go to local computer stores and talk with them about how we could help their customers. By doing a good job, we earned more business for us and them, which is the basis of any good partnership. Our pitch to Tableau years later was much the same.

When we first talked with Tableau, there was no partner program or partners of any sort. They had a guy named Chuck Hooper, a solo practitioner who eventually became an official Tableau employee. Tableau was a small organization then, so Chuck ended up doing all the things, from pre-sales and post-sales to managing a rapid-growing community surrounding Tableau. It got to the point where he needed some help, which was around the same time we approached Tableau’s then-CEO Christian Chabot and CRO Kelly Wright. We pretty much told them how much we loved the product, shared our belief in its ability to change the analytics landscape and described InterWorks’ ability to do great work for Tableau customers.

Above: Some of the InterWorks team at Tableau Conference 2014

They were skeptical at first, and things were slow-going until we got a call from Tableau about a customer deployment that wasn’t going to plan and asked if we jump in. We sent Dan on site for a week, and that Friday at 5pm, the customer placed a large order with Tableau. This experience showed Tableau that they could send us into uncertain engagements and trust us to turn them around and ultimately earn Tableau new business. I think our success goes back to that service-first, small business mentality. Both Tableau and InterWorks were the right size for each other at the time: agile upstarts built on the idea that analytics solutions could be flexible, affordable and personal.

As we continued to have more success with Tableau, they naturally wanted to expand their partner ecosystem. We became their unofficial Pro Serve and Training Partner, and we worked hand in hand with them on shaping what those teams would ultimately become. In 2012, we were officially named Tableau’s inaugural Gold Partner. Since then, we’ve won 22 Partner of the Year awards across numerous different categories and regions.

The InterWorks + Tableau Difference

Q: What makes InterWorks unique as a Tableau partner?

Behfar: Aside from coming up with Tableau from the ground floor, there are quite a few distinctions between InterWorks and other Tableau resellers and services partners. Our strength has never been in numbers, and that’s intentional. Instead, our strength ties back to our obsession with customer service and learning everything we possibly can about the technology we support. The fact that we are small, agile and personal are strengths.

In any services business, whether it’s tech consulting or lawn mowing, I think good service starts with the basics, which is simply doing great work, communicating well and providing a solid human experience throughout. I think many firms have the technical ability to do sound work but lack skills on the people side. When things get transactional, quality of service often suffers.

Another advantage in coming from the small-business world is that, while we have fewer people to throw at our engagements, our consultants are incredibly well-rounded and capable of doing many different things in and beyond Tableau. In a sense, they’re a lot like decathlon athletes, only their events consist of visualization, scripting, coding, database work, data transformation, standing up servers and more. Larger solution integrators might find that work unappealing because it’s not easy or the most profitable thing they could be doing. We preferred the Swiss Army Knife sort of approach, and we found that our clients did as well. Now, things are a bit different today than they were 10 years ago. Organizations are generally further along in their data journey, dealing more with issues like adoption and governance. We’ve adapted, too, but we still have that agile, small-business mentality.

Strategically Adding Value and Filling Gaps

Q: InterWorks has created several Tableau add-ons like Power Tools for Tableau and Curator. How have those enhanced our partnership?

Behfar: Predating our involvement with Tableau, we’ve always had people with strong development skills, and we’ve always encouraged them to use those skills when building solutions for clients. This has taken us down some interesting avenues, from developing mobile games like Fightin’ Words to building full-fledged oil and gas software like Landboss.

Since learning about Tableau, our people organically went about all sorts of skunkworks projects to see what Tableau looked like under the hood and what it might be capable of. As we started consulting more on Tableau, we saw more opportunities where the combination of Tableau and custom development might solve some unique challenges. Honestly, a big part of this was also driven by the needs of our consultants.

Above: Members of the InterWorks and Tableau teams at PEKO 2019

The more experience we got in the Tableau consulting sphere, the more we saw a need for performance tools or tools that helped solve server-related issues. Our developers and consultants spent a little time putting together the duct-tape version of these tools at first, and the first “official” tool we created was the Tableau Performance Analyzer. This eventually matured into an entire suite of tools, called Power Tools for Tableau, that helped people do more with their Tableau workbooks, server and so on.

Tableau was already great and could do so many things that traditional BI tools couldn’t, but Power Tools took things further. These tools became so popular that, eventually, something like 70% of Fortune 100 companies were using Tableau AND Power Tools along with it, which was crazy for a small business like us to conceive. We built out an entire product team, developed a sound product lifecycle and roadmap, and then Tableau approached us about officially building Power Tools into Tableau proper, and that’s exactly what happened in 2019.

The Tailored UX Power of Curator by InterWorks

Another big part of that Power Tools legacy can be seen in our Curator by InterWorks today. Formerly known as Portals for Tableau, Curator started much in the same way as Power Tools did but with a different emphasis. We had customers coming to us with their data visualizations, wanting to present them internally or externally in a custom-skinned manner. This wasn’t possible with Tableau out of the box. After building more or less the same custom solution over and over again, we naturally thought it might be wise to productize our efforts a bit more.

One of our consultants had a background in building CMS solutions and eventually started a skunkworks project to make something we could deploy repeatedly vs. building one-off web portals each time a customer needed something like this. Those efforts were successful, and today there are hundreds of customers around the world—ranging from small businesses to multi-national enterprises—that use Curator to embed their Tableau dashboards in a custom web portal. More than that, Curator has added all sorts of additional functionality that combines the best of Tableau Server and CMS for an incredible user experience.

Earlier, I talked about organizations being collectively in a different spot with their analytics needs. One of the biggest roadblocks we’ve seen our customers encounter these past few years is figuring out how to make their users and stakeholders aware of the great Tableau dashboards they’ve built. Their options are either make do with what they have or build something on their own, which can be expensive and time-consuming. The reason Curator is so popular is because it’s customizable, feature-rich, solidly built and deployable in under a week, sometimes within hours. Frankly, it makes analytics departments look good to the rest of the company. That all probably sounds like a sales pitch, but we’re tripling down on Curator because our customers routinely tell us how much they love it, and our development is largely driven by their feedback.

