Nathan Reis is not your [...]]]> Nathan Reis is CEO of Entrust Bankcard. Entrust Bankcard processes point-of-sale, Internet, telephone, and mobile device payments and operates loyalty and gift card programs for small businesses.  Nathan and his team grew Entrust Bankcard’s revenue from $109,983 to $9,400,000 in less than three years an amazing 8,417% increase!

Nathan Reis is not your typical CEO. As he put’s it “I’m a little bit old school, I believe sales is about picking up the phone and pounding the street, there is no better way to market anything than picking-up the phone, my marketing plan has been quite simple: set appointments and close deals”.

When asked about how Entrust Bankcard grew so fast in a tough economy he told us:

“I refused to watch the news. I was focused entirely on sales. I can’t—I honestly can’t stress enough how, do not watch the news because every day I walked outside the world wasn’t coming to an end and you know and where we focus on small business and you focus on whatever your product is, if you’ve got a decent products you know just start selling”.

Further:

“Very few people today like to cold call or walk into businesses and introduce themselves. Everybody likes to throw up a website and just hope that people come an sign up.  Do what everybody else hates to do, pick the phone go against the grain, call it—you know people call it disruption I just call it working hard and doing what everybody else hates to do, set appointments and close deals.”

Entrust Bankcard grew 8.417% because of Nathan and his team do “what everybody else hates to do”. Do what everybody else hates to do, work harder than anyone around you, and reap the rewards of that effort.

Tasty Catering is ranked as a top 20 best place to work in the United States.  Tasty Catering has been listed four times as an INC 5000 fastest growing [...]]]> Tom Walter is CEO of Tasty Catering. Tasty Catering plans and caters corporate events such as company picnics and fulfills other corporate catering needs for Chicago-area businesses.

Tasty Catering is ranked as a top 20 best place to work in the United States.  Tasty Catering has been listed four times as an INC 5000 fastest growing company.

Tom has over 45 years of experience as a food service industry entrepreneur, including owning full service restaurants, bars, nightclubs and fast food restaurants. He is currently the President and CEO of Tasty Catering.

Tom has started twenty nine businesses and acquired three. He is still active as a principal in seven companies, four of which were start ups involving Tasty Catering staff – That’s Caring Gift Baskets, T.F. Food Processors, Touhy Capital and a real estate investment company based in Glendale Arizona.

Tom has given presentations on the national level about corporate culture, leadership brand image and corporate sustainability. His presentations have earned the respect of such organizations as the International Special Events Society, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce Executives Association, The Chicago Urban League, Advanced Learning Institute and the DePaul University Coleman Center for Entrepreneurship.

Tom’s efforts have helped Tasty Catering earn multiple business and industry awards. Some of these awards are the Inc. Magazine/Winning Workplaces Top 20 Small Workplaces in 2010, #1 Best Place to Work in Illinois 2008 & 2009, the Achievement in Catering Excellence 2010, Caterer of the Year by Catering Magazine, Crain’s Chicago #7 Best Place to Work, and the Better Business Bureau Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics.

Tom was inducted into the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in 2010.

We recently interviewed Tom and talked about how Tasty Catering made the INC 5000 list 4 times and about the culture he and his team created resulting in Tasty Catering being listed as a top 20 small workplaces in America. Here is a brief excerpt from that interview.

Now Tasty Catering was rated as one of the top 20 best small businesses to work for in the country. In your opinion, why is that? And how do you create that environment that allows your people to thrive?

Tom Walter: Five years ago or six years ago the young people in our company approached us and told us that they can no longer work in our environment, which at the time was a command and control management system. They said, “We’re tired of coming in here and spending the first hour of everyday deciding which mood, which owner was in” and they wanted a clearly stated culture.

So they chose Good to Great by Jim Collins and had everybody in the company, every team read it both in Spanish and English and then each team chose a representative to our Good to Great council. Our Good to Great council decided what our core values are, what our mission and vision statements are, what our big hairy audacious goal was.

We let our staff determine what our culture was going to be and what big goals they wanted to achieve.

And that culture we stick to it like glue. Our culture statement is repeated before every meeting so it’s front of mind all the time, any time three people or more get together in our company.

Every word of that culture statement has to be read and just rotates around the table until the whole culture statement has been read. That is the reason why we’re successful. Our people are engaged and motivated to help Tasty Catering grow and thrive.

It’s a combination of having a strong culture in place that’s active and it’s not just on a shelf some place or in somebody’s cubicle but it’s worked on everyday, and constantly working to find and bring in the best and brightest young people.

Our productivity is incredibly high, our employee engagements scores are incredibly high. The turnover, there is no turnover. We’ve lost one person we cared about in the last 4 years and that’s because she had a glass ceiling, there was nowhere for her to go. She’d reached the highest level that she was capable of.

