Collaborative Consulting Confirms Commitment To Financial Services Practice With New Hires

As seen on The Wall Street Journal, week of 22 April 2013

Move Deepens Collaborative Consulting Services In Financial Sector

BURLINGTON, Mass.– Collaborative Consulting today announced it has recruited three executives with extensive experience in the financial services industry. Joining Collaborative’s financial services team will be Gary Jones, who brings a long history of experience in the wealth management business; Sandeep Singh, with deep technical and domain experience in financial services; and Sean Dykhouse, a seasoned business development professional. All three most recently ran the wealth management practice for eBusinessware where they delivered IT service offerings to the asset management industry.

Sean Dykhouse (Photo: Business Wire)

Combined with Collaborative Consulting’s recent acquisition of the SMART Consulting Firm last year, the additions further enhance Collaborative’s Managed Accounts practice. All three hires bring experience and skills that advance Collaborative’s financial services offering.”By adding these three, very talented and experienced individuals, Collaborative will be gaining incomparable expertise and managed accounts consulting capability in the financial services field,” said William Robichaud, President and CEO of Collaborative Consulting.Jones comes with over 25 years of experience in the Managed Solutions industry having spent a significant period of time as a part of the leadership team in Merrill Lynch’s Advisory solutions business. He currently supports the Money Management Institute (MMI) as a private consultant in its effort to bring greater efficiency to the managed solutions industry.

“We are excited to join one of the industry’s strongest IT consulting firms in financial services and look forward to what we can achieve together,” said Jones. “This week’s MMI Annual Convention is the perfect opportunity to introduce our new team,” he added.

Collaborative’s acquisition of SMART Consulting Firm in July 2012 boosted its expertise in business development, enterprise and project management in the capital markets industry. That practice is based in offices at 77 Water Street in Manhattan.

“Collaborative Consulting has made rapid strides in the financial services industry and Mr. Jones, Mr. Singh, and Mr. Dykhouse will be valuable assets in expanding our existing systems architecture and implementation capabilities,” said David Gardner, Senior Vice President of Collaborative Consulting.

The recruiting of these industry experts comes about a year after Collaborative broke new ground with its “onshoring” initiative and the hiring of over 70 new IT specialists, jobs that in the past would have gone offshore to facilities in places like India and China. The Collaborative Domestic Solutions Center (CDSC) in Wausau, Wisconsin recently celebrated its first anniversary focusing on onshore application development and testing and is on track to hire up to 200 IT experts within the next year or two.

The announcement today about the firm’s financial services practice comes only weeks after Collaborative announced a boost to its life sciences capabilities with the acquisition of the Maxiom Group. Maxiom provides pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and healthcare technology consulting services.

The growth at the CDSC has resulted in significant new job creation at Collaborative Consulting’s Burlington, MA headquarters.

Collaborative is a leading management and IT consulting services organization with offices in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas, dedicated to helping clients achieve business advantage through the use of technology. The company delivers a full complement of services across multiple industries with a specific emphasis on financial services and life sciences. Collaborative’s foundational service areas are Information Management, Application Development, Program Management, Software Performance Engineering, and Quality Assurance. They deliver these services through a combination of traditional consulting and the Collaborative Domestic Solution Center providing optimal value to clients. Collaborative was recently awarded a spot in Software Magazine’s Software 500, a ranking of the world’s largest software and service providers. Collaborative is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts.

See the full article on WSJ.com

This article is also available at the following syndicated sources: The Burlington Herald Burlington, Massachusetts The Fort Mill Times Fort Mill, South Carolina Berkshire Hathaway’s BusinessWire New York City SYS-CON Media Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey

Gary Jones Sandeep Singh

Of Cabbages & Clients

While some metaphors are effective because they are memorable, and some are regrettable because they are forgetable, this sales example of becoming and staying focused is one that always brings smiles.

Customer Focus
One of the most common fallacies you can observe in modern business marketing efforts is the inability to overcome personality in order to offer customers what they want. It is true that you can sell more than what people think they want, but it is a terrible mistake to sit in meetings with marketing and promotional leaders and declare “don’t make the widget purple, I always hated purple.” Big wins and big breakthroughs come from surveying and listening to what customers really desire. If market research shows purple widgets are what will make the biggest impact for purchasers, mismanaging the process to offer only orange based on one opinion is too large a risk.

The Buyer’s Perspective
If a woman walks into a grocery store, and she is only looking for cabbage, she is not looking to buy anything else, although other upsell opportunities exist. Trying to sell her a hammer, or a box of pastries, may or may not be effective, but it is not what she walked into the store looking to purchase.