A Partnership with Room to Grow

Q: How has our partnership with Tableau evolved? What’s it like today?

Behfar: Ten years ago, I think everything was a bit more off the cuff and ad hoc. One of our consultants would parachute into a client site, get things going and then walk out a hero. Most of our engagements looked like some version of that for many years. But as the market started to mature and organizations got further along with their data journeys, their needs changed. The primary challenge for them became things like, “How are we going deploy Tableau organization-wide to thousands of users?”, which includes things like governance, adoption or the best way to roll out dashboards to a wide audience of diverse viewers.

In the early days, we spent a lot of time just getting people familiar with the basics of Tableau, which was a tool many people had never heard of. Today, there’s a much higher degree of Tableau familiarity and general data literacy, so we’ve evolved our offerings and grown our team to address more mature needs. Tableau is no longer this experiment that people are running on a server under their desks; it’s their primary analytics platform, touching virtually every group within their business. Our work now is fewer of these two-to-three-day engagements and more strategic advisory along the lines of “teach a man to fish.” Curator, Center of Excellence creations, custom workshops and planning sessions—these types of custom solutions now represent the bulk of what we provide.

Above: A Power Tools for Tableau: Server workshop

Bringing this back to our partnership with Tableau, we’ve been equal parts fortunate and strategic to grow in tandem right alongside them. Though their needs and what we provide have evolved a bit over time, the basis of our partnership remains the same. Tableau trusts in our ability to solve challenges with customers of any shape and size, helping those customers get the most out of Tableau and turning them into ardent Tableau fans. The benefit for us is that we continue to receive a steady stream of Tableau work based on that pattern of customer success. I think it’s important to note that even though we have great relationships with our contacts at Tableau, this trust has been earned exclusively on the basis of our work ethic. It’s pretty cool to me that InterWorks is the go-to partner when things need to be done to the highest standard.

Moving Forward with Salesforce

Q: Final question: How has the Salesforce acquisition affected the Tableau product and a community?

Behfar: Any time one company acquires another, there’s going to be a confluence of different cultures. Aside from simply being an incredible product, I think Tableau’s greatest strength is its community. I mean this in a good way, and I don’t know that there’s any other way to say it, but Tableau has a cult-like following amongst its users; that’s how much people love it. We work with a lot of different vendors across IT and data, and I don’t know that I’ve seen such a dedicated community anywhere else. You simply don’t see it in the Power BI, Oracle or Cognos communities. It’s on an entirely different level with Tableau users.

I think the community is so strong because Tableau has been so intentional about connecting with and fostering that community from day one, which is a real credit to people like former Tableau CMO Elissa Fink and others responsible for making that such a priority. Knowledge-share in the Tableau community is off the charts, Tableau Public is one of the most inspiring places in the analytics world, and there are deeply engaged user groups for every city, industry and use case you can imagine.

With any acquisition come certain changes to things like product roadmap and community engagement, and the Salesforce acquisition of Tableau is no different. Tableau will evolve and grow in new ways, and it’s already become more closely integrated with the broader Salesforce environment. Many see this as a good thing. Others are more focused on wanting Tableau (and moreover, the Tableau community) to be the same great product they’ve known for years. I think Salesforce recognizes this, so it’ll be key for them to continue preserving that Tableau community and enabling Tableau to thrive as an independent product that’s still part of the Salesforce family. Of course, I think the biggest benefit for Tableau and its users is that Tableau’s reach will be massively amplified, opening up the Tableau community to even more ardent fans. That has the potential to be really special.

Need a Tableau Advisor? Chat with Our Team

It’s clear we’ve had a unique relationship with Tableau for many years, and we’re excited to keep that relationship going for years to come. If you’re interested in chatting with a Tableau partner that can help you take the next step with Tableau, or really any other part of your analytics environment, we’d love to connect you to our team. The biggest takeaway we hope readers get from this blog is that we’re committed to always doing the best work we possibly can for our clients. Whatever success looks like for you with Tableau, we want to help you get there.

Contact Us

The post Reflecting on 10 Years as a Tableau Gold Partner appeared first on InterWorks.

I’ve always found it hard to attach labels and definitions to things, especially InterWorks, for a lot of reasons. In a recent blog post, I detailed how and why InterWorks came to be. When I started InterWorks, we didn’t have a super defined mantra, mission statement or 10-year plan – it was simply about having fun doing work that we enjoy. That was my response anytime someone asked me what we were trying to do with InterWorks, and people loved that answer for a long time.

As the years went on, we kept experiencing tremendous success. Opportunity kept leading to more opportunity, and this implied idea of chasing whatever work we found fun seemed like it could stretch on forever. But people kept asking the same question: “What exactly is InterWorks trying to do?”

We realized at some point that if we didn’t put guardrails on our business, we might keep growing into infinity and potentially wind up in a place we never intended to be. The question loomed on, and it honestly took a few years of conversation and reflection to finally emerge with a guiding mantra that felt fitting: “Do the best work for the best clients with the best people.”

At a glance, it looks pretty simple. It’s easy to gloss over the fact that it took a long time to get to a point where we could talk about this comfortably and really summarize what InterWorks is all about in one statement. For me, if those three conditions are true, then I’m happy with what we’re doing and where we’re headed. Of course, even after sharing that, people still ask me on a regular basis, “Where will you be in three years? Five years? What will you be doing?” For me, the answer to all those questions is, “Doing the best work for the best clients with the best people.” That’s the goal irrespective of time and circumstance.

All that said, I think there’s still a need at times to break down what such a simple statement actually means in practice. We can start with the things that it’s not. It’s not about a specific technology. It’s not about size. It’s not about revenue targets or growth targets. The only thing it’s really about is finding the balance between three points. We’ll zoom in on Best Work first.