Veterans Corps sells CBRNE (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, [...]]]>

Bill Wheeler is CEO of Veteran Corp of America. Bill and his team grew Veteran Corps revenue from $2.3 million to more than $19 million dollars in less than three years, a 726% growth, ranking them at #476 on the 2011 INC 5000 list.

Veterans Corps sells CBRNE (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosives) detection and protection equipment as well as IT and administrative products to government clients. The company is well-known for being largely staffed by military veterans and hires combat wounded and disabled veterans.

The Veteran Corps of America was founded on a family legacy that includes six year Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle G. Wheeler (1964-1970) and more than a dozen other decorated military veterans who served the United States in the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marine Corps. We support, and encourage others to support, organizations that value the ongoing service and sacrifice of military veterans and their families.

During my interview with Bill I asked: “What were the biggest challenges that you’ve faced in keeping up with the demand for your products and services.”

He responded:

“You get to a point where when things are going well your obligations and commitments start exceeding your capacity. Essentially, you find yourself with just not enough human bandwidth to meet all of your corporate commitments.

You see that wave off the beach but coming in and it looks like a good one but we had to figure out how to surf it versus being crushed by it. And so, for a while, you just try to make it happen with long hours and really taxing your resources and then the resources of your folks.

The challenge is trying to grow out the infrastructure and hire the right people to not only take care of where you are but where you want to go.  I mean abrupt success, phenomenal success can probably be as deadly to a company surviving as no success, because if you start pledging and trying to do things and don’t deliver pretty soon your reputation is shot and everything else kind of falls after that.

So I asked: “What did you do to actually overcome those challenges?”

Bill answered “Well we try to be pretty agile in the workplace but sort of paying attention to what we think is coming and growing the capacity quickly as things happen. The biggest thing is try to learn from your mistakes so that you don’t make them again.

And a lot of times you’ll discover that other folks have been there before you and so looking at what they did and how they got successful or what they didn’t do and what hurt them really helps a lot.

And that’s where just everything from your company teaming with someone else to just mentoring or networking with folks so that you understand the environment and what’s happening, changes that may be coming down in the market place.  Things like that.

A federal budget or a budget sequestration could affect orders in the future.  So you try to just totally understand the threat environment so that you can operate in some kind of cogent way within that structure.

Diana leads all strategic and business operations at Sesame. She brings an 18-year success track record in marketing innovative technologies [...]]]> Diana Freidman is CEO of Sesame Communications. Diana and her team grew Sesame Communications revenue from $4.1 million to more than $9.2 million dollars in less than three years, a 125% rate!

Diana leads all strategic and business operations at Sesame. She brings an 18-year success track record in marketing innovative technologies and fortifying brand positioning for dental companies in the professionals and consumer markets.

I asked Diana “Sesame Communications grew 170% in three years which is just phenomenal. What was it that enabled the company’s dramatic growth? I mean what was it that changed and accelerated the business?”

She responded:

My approach was – believe it or not – five-fold. The first one is operational excellence. In order to succeed and grow you really need to be good at delivering what it is that you do. And delivery excellence is one part of it but the second part is accountability and management by objective.

That’s the operational side of it. So we brought in a COO to really chart every procedure in the company, determine what is the optimum way of performing every function we needed to perform and then setting those objectives, the managing towards those objectives.

So accountability was there so people really understood what is expected and when people are provided with the tools and the guidance, they want to succeed. And when everyone in the company succeeds, the company succeeds and our members are successful.

So operational efficiency and management by objective was the big thing – delivery excellence was the same thing – we asked every time we touched a member, we asked if that was a best experience we could deliver, and if not we changed things. The third thing was to focus on the customer.

As a tech company, it’s very appealing for us to sit here and focus on the technology because there’s all these wonderful cool things we can do with technology, but at the end of the day it is not about the technology, it’s about the member that is going to use that technology to build some sort of value for their businesses.

And by shifting our thinking from technology to the member, we’re able to really start growing that relationship and with that in dentistry like many other verticals, it’s a relationship driven business. So that focus on the customer has really allowed us to drastically reduce turn.

I mean, our turn is less than nine percent. For a staffed business, that’s unheard of. When we get customers onboard, we keep them because we focus on them. We focus on them and we make every experience with us a positive one. So that focus was certainly important.

The fourth thing that I chose to implement is completely rewrite our platform, our technology. Over the years, like many emerging entrepreneurial businesses, you start with one thing and you keep adding things along the way.

And there comes a point when you look at the spaghetti that you have and you go, How does it all fit, is it strategic – what is this?

And the final one is scalability. Entrepreneurial businesses grow organically, a member here, a member there and as a midcap company we can’t grow at that pace.

But the problem was the business was not developed in order to be scalable, to be able to absorb a hundred members at a time not one at a time.

And so we looked at our business and created a scalability through technology through training through operational procedures, etc.

So now we are set for success so when we are able to acquire new members, we can onboard them very quickly and still provide an exceptional quality service. So I think these five things probably were the most important ones to drive our performance.