Purple Cabbage
The old adage, “sell the sizzle, not the steak,” has never been more true than today. Imagine the markets of England, where even today, in open air bazaars, sellers loudly hawk their wares,” Cabbages! Get your cabbages here,” they announce. In modern marketing practice, it would make more sense to holler the experience your customers could want. By getting your potential buyers to imagine a tasty sauerkraut, or a crisp cole slaw, even a warm and steaming rice and saucy cabbage roll, will make a far greater impact towards selling the cabbage alone.

Stay Hungry: Someone Is Always Moving the Cheese

While there are probably hundreds if not thousands of business axioms about the constancy of change, it is never more important than to an organization as it is to an individual to be flexible, to be hunting, chasing new opportunity. While this is especially true of sales leaders and the hunter roles in business development, it is certainly a necessary and desirable trait for every worker.

Heraclitus as a Herald for All Time
So many great quotes have reached us from antiquity and yet many more must have been lost through the ages, but one of the all time best is the phrase, “there is nothing permanent except change,” written by Heraclitus. This simple idea conveys more than an observation, it is also a message, almost a call to action. If you sit and wait, rigid and unready, the change that approaches will not only surprise you, it may overturn your whole situation, and it is very unlikely you may make the best of it as an opportunity so much as you will bemoan the very process, which was in itself completely predictable.

Staying Nimble to Get Nibbles
In his landmark 1998 business book, Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, Spencer Johnson put into parable the concepts required of humans from the earliest mammoth hunters to the modern day workforce; that times change, opportunities which were once close by and easy to come by can suddenly become few and far between, and that the best, most flexible, hungry hunters will always be on the lookout for possibilities and payment (“the cheese”) regardless of sea change, allowing them ample ability to win and grow by staying nimble. The book was such a simple approach, and an easy read, that it reached all levels of business and average readers. I once met a 7 year old boy who told me it was his favorite storybook, taught to him by his father, my friend, a cobolt trader.

Staying Hungry
In an earlier post on this blog, I discussed the phenomenon that occurs when we plateau and how that is, in my opinion, a necessary part of the process, both physiologically demonstrable in fitness and exercise practice as well as from a psychological perspective both from a group and an individual level. What is important to remember, in the case of the soon-to-be-missing cheese (whether we like it or not), is the fact that those who keep in practice and are adaptable will always be the most likely to survive intact, and possibly thrive, in an environment that requires that adaptability. This is true on a career path as well as at department, division, and enterprise levels. Taken further, the concept can be applied to corporate and market forces, and even whole countries, regions, and market groups like the European Union or the North American Trade Agreement (even to military coalitions such as NATO now working with formerly diametrically opposed nations). The rule here is that by continuing the search for the next opportunity, we prevent the “fluster and bluster” that occurs when change comes. Winners will face that with a wry smile and a knowing grin, already having options at the ready or preparing quickly.

SOLD in 60 MINUTES

When someone at my current company asked me to share a company-wide “Sales in 60 Minutes” presentation so that each employee had a more business development-oriented mindset, like our department’s sales hunters, I felt that everyone, every single person in our company needs to remember if we disappoint, we get fired. Maybe not that day, but definitely soon. And if that happens often enough, we are through.

Moved to a Sale
The heart of what every employee, regardless of duties or station, need to keep in mind first is that everything we do, we do for our customers. We are in business to solve their problems. They reward us for doing so. It really is that simple. So how we interact with them, and what they take away from every interaction, is what Jan Carlzon refers to as a “moment of truth”. It is up to us to make each of these moments both memorable, positive, and successful.

In a Nutshell
While there are hundreds of mantras out there, or ideologies to what a customer needs in any interaction, it boils down to:

• Reliability – doing something when you say you will.
• Emotion – being optimistic, helpful and under-promising to over-deliver.
• Asking for help – bringing sales staff or customer service as soon as appropriate.
• Continuity – ensuring what people see is the same across materials, websites, email, etc.
• Tenacity – always asking how else we can help and exploring cross-sell opportunities.

Referrals
More money is made through trust and connections than any outbound mail campaign, online ad, or sales call. It is of the utmost import that if, in the circle of your acquaintance, you find a person happy with your services, be particularly careful to ask for his or her recommendation, so the world at large convinced of our good works. One of the greatest lessons I learned in sales training from David Sandler was that the moment when someone is signing the contract or giving you the official go-ahead is the best time to ask for referrals. This turned out to be very, very true in my real estate practice and now, in global banking.

The Best Logo of the 1990s, Today

In every encounter with some corporations, you are greeted with their corporate image through branding and iconography. In the merger between Citicorp and Travelers Group, the opportunity to create a unified design led to one of the most innovative logotypes of record.