Best Work

Best work can qualify as a lot of different things. Maybe it’s the ability to truly listen to and understand a client’s needs, or maybe it’s the ability to collaborate really well, or perhaps it’s just executing at a really high level. Best Work can be all those things and a whole lot more. Here’s another way of expressing it. Take a look at the pictures below of some server racks:

I think even if you don’t really know what you’re looking at here, you’d likely agree that what we have on the left is sloppy work. Now, look on the right. You’d probably agree that this looks like much better work. Sometimes, you just know Best Work when you see it.

To take the server rack example a little further, when we built our corporate headquarters in Stillwater, Oklahoma, we obviously wanted to plan where our server racks would live and how they would be arranged. Even though InterWorks doesn’t run cable like we used to, I went to the team and said, “Let’s just take care of running the cables ourselves.” For old time’s sake, I was involved in the project, which was really just me marking the spots where I thought we needed cables. Beyond that, the team did the rest. They came back with something that looked like this:

This is what I would consider Best Work. Here’s what I love about this: The picture on the left is within a closet that no one will ever see, but the team still went through the extra effort of color-coding the cables, making sure we had nice face plates on everything, getting our logo etched on a piece of metal and even putting lights on top of the rack. Keep in mind that no one ever goes into the closet to look at this. These alterations may have altered the budget and time spent on this rack by, like, 5%, but it was those extra inches that made this memorable work. Best Work is all about doing your best work at all times, even if nobody ever sees it. Whether it’s a network rack, a database schema, putting data into a CRM, a data visualization or whatever, this philosophy should be applied to every single thing we do across every aspect of the business.

Best Clients

So, we’ve established the first part of our triad, which is Best Work, but what does it mean to do Best Work for the Best Clients? Who or what qualifies as Best Clients in the first place? I could talk about our clients who happen to be household names – massive brands with tons of prestige and name recognition – and it’s true that many of those names qualify as Best Clients, but it’s really not about the name or the logo that makes them so great. Instead of focusing on names that sound prestigious, I always like to talk about a client of ours that, unless you’re from North Central Oklahoma, you’re probably unfamiliar with. This client is a small, Stillwater-based optometry office called Cockrell Eyecare Center. If we could find a hundred more clients like Cockrell, we’d take them in a second. So, what makes them so great?

Number one, we have a real and meaningful relationship with them that goes all the way back to 1997. In fact, I have Dr. David’s cell phone number and he has mine. If he needs to call me on a Sunday night, he can. If I need to call him on a Sunday night, I can. He doesn’t have an unlimited budget for everything, but if we call him and say, “Hey you need this piece of technology and it’s going to cost $50,000,” he might ask a couple of questions, but he ultimately trusts our judgment. He trusts InterWorks to make sure his technology’s working for him. We understand his parameters and how he wants his business to run. It is 100% a partnership. We are not a vendor to him; we are a partner to him. He pays his bills on time, he doesn’t nitpick at them and, in turn, we don’t nickel and dime him. It is a two-way relationship that leaves us both happy, and that is what makes a Best Client.

Now, the next question is what happens when we don’t have that kind of relationship? At least in the early years of InterWorks, we didn’t always have the luxury of being overly particular about the clients we worked with, but as we got more established, we began asking ourselves what type of work we truly enjoy doing and with whom. Some years back, we developed a sort of grading system. The first time we started applying this system to our client relationships, we ended up letting about 70 clients go because they didn’t meet our threshold for Best Clients. The clients we let go fell into one of two buckets:

1. Those we simply did not enjoy working with
2. Those we enjoyed working with, but the work wasn’t the type of work we wanted

Here’s an example of a high-profile client that did not personify Best Clients in the end. I won’t say names for this one, so we’ll just say that this is a massive technology company based in the Bay Area that virtually everyone knows. When we first started working for them, we were doing some really cool work. We were responsible for standing up Tableau, rolling it out across the entire organization, along with some very high-level data architecture and data engineering work. So, we rolled everything out and before long, they had reached a more mature phase in their analytics lifecycle where they simply needed some talented people to keep things running with their Tableau environment. We had a lot of senior resources on this account, and our work evolved into something more focused on staffing. We were no longer consulting as we knew it – it was straight-up staffing.

So, we approached them, told them that we loved working with them, but we expressed that this wasn’t the type of work we wanted to be doing. They agreed and promised to change our work dynamic. Unfortunately, that never materialized. After a few more iterations of this conversation, we came back to the entire company and asked if anyone at InterWorks wanted to keep doing this type of staffing work for the client. The opportunity was there, but nobody wanted to do it. Even though they were a great client in a lot of other ways, we told them that this wasn’t the type of work we wanted to be doing and that they had 60 days to find someone new. Mind you, this client was 100% utilization, had no problem paying their bills and the prestige of working there was something really cool to everyone at InterWorks. But, at the end of the day, those things didn’t outweigh our need to do meaningful work that matters to us.

Best People

The last, and perhaps most important, ingredient of this entire equation is Best People. Much like our definitions for Best Work and Best Clients, the way we determine what “best” really means goes far beyond what’s on paper. Best People to us doesn’t always mean people with a wealth of knowledge, skills and experience. Those things are certainly useful and can contribute to Best People, but there are plenty of brilliant people out there who just don’t have it together in other ways that are important to us. So, what are those things?

In the companion post to this, “An InterWorks History,” I shared a lot of pictures of friends and family who, over the years, have joined InterWorks. The reason I shared those examples wasn’t to say that someone has to be one of my best friends to work here. It’s because, somewhere along the way, I realized that there’s a particular kind of person that I want here who I enjoy working with. I’m totally content to sit in a room by myself and work alone, but I would rather collaborate with likeminded people. As such, the first aspect of Best People is bringing together individuals who share the same mission and vision as I do.