TekScape’s engineering and account growth has been tremendous over the last several years.  They have realized at least 100% growth in sales annually and new [...]]]>

David Smith is CEO of Tekscape. TekScape is an IT provider that helps clients with management of remote workforces, integration of mobile devices, data security, and collaboration across multiple locations.

TekScape’s engineering and account growth has been tremendous over the last several years.  They have realized at least 100% growth in sales annually and new client acquisition since inception. Tekscape’s product sales for hardware and software Cisco, HP, Microsoft  and Dell put them in the top-tier for Manhattan resellers over the last 3 years.

Dave and his team grew TekScape revenue from $179,589 to more than $5.8 million dollars in less than three years, a 3,135% growth, ranking them at #72 on the 2011 INC 5000 list.

During my interview with David I asked him “How did  Tekscape grow 3,135% in 3 years, especially given the down economy?”

David answered:

“I would say that the dramatic growth, there’s a lot of things that kind of happened.  I had the right skill set, the timing in the market was right in respect to the industry, in addition to the relationships that I had formed.

Number one, my skill set being a high-level engineer, there’s a sense of confidence in the people that I spoke to and the sales aspect of and how I communicated  solutions to people that gave them the comfortably that we were the right solution and we were the right decision.

So the second part of that, being that the economy, although the economy was extremely bad, it was an opportunity that I could see and I took advantage of it at the time, where I could see that people had to reduce ongoing expenses so they had to reduce headcount and employee headcount.  But they still had the same amount of work done.

The third reason for our rapid growth is relationships. I had to align myself with adjacent companies during this period of time who did similar functions of work that I did, not direct competitors, but similar and worked with them in building an Agency Referral Program so that I could leverage their resources they could leverage my resources to complement each others services and ultimately to sell more”.

I then asked him  “you mentioned an agency referral program how does that work?”

David replied:

“We aligned ourselves with adjacent companies like telecommunication companies and so forth, spoke with them about that helping to leverage their sales staff, provide support for them where they don’t do IT, technical support or hardware sales and in turn we would pay them for on whatever services that they referred to us and vice-versa.

We wouldn’t compete with them and we would use them for their services and they would pay us on their services. So it allowed us to expand our sales network without actually expanding our sales network, incurring the fulltime employee cost, benefits all that sort of thing.

To date, we’ve done over $10 million dollars in 2011 which will be at least 1000% growth over three years ago.  I mean, we will easily be in INC Magazine probably top 100 again. And I still do not have a single person sales person on staff, I have all engineering and back end administration people“.

With cutting-edge technological advances combined with treatment expertise, the highly sophisticated ClearCorrect treatment delivery system and aligner products have years of research and [...]]]> Jarrett Pumphrey  is CEO of Clear Correct. ClearCorrect, Inc. is a company created by dentists to serve the dental and orthodontic industry by providing a superior clear aligner system for patients.

With cutting-edge technological advances combined with treatment expertise, the highly sophisticated ClearCorrect treatment delivery system and aligner products have years of research and clinical experience behind them. This coupled with outstanding marketing and sales support, makes it the premier solution that it is.

ClearCorrect, Inc. takes a modern, needs-based approach for both doctors and patients. This unique orientation gives them the powerful position we hold in the industry.

Jarreat and his team grew Clear Correct’s revenue from 100,000 to more than $8,7,000,000  in less than three years, an amazing 8,625% earning them the #17 spot on this years INC 5000 list.

We recently interviewed Jarret and talked about how he was able to grow Clear Correct, 8,625% in three years, in spite of the tough economy. Here is a brief excerpt from that interview.

Managing a start up is much different than managing a  $9,000,000 a year company.  What educational sources do you look to, to increase your effectiveness and your ability to manage and grow the company?

Jarrett: Well, I have read a lot, I study a lot, read lot of books.  I look at other business leaders to see what they’ve done that’s worked and not worked, and I really just try to learn as much as I can from my own experience here at Clear Correct and from my team members.

We got a lot of experience here so I’m wide open to learning new things and applying what works and learning from those things that haven’t worked. And that’s really, new opportunities kind of always present themselves here and just constantly staying open to what that would that could be in and learning from it.  That’s really what I’ve been doing.

Have you read any books that you could recommend?

Jarrett: I’d have to say, one of my favorite books recently is “Rework” from a guy at 37 signals.  That’s probably one of my favorite books I ever had recently.  Anything You Want, from Derrick Severs.  The books that I tend to really enjoy reading are those that kind of provide the behind of things or the back story to some company that I admired or followed before and to kind of see what those guys went through or the lessons they learned and things they applied here at Clear Correct.  Those are the ones that mean the most to me and how I learned the most from, so anything like that onwards from the Howard Shultz to the great book.  Yeah, it’s just a lot, there’s lot of books out there, lots of things, lots of insights.