What’s in a Name?
While Citicorp was undoubtedly one of the strongest financial services firms to expand and grow through the 1980s and 1990s by customer addition and retention, the organization also added revenue by buying up other successful concerns. In fact, Citicorp’s ability to wheel and deal through an era dominated by merger & acquisition is still a case study in flexible, sustained increase.

Enter Travelers Group
In 1998 Citicorp announced that it would merge with Travelers Group, a well-known insurance and financial concern, with tremendous potential for cross-selling and addtional service offerings at existing locations. With every merger of this size, a great amount of work ensues for marrying the organizations operations at every level, but what may be found most astonishing about this combination continues to this day: the new company branding and logo.

Creating an Icon to Last
The design team that worked diligently to combine the aspects of both Citicorp and Travelers Group had a number of options to begin with: Create a new look and feel, retiring both old icons, share the colors of one but the style of the other, or combine the two and cast an emotive, solid look to the merger, set in “stone” for years to come. Decades, as it turns out. The stroke of genius that is today’s Citi logo includes the original feeling of the Citibank from the 1970s and 1980s as well as the well-known umbrella used in advertising channels by Travelers. This red swash over the ‘t’ was so loved that Travelers even bought it back when they left Citi. The grace and simplicity that is the Citi logo endures.

April Follies: Running With Risk

For the All Fool’s Day holiday, take a moment to look back at the recent and even distant past mishaps that could have been larger leaders. The difference between FriendFeed, MySpace and Facebook is measured in many billions of dollars in revenue.

Coffee for $5 a Cup?
Kraft Foods had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in research showing that the North American market was ready for neighborhood cafes, but they didn’t jump on it because they are used to being in the food business. Instead of selling products for delivery into neighborhood stores and grocers, they shied away from investing in opening corner coffee shops in every American city from coast to coast. The result: Starbucks ate their lunch.

Rand McNally
How on earth did you miss the boat on internet mapping? Because it wasn’t a priority. The firm that used to be the only name in maps of the roads and cities of North America became a sideline to companies with a dotcom in their moniker. They have since retooled and now offer a great amount of their data in GPS applications, as well as in the new version of their website where the user can receive travel packages related to directions searching. Late to the game, but points for making headway after missing the boat on the first wave.

MF Global
If you want to take a firm with a reputation approaching 300 years of solid, profitable business, and completely demolish it, what is the easiest way? Betting on short-term gains in the high risk, high reward casino we call European debt. After an amazing run since the 1700s beginning with the sugar trade, MF Global had positioned itself as a focused, conservative company for financial gains, selling in the world’s market. Somehow this all unraveled in a matter of weeks as the European currency crash and debt crises in Greece, Italy and Spain caused deep discounting. MF Global was still shopping for a buyer to bail its way out of a $6.25 million bet on the situation.

Spread Too Thin

While some corporate choices lead us down a garden path to delightful gains, some journeys can delay growth as an organization. Worse still, some decisions can sink the entire ship by sapping energy and resources from an enterprise’s core competency.

Too Big to Succeed?
In initial drafts of this post, I struggled with the conflict of how much I love using Google Search, Google Maps, and a variety of other Google products with the difficulty I was experiencing with Google Apps, a platform of services including Google Docs services like word processing, spreadsheets, and Google’s GMail for business email service. I found the extremely low per-user fee charged to businesses using Google Apps and free availability of some services to be at odds with professional use when support is required; for a period of time last year, the spreadsheet service was completely unavailable for edits or uploads. However, I was wrong. My thesis was planned to be “Spread Too Thin,” based on the idea that by taking on so many tasks, and by becoming a Jack of All Trades, Google might become the anecdotal Master of None.

I Stand Corrected
While complaining about services which in some cases are completely developed to compete with existing models (maps.google.com is now in many ways better than the MapQuest.com who dominated the market years ago, or launching Google+ to integrate social networking directly into the Google suite and in effect take on Facebook and Twitter), I underestimated the work that appears to go into this kind of Google growth. The leverage of large monopolies is always fraught with peril, because if a firm becomes too large and exerts its own girth in order to control the market, it runs the risk of competing unfairly. But looking at this in-depth, Google appears to target large opportunities, in fact bringing its considerable cannons to bear only on sizable markets, even when they appear unrelated to existing lines of Google business. When a small company is achieving remarkable growth, as in the case of Groupon.com, Google makes all efforts to acquire the firm and acquire the intellectual property, only competing when required.

Redux
I now consider the progress made on new and exciting (sometimes seemingly unrelated) fronts for Google to be not only what is currently called “creative destruction” or constructing “disruptive technology” but better still, the achievement of Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It’s a win because they succeed far more often than they fail.