Above: The InterWorks Summit circa 2018

Beyond that, we look for people who are adept at building strong relationships and genuinely take care of each other. We hear a lot of comments about how this feels like an extended family. There are real relationships built here that go well beyond the walls of InterWorks. People here know and care about others’ personalities, passions and hobbies, so that ability to connect on a much deeper level and be not only a great teammate but also a good friend is key.

Another essential quality of Best People is the drive to go above and beyond what is asked of them. Sometimes, this is doing their work with such excellence and care that it blows people away, but just as often, it’s doing work or tasks that nobody asked them to do. One of my favorite examples of this over the years features InterWorks IT Lead Keith Johnson. Keith has worked here for some time and works out of our Stillwater headquarters. One day, we had some sort of event that generated a lot of trash, and our trash cans were full to the brim. We have a janitorial service that comes regularly, but Keith took it upon himself to empty out trash cans immediately without anyone asking him. He did it simply because it needed to be done. That might seem trivial, but it’s those little examples of extra effort and initiative that add up. If Keith is willing to go above and beyond for something like emptying the trash, imagine how that mentality manifests in his actual work.

Finally, and bringing this full circle to the spirit that InterWorks was founded upon, we want people who play as hard as they work. Fun is a major part of InterWorks. Yes, we want to complete our work responsibly and in a manner befitting the highest quality, but life is too short not to enjoy yourself while you’re at it. That type of joy is contagious. When you have a bunch of people who don’t take themselves too seriously, are able to keep things in perspective and are just generally a joy to be around, then work doesn’t really feel like work at the end of the day.

Above: A recent InterWorks gathering in OKC

Putting It All Together

Trying to pin down all of these things is still inherently a challenge for me. There are so many representations of what Best Work, Best Clients, Best People can be, so it’s almost impossible to include every iteration here. Hopefully, you now understand the essence of each and how they drive everything we do at InterWorks. Focusing on any one of these tenets is a worthwhile endeavor, but it’s when these three things are brought together that the real magic happens. Are we always perfect in each regard? No, but simply striving towards these ideals has put us in place that I and others at InterWorks are proud of. My hope is that it shows.

The post The InterWorks Mantra: Do the Best Work for the Best Clients with the Best People appeared first on InterWorks.

When you start your own company, the concept of “having made it” is one that rarely sinks in – no matter how objectively successful you become (whatever that means). I don’t doubt that there’s a part of my mind that views InterWorks in the exact same way as when it started – a part of me that still views us as a chippy upstart taking on the world. I do feel confident that, over the years, we’ve stayed true to our roots and the values we set out with back in 1996. Still, that was 25 years ago – a quarter of a century – and some things have inevitably changed. Most noticeably, what started out as just me doing local networking services in Stillwater, Oklahoma, has since grown into a global data consultancy made up of over 230 unique and talented individuals.

Maybe it’s because we’ve reached a certain size, or perhaps it’s because 25 years feels like a worthy milestone, but it struck me recently that we’ve never consolidated the InterWorks story in one publicly viewable place. Sure, we’ve shared our history orally with clients or in brief presentation format during things like new employee onboarding, but we haven’t etched it into any stone tablets that I know of. In truth, it’s likely impossible to capture the whole story because every story can be told from different perspectives. Someone who has been at InterWorks for 15 years might have a pretty different take from someone who has been here for three years. You get the idea. What I’m trying to say is that I feel it’s time to tell a more crystallized version of the InterWorks story, and I’ll start with my own perspective.

A Long Time Ago, in a Flyover State …

Before I dive into “how” InterWorks came to be, I feel it’s much more important to share “why” InterWorks came to be. It’s not that the “how” doesn’t matter – I just think you learn a lot more about an organization or an individual by understanding what motivates them. To get a clear picture of how I view InterWorks’ “why,” you need to understand a little bit about my upbringing in the college town of Stillwater, Oklahoma. The first thing you need to know about me is that I fell in love with technology at a very early age. I like things that turn on and off. I like things with blinky lights. My first tangible memory of diving into tech on my own was in second grade. I pushed really hard to get a computer: a Commodore Vic-20.

My family didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so it was really big deal to get this thing. I wanted it because I wanted to play video games. Today, you would just hop into the App Store or download Steam. Back then, it wasn’t so easy. In fact, the easiest way was to program your own games. So, my dad bought me this book called “Zap! Pow! Boom!” Each chapter in the book was made up of coding instructions for a single game. As a second grader, I didn’t really know how to type, so I transposed the code one finger at a time. The code was written in BASIC, and at the end of the first chapter, you type in the word “Run.” I hit enter, and what I got back was “Error Line 1.” So, I had to go all the way back to the beginning and see what I transposed incorrectly. By the time I got to the end of the book, I had accidentally learned how to code in BASIC. For me, it was all about playing video games, but now all of a sudden, I understood the fundamentals of programming.

Above: Me and some childhood friends, one of whom is Richard Clapp, Systems Engineer

As time went on, computers were rapidly advancing. I wanted something new, so I started looking at a 286 model. Today if you want a computer, you go to Dell.com, Best Buy or the Apple Store. Back then, you went to your local computer store, told them your budget and then waited anywhere between five days to two weeks for it to be built. You could save a few hundred dollars by ordering parts and building it yourself if you knew how. So, that’s what I did. Using the earnings from my paper route and some extra funds from my parents, I ended up saving enough money to buy parts and build the computer myself. This experience ended up teaching me a lot about how to put a computer together. I learned about motherboards, RAM, ribbon cables, processor speed and so on.

Though I didn’t know it then, somewhere along the way, I realized building that computer taught me another skillset. I now had a programming-light background, as well as a newly found hardware-light background. It wasn’t just me developing these skills and interfacing with new technology, though. My dad, brother, aunt and uncle – everyone was into tech. I would get a lot of their hand-me-downs.

