From Trust to Innovation

A great leader envisions success and recognizes that its path relies on the talents of others. With the right talent and approach, “success” can often exceed the vision.

Nothing fuels this possibility more than a highly-functioning partnership of innovation and achievement between the C-suite and its information technology (IT) team.  Miss that opportunity and you can be sure a competitor that effectively integrates business strategy with technology will ultimately disrupt your vision.

I’ve seen it happen.  In fact, I lived it with a client who asked us to help it become that disruptive start-up. We then helped grow it to a mature competitor (third in the nation in its industry) and finally to a friendly exit (acquired by a major global player in September), because the visionary let us do what we do best: Create.

The journey serves as a lesson for all business leaders on the value of leveraging your IT resources for innovation.

BIRTH OF A PARTNERSHIP
The story begins with a software application I wrote 20 years ago and a straight-shooting entrepreneur named Dennis Howarth.

Dennis had a vision for creating a national network of registered agents, the folks designated to receive “service of process” when a legal action is taken against a company. Businesses often hire registered agents to receive, track and forward the legal, tax and other formal notices that come their way.

While assembling this network, Dennis met a local registered agent provider for whom I had created QCard, an application capable of managing service of process for hundreds of thousands of businesses.  He was intrigued.

He described how he wanted to grow his business through technology, minimizing the manual processes and armies of personnel common to the industry. And he wanted to innovate, delivering unheard of value to the market. I was intrigued.

On the spot I gave Dennis a copy of QCard with the understanding that he would hire us for future enhancements. We sealed the deal with a handshake. The following month National Registered Agents Inc. (NRAI) opened for business.

QCard allowed NRAI to do more with fewer people, helping keep headcount down in the early lean years: Technology as efficiency. But the real goal was to take market share from the industry’s leading brands: Technology as innovation. And we began.

The industry’s first tax calendar: not just a reminder system, it also forwards the right forms, with the blanks filled in. The nation’s first tax filing system for corporations: this one stumped NRAI’s competitors for two years. And more.

BUILT TO GROW
As NRAI grew, the trust Dennis and I shared spread through our collective teams, creating an environment of innovation. Some of the ideas were theirs. Some were ours. All were focused on outperforming the competition.

One day, while mining state databases of corporate information, we recognized an opportunity to identify cherry prospects, those that would be most profitable and had the most to gain from NRAI’s value proposition. By overlaying additional public data and making the right inferences, we uncovered this highly valuable pipeline.

NRAI began closing larger, more profitable deals, faster. Salespeople nearly tripled their incomes. Return on investment was tremendous. Even better, it happened largely below the competition’s radar. Data mining led us to another pot of gold.

Just because companies name a registered agent in their legal documents doesn’t mean they actually engage that agent and pay the associated fee. But the registered agent shoulders significant legal and financial risk nonetheless. Even more so when it doesn’t know about the company it supposedly represents.

It dawned on us this might be a significant population. NRAI wasn’t so sure…until we delivered a list of thousands of such companies that were benefiting without payment. 

NRAI back-billed them. The result? Several million dollars in unanticipated revenue, all falling to NRAI’s bottom line. Now that’s a good day!

LEVERAGE CREATIVITY
Ultimately NRAI represented hundreds of thousands of business units. Together we delivered leading edge corporate compliance and entity management tools, and more, to many of the biggest corporate names in America.

We caused so much disruption that the industry leader decided the best way to win the fight was to buy NRAI.  Once under the hood, it commended our collective team for engaging business people in IT so successfully and building competitive systems at a fraction of their own budget.

You can do the same!

Leverage your IT team’s creativity. Engage them fully in your corporate strategy. Let them utilize everything they can bring to the table. That’s what a trusting partnership between business and IT is all about. And it’s the best way I know to disrupt somebody else’s vision and exceed your own.

View this article online at SmartCEO.