Above: Me and my younger brother, Ideen Jahanshahi, Solutions Architect

Co-Op Gaming, Corporate Tech and Coming of Age

Fast-forward to my high school graduation, and that’s when a game called “Doom” came out. The significance of this game was that it was one of the first games you could play with someone else. If you were on the same network as them, or if you had a modem, you could call into your buddy’s modem and play against one another. Now, all of a sudden, all my friends wanted computers with this game installed on it. They also wanted help installing modems and calling into other people’s modems. Because I had a reputation as a “computer person,” I became the tech support for my buddies so we could play this game together. What I realized throughout all of that is that I really enjoyed helping other people solve these problems.

This coincided nicely with another big moment upon my graduation of high school. Creative Labs, who was at that time the biggest multimedia peripherals manufacturer on the planet, had just announced they were going to open their U.S. support center in Stillwater. This was a massive, publicly traded company. In my mind, it was the equivalent of Google or Tesla coming to town today. I absolutely wanted to work there. Because they were based in Singapore and were not yet physically in Stillwater, I did a remote interview, and they offered me a job as part of the first group hired in Stillwater. It wasn’t until the first day of onboarding when I showed up in person that they realized I was 17. Because they had a strict 18-and-older employment policy, they told me to come back in a year, so I did.

When I first started at Creative Labs, I loved it. They were a small company with big technology, and everyone there was incredibly passionate. Our little group would have regular LAN parties and BBQs on the weekend. Even though it was only an $8-an-hour job, which was still pretty great for a college kid, I loved it and took it very seriously. I’d go home and read entire manuals, which is not something I do – I was just that into it. I remember that no one ever told us what our mission was when we started there, so we made up our own. My mission was to delight the customer. There really weren’t any rules, so we just did whatever we could to keep the person on the other end of the line happy.

This philosophy came with a lot of rewards. Customers would often send me gifts. One gift I remember well was from a guy who worked for a massive networking company called 3Com who sent me a box of network cards, each worth $135. I thought that was pretty cool at the time and still do today. After a year-and-a-half of working at Creative Labs, I went from loving my job to being completely miserable. The reason why was because Creative Labs started suffocating employees with KPIs and metrics for everything, as well as increasingly strict rules. This choked all the fun out of work for me.

So, what happened that caused such a dramatic change? I think a big factor was that they experienced such an incredible period of growth over such a short time that their onboarding classes grew to 20-40 people in size. Rather than focusing on hiring the most talented people, they focused on hiring anyone who could speak English well and type at least 30 words per minute. If those boxes were checked, you were in and they’d train you the rest of the way. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that approach, but the quality of new hires suffered as a consequence, leading them to introduce a lot of new rules that boxed everyone in.

Essentially, we now had four-hour shifts broken up by 15-minute breaks for things like using the bathroom, smoking, grabbing a snack or whatever. Each phone call was limited to 10 minutes. At the 10-minute mark, you escalated your call to a manager. When you hung up the phone, you had 60 seconds to type up notes in the wrap-up period before your next call. Then we started getting scripts for everything. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, it was just a fundamental change from the freedom and energy I had when I first started there. Ultimately, I ended up leaving. That was my first exposure to the “tech world.”

The Summer of InterWorks

After Creative Labs, I ended up moving to an apartment complex behind Eskimo Joe’s (a popular sports bar) in Stillwater with some buddies. We moved here in the middle of the summer, mainly because it had a pool. We thought we’d be social butterflies, but instead I bought a spool of network cable, took those network cards I got from the appreciative customer I mentioned earlier, walked down the hall of the apartment complex, knocked on people’s doors and asked them to be on our network. If they said yes, we ran cable up the side of the building, stapled it to the wall and ran it into their room. We then put a network card in their computer and added them to our LAN. Keep in mind that this was before high-speed internet and Wi-Fi. As a result of all this, I spent most of my weekends and weekdays providing support for friends and parents with network issues.

Playing games was fun, but I really enjoyed building up networks and then tearing them down – figuring out why things weren’t working, why drivers were off, how to crimp network wiring, how to make it look good and so on. It was a lot of fun, but after a while, I realized I was fixing the same 10-20 problems over and over again. I knew the only way I could tackle more challenging problems was if I did this for businesses. So, in 1996, as a sophomore at OSU, I went and incorporated InterWorks. Like many tech companies, I started InterWorks out of a garage – well, it was technically out of my room that was converted from a garage.

A quick aside, in case you were wondering where the name InterWorks came from: It’s a combination of the word “networks” – because that’s the work we provided – and “internet”– because we knew at the time the internet was going to be a big deal. The name was brainstormed by a collection of roommates and friends who lived in the same house.

Above: The InterWorks house, featuring Blaine Stephens, Strategic Account Manager

I never started InterWorks with the vision of starting a business or being an entrepreneur. To me, it was just a way to further the fun. The first thing I did after incorporating was go to local computer companies in town and offer some services. I said, “Hey, you’re in the business of building computers. I would like to service those computers for your business customers. If I do a great job, not only will they be happier with what you sold them, but they will also come back to you asking for more of it.” I was very lucky, because these local computer companies simply wanted to build computers and had no interest in servicing them, so they readily agreed. If you look at our model then and our model today, it’s exactly the same. Back then, the partnership was with local computer companies. Today, it’s with billion-dollar, multinational companies like Dell, Tableau and Snowflake.

Before long, InterWorks started receiving more work, and our big break came in 1997 when we got a call from Clinton Public Schools to bring internet to their school. Lots of schools at the time were getting funding to have their buildings retrofitted to support internet. Clinton Public Schools wanted us to take care of the entire thing, and we said “Absolutely.” We had never done anything of that scope or magnitude, so I called a bunch of buddies and asked if they were interested in helping out. They said yes and were glad for the cash. So, we loaded up a few cars with all the tools we thought we’d need, as well as several ladders and 18,000 feet of network cable.

Above: Early days with APAC Regional Director Robert Curtis (left) and COO Johnnie Hurns (right)

We drove to Clinton, Oklahoma, which was a few hours away, in the dead of summer. If you’ve been in a public school during summer, you know that they turn the AC off to save costs. In Oklahoma, that means 100+ degree weather. When running cable, you have to move around ceiling tiles, causing white flakes, pink fiberglass insulation and who knows what else to rain down on your head. When you stick your head above the ceiling, it’s another 20 degrees hotter up there.

So, we were in a school out of town, working in 120+ degree conditions, with no real idea of what we were doing at a scope we had never tackled before. As you might expect, we ran into some unique problems – problems like how to scale 30ft walls and run cable across them. The longer we did this, the more we figured out that there are more efficient ways to do things. We started bundling cables and being smarter about where we ran them – for the most part. There were some really long hallway runs where I’m sure we broke fire code by running cable over ceiling lights.

On top of all the challenges with the work, we had no real concept of how to bill expenses or account for costs. So, we got the cheapest hotel we could find – the kind of hotel where you don’t touch anything you don’t have to. We packed five us into one room, but the one nice surprise was that the hotel had a hot tub. One buddy surprised us all with a $30 bottle of champagne to celebrate our job well done. No one brought swimsuits, so we sat around in that hot tub in our tighty whities, passing around the bottle and just taking in the moment. We were having fun and thought the work was cool. At the end of the project, we posed for some silly pictures.

I look back on those days often. We were working 16-hour days in smoking-hot weather, unsure if we were even going to finish the project. But we did it somehow, and we brought high-speed internet to a part of the world that had not seen it before. We gave this entire K-12 school internet that would, in theory, change their lives for the better. It felt great. If I could go back to those days and do it again, I would in a second.

Above: Snapshots from our first big job at Clinton Public Schools in 1997

InterWorks Goes Full-Time

After the Clinton Public Schools job, I was still finishing my bachelor’s degree and trying to figure what I wanted to do. I was interviewing with companies like IBM and Boeing (who was doing an International Space Station project that I wanted to be a part of). Me and my buddies would sit around and talk about what the future might look like. I decided to stick with school and get my master’s degree. Somewhere along the way in 1997 – the second year of InterWorks – I started dating this gal, Staci Bejcek. One day, I was showing her how I invoiced different customers, explaining to her how I used Word templates to print out two copies of each invoice. I’d send one copy to the customers and then keep the other for my records. I’d wait for the customer to pay and then move that copy from the “unpaid” folder to the “paid” folder. I remember her looking at me like I was an idiot. One month later, QuickBooks was installed on my computer, and she had transposed everything from paper to digital format. She is our global CFO today.

Above: My wife and CFO, Staci Bejcek, without whom InterWorks wouldn’t exist

When 2000 rolled around, I graduated with a master’s degree from OSU. The question then was what was I going to do with my life? I started thinking that maybe this InterWorks side business could be my real job. I had never really thought of it that way, but the idea stuck. The rest is history. It’s probably unfair to skip everything that’s happened between 2000, when InterWorks took off as my full-time job, and now. A lot has happened since then, and a lot of wonderful people have shaped InterWorks’ trajectory. We expanded our IT services, became a Dell partner, became a Tableau partner, became a truly full-stack data company, expanded across the globe, and now we employ over 200 people who do incredibly cool work for organizations of all sizes and backgrounds. It’s been a wild ride, and I don’t know that I ever could have imagined being where we are now 25 years ago. It’s better.

Above: Global Director of Business Development Aaron Confer (left) and CDO Cole Shelton (right)

The InterWorks Why

In the early days, people would ask me, “What are you trying to do with InterWorks?” I’d say, “I’m just here to have fun.” The problem there is that everyone loves that idea, but when they would prod further to ask what our mission was, my answer didn’t change: having fun was all that really mattered. Of course, the need for more specifics arose. For a long time, we would go do work we loved and that clients enjoyed, which would lead to opportunity after opportunity. That went okay for a while, but when we reached a critical mass, we realized we needed to put some guardrails on our work, or else we would just grow and grow into infinity and potentially risk becoming Creative Labs with all of their rules. I never wanted that, so we got more deliberate about defining our mission. After years of conversation, we managed to distill it into this phrase:

“Do the best work, for the best clients, with the best people.”

If those three conditions are true, then I am happy with what we’re doing and where we’re at as a company. People love to ask where I want to be in three or five years, and the truth is that the where doesn’t matter so long as we’re staying true to this mantra. For me, the goal isn’t about attaching ourselves to specific technology, growing to a certain size, meeting arbitrary growth or revenue targets or anything like that – it’s about keeping everything in balance with that mantra. If you want to learn more about that mantra, as well as some additional InterWorks history, go check out this companion blog post.

The post An InterWorks History: Our Origins to Our Why appeared first on InterWorks.

InterWorks started out as me and a small group of friends doing IT work because we had a good time and enjoyed the challenge. As InterWorks has grown over the last 24 years, our mission has attracted more talented individuals, and the team has become increasingly diverse. Professional development and team building are important to our work, and one place we address these needs is at our annual Summit, specifically through the speaker we invite to talk to the company.

Growth and More Understanding

I met Les McKeown at the Inc. Conference several years ago. I was in awe as he gave his presentation on predictable success because he described so many of the personalities here at InterWorks to a tee. It gave me a greater appreciation for the different personality types represented in our company and how they might mesh or clash. The four personality types Les discussed were:

• The Visionary – autonomous risk taker with big ideas
• The Operator – goal-oriented finisher who get things done
• The Processor – organized implementer of structured systems
• The Synergist – brings people together for the good of the enterprise

In looking at 2019, we’d gone through an incredible amount of growth and were getting hit from all sides with exciting opportunities. That meant our teams were getting pushed to do more and more, and we were needing to find ways to become more efficient. Moving at a speed faster than we ever have, the different personality types among our team felt magnified.

Set up for Enduring Success

As we were considering what type of speaker to bring in for the 2019 Summit, I wanted to talk about the dynamics of our team and how we mesh together in the hope that by better understanding one another, we can empathize with and work better together. Les fit the bill perfectly many years ago, so we asked him to come and talk to our group. He didn’t disappoint. As a result of his talk, we’re now armed with data that helps us learn more about each other, as well as an empathy that equips us to better collaborate and support one another. This enables us to lay a firm foundation of success that will last and an authentic legacy that will endure.

Below is a Tableau dashboard put together by Mat Hughes, Grant Eisenmenger and David Duncan that highlights the different personalities within our teams. With this information, we can better understand how our teams function, what certain individuals prioritize, where their strengths lay and what our dynamics look like company-wide.

I’m excited to see what 2020 holds and how our mindset of predictable success will open up new opportunities for growth and teamwork.

The post Predictable Success: Laying a Lasting Foundation appeared first on InterWorks.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) has been an important part of my life from an early age. I grew up in a house where there was a bias towards these fields, and both my immediate and extended family had passions or careers in the space.

Making Learning Fun

At an early age, if any piece of electronics in our house stopped working (TV, hairdryer, fridge, etc.), the first thing my dad would do—with me standing over his shoulder—was take that equipment apart to figure out what was wrong. I learned about capacitors, resistors, soldering irons, relay switches, all under the umbrella and spirit of “fun” rather than “learning.” I remember my first electronic project kit from Radio Shack: the 150 in One. I spent countless hours with the toy, learning building experiments.

Like most kids, I was also into video games. When I was growing up, you had to program your own game in a language called BASIC, and it was common to see books on the shelves at stores that were entirely made up of code, with each chapter of a book being a video game. So I would transpose that code one keystroke at a time to the computer and accidentally learned to program at an early age.

This early exposure to the STEM disciplines helped shape who I am today. Without realizing what was happening at the time, I learned to think through problems in a decision tree, evaluate cause and effect and got comfortable with making a mistake, backing out of that mistake, and then going down the right path. This process taught me patience and diligence (transposing code and finding errors when transposing took much time and effort). It taught me computer logic and how to think through a problem step by step. It taught me to be resourceful and autonomous because I would experiment on my own, without a parent or other adult to help guide me.

The Benefits of Early STEM Exposure

I can take what I learned in those early days and apply it to many aspects of my life. I feel so strongly about the benefits of the STEM fields that we got our 11-year-old daughter into coding as well. She works through code.org (which I HIGHLY recommend for any kid), and they do a great job of making coding fun and interesting. I see her picking up the same skills that I did: thinking through a problem, experimenting, being comfortable making a mistake, backing out and starting again. We’re constantly on the lookout for educational activities around STEM, and we’re bringing our five-year-old into the mix as well.

My close encounters with STEM from a young age proved especially formative for me. This time is critical in any child’s development, and getting exposure to industries that prompt and cultivate creative problem solving, independence and a strong work ethic is invaluable. I’m a strong advocate for STEM education and support people getting involved in it at any time in life. It’s not a stretch to say that learning over my dad’s shoulder and working it out with that electronic project kit led me to where I am today and how InterWorks began.

The post Why the STEM Disciplines Matter: A CEO’s Story appeared first on InterWorks.

Here at InterWorks, maintaining a small group of amazing people is very important to me. Having 500, 1,000 or 10,000 employees just for the purpose of leveraging that army to hit a billion in revenue is simply not the goal. In fact, it just sounds horrible.

We take a lot of pride – and put a lot of effort – in having an amazing culture. This requires us to be vigilant about who is allowed into that culture and who will help propagate that culture. It sounds easy, right? Most companies say something similar, then focus all their HR efforts on getting as many new people through the door as possible. I feel like I have to push for the exact opposite.

The Interview

Our interview process at InterWorks involves several stages. We have an initial phone screen, then one or two technical screens that often happen via phone or video conference. Should the person successfully navigate those meetings, we’ll invite them into our main office where they’ll often talk to anywhere between two and six additional people.

If all is still going well, they’ll head into my office where Staci and I will do the final interview. To the dismay of many a manager or team lead in need of a new hire, a lot of people will make it to this final stage only to get a “NO” from me.

To better clarify our philosophy for casual readers, candidates and even some of those dismayed managers, I want to talk about hiring and why this process is so important to me.

When hiring, there are only two choices: “HELL YES” or “NO”.

Would I Be Excited?

When I am evaluating a candidate, I am interested in hearing their story. I’m not first concerned with salary demands or their technical ability, and I’m most definitely not concerned with the role we are trying to fill. I simply want to know what makes them tick, what they are passionate about and if they have “the fire” in their belly.

My primary question is “Would I be excited to have this person at InterWorks?” If the answer is “they were OK,” “yeah, I kinda like them” or even worse “they could do the job,” then the answer is an absolute “NO.” Again, this evaluation is done almost 100% on personality; not previous experience, salary requirement, urgency of hire or geographic location. The same methodology is applied to someone new to the job market or someone who has been in the space for 20 years.

It has to be a “HELL YES.”

Not Everyone Gets It

Of course, this can be frustrating to hiring managers because they have work piling up and need a hire ASAP. They’ll get excited that they’ve found a person that has the skills and experience on their resume, but then we have to pass. It’s tough. I get it. But we can’t be short-sighted on this one.

I understand that we will end up weeding out candidates that may have been amazing. There’s even a good possibility of us making a mistake and missing out on someone great. Most importantly though, it means that the likelihood of letting anyone in the door that isn’t the right fit is very slim.

The right people – the “HELL YEAH” people – are out there.

Whenever I’ve questioned why someone is here, I can immediately think back to the interview. I can always remember the point where I gave in and thought “good enough” or “alright for the job.” This eats at me because I know the kind of organization that we’ve all worked so hard to build. Even worse, going against the philosophy does an incredible amount of damage – we’ve seen this happen again and again.

Finally, Firing People Sucks

I’ve heard people jokingly say, “We really suck at firing people.” It’s true, and this is why we can’t give in. If we keep our hiring practices tough, we really don’t have to fire people. Another reason to get it right the first time.

We need the right people; people who are hungry, people who come with excitement, people with eyes wide open who are ready to conquer the world.

So, as you interview candidates moving forward, whether you’re hiring for InterWorks or you’ve just stumbled on my post, I encourage you to consider this core philosophy of how we hire:

“If they aren’t a HELL YES, they’re a NO.”

The post Hiring: It’s ‘HELL YES’ or ‘NO’ appeared first on InterWorks.

I grew up in a small college town and spent most of my life in student housing. Most of my neighborhood friends were international students whose parents were in the country for the sole purpose of a college education and pursuing future opportunity. This gave me the mindset that most people in the world are ambitious, autonomous and self-motivated.

It wasn’t until I started hiring people and consulting for other companies that I started to truly understand that this was not the case. 

Over the last 15 years, I’ve met thousands of employees in hundreds of various job roles. I’ve seen employees with only a high school education who are some of the hardest working and most resourceful people out there. I’ve seen upper management with Ivy League MBAs that lack any sort of practical knowledge, passion or talent. It became apparent to me that there are key attributes that determine what makes someone a great fit in our organization.

Although a company requires leadership and direction, a company’s success is driven by the employees. If you get the right people involved, a leader can set the direction and still succeed as the path and environment changes along the way. The vision of the company should be set by the leader, but it is the employees who will convert that vision into a reality.

My childhood and later business experience has shown that not just any team will do. The company must be made up of top level players for each job role, all using their individual talents and strengths to drive toward the goals of the company vision. This understanding led me in an attempt to define what makes the right employee.

It’s Who You Are, Not What You Know

Although we are a tech company, I was surprised to find that the attributes of our best employees had less to do with technical ability and more with core personality. These attributes include:

• Passion – Those who are passionate about their interests will become a master of their craft. We choose to find people whose passions coincide with certain aspects of their job roles. 
• Detail – Attention to the details receives a great deal of emphasis at InterWorks. The small things always matter and finding people that understand where the details lie within the big picture is key to our success.
• Resourcefulness – We do not like unneeded structure, process and bureaucracy. By targeting employees who can make the most of their time with minimal direction, we are better equipped to grow organically.
• Service – Everyone at our office deals with clients to some extent, so we want to focus on bringing in those employees that truly care about the service or product we are offering. 
• Agility- Technology changes at a rapid pace and we need the ability to quickly assimilate new technologies into our offerings. We expect everyone here to be able to learn with minimal outside assistance and become experts on very short notice.
• Attitude – Negative attitudes can bring an entire organization down, so we look only for those people that can make contributions with the right attitude. 
• Work Ethic – Our company culture demands a ‘work hard, play hard’ mindset and this begins with the personality of every individual involved. 

Of course we expect some minimum level of technical competence for a respective role, but I’ve found that meeting the above criteria is the tougher portion of finding the right person. With these attributes, the right person can gain the technical skills necessary to be the best. I have found that it does not work the other way.

InterWorks employees are a special breed. Do you have what it takes?

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The post InterWorks Vision and Roadmap – The Environment appeared first on InterWorks.

As we grow in size and reputation, we find a marketplace full of opportunity. As we are presented with new situations, ideas and partnerships, it has become increasingly difficult to communicate a vision of the future that will allow employees of InterWorks to keep us focused in the right direction.

Understanding that every employee has a stake in the future of InterWorks and to maintain consistency with the vision and direction of the company, a framework must be established to determine how and with whom we build relationships. With that goal in mind, I have been working on a set of criteria on what makes a great match between a particular client and InterWorks.

As you read through the following framework, keep in mind that it is based on the type of relationship we have with our client, not the amount of revenue a client may generate. Since I place a high degree of emphasis on creating a great working environment for our employees, the type of client with which we engage contributes significantly to the level of satisfaction of both our clients and InterWorks staff – this is a core part of the goal and our long term vision.
 
There are several criteria that may be applied to a particular client to determine if we feel they are a good fit for a productive relationship. While the list below is not set in stone, we have applied it successfully over the past several years to develop some very good client relationships. I want to emphasize that this is not a checklist of required qualities, only points to consider with a new client or partnership:
 
Clients We Appreciate
 
There are several criteria that may be applied to a particular client to determine if we feel they are a good fit for a productive relationship. I want to emphasize that this is not a checklist of required qualities, only points to consider with a new client:

1. Do we have good chemistry with the client’s management or our main point of contact?
2. Is there something that makes this client unique & interesting, such as the line of business, geographic footprint, etc?
3. Does this opportunity have the potential to lead to further opportunities if we make a strong positive contribution?

  
Clients Who Appreciate InterWorks

1. Do they enjoy our presence? Does the client feel we make a positive impact to their organization?
2. We want to become welcomed as part of their team. Does this client have the potential for a relationship like this to form? 
3. Are they comfortable with our cost structure?
4. Does the client trust our knowledge and judgment? We recognize trust is earned over time and we have an obligation to earn that trust. Are circumstances beyond our control which may prevent this trust from developing fully?
5. Are we and our services a valued part of the client’s business? 

 
A Mutual Understanding of the I.T. Vision for the Benefit of the Client
 
We don’t expect to walk into every situation and drop an I.T. roadmap on the table, having our goals for the company accepted immediately. In many situations, it is a collaborative effort between our companies. In some situations, the client requires a predefined vision that we can articulate to them in a way that makes them feel confident and informed. Sometimes the client simply wants to hear our thoughts, give their feedback, and move forward based on comfort level and budget.
 
After thoughtful and thorough discussion with the client, do we all agree on the direction and role of I.T. in the organization? We don’t need to agree 100%, but the meat of the vision should overlap. Is the organization willing to make the necessary commitment over time to make that vision a reality? Again, we are not looking for 100% commitment, but an understanding of the general direction and how we are going to get there.

Conclusion

Although there are many items to consider with a new client or opportunity, the essentials are defined as a mutual respect between the companies. If a client trusts our judgment and leadership and if a client truly welcomes our services and expertise, I believe that the both companies could be well served for years to come.

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