Blog - Jim Knotts

As video and audio conferencing is adopted more and more through tools like Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex, we have to be more cognizant of our behavior and surroundings during meetings.

Microsoft has released a great product with Microsoft Teams. Teams enables, well, teams to collaborate, communicate, and overall improve their working experience. It does this by leveraging a single software client to do many different tasks. There are three key features that, if used correctly, will make your team perform like rockstars.

Cloud technology has become so prevalent nowadays that it's pretty much all you hear about. So much so that the term "cloud" has evolved in and of itself. For the purposes of this conversation, "cloud" refers to Office 365 or Google GSuite. We could talk about other providers all day but, in the end, these are the two small businesses should be looking at.

Identify what you’re good at. Be damn good at it. Sell the shit out of it. But, under no circumstances, compromise your integrity or success. If you do, you may feel successful, but you will have ultimately failed.

Just like intimacy in important in a marriage, it is equally important (just not the same kind) in a business relationship.

It's always good to "eat your own dog food, right? In the tech world, it's a very common term.

As I'm sure that we all know, there are countless numbers of IT consulting organizations. I have worked for/with many of them and I can tell you that the bulk of them are missing a vital component that is holding them back from reaching true success. Below, I will cover the 6 things that these organizations need, but typically do terribly. A PSA tool, or professional services automation tool, will massively increase your IT organization's productivity and profitability. By employing one of these tools, the leadership of these organizations could be significantly more effective.

I recently did some traveling, as I often do, and experienced some things that resonated with a conversation I recently had. As a matter of fact, I have this conversation a lot. Recently, I did a little over a weeks traveling and had the following experiences.

We, in my opinion, live in a weird world. the world today is often consumed by terrible news stories, political distress, financial challenges, and many other negative things. Because of this, it makes it even more important to “be good...”. I put this in quotes because this is what I constantly tell myself day in and day out.

There are many misconceptions of the cloud that people believe to convince themselves that they shouldn’t move to the cloud for different services. I’m going to cover a few here and hopefully this adds some food for thought to your cloud journey!

For the majority of my career, every employer has always told me “Don’t tell them how we do it!” or they say they have some “unique” or “special” or, so help me, a “proprietary” method. “If they know how we do it, then they’ll do it the same or better and we’ll be out of business!” Let me enlighten you to something: it’s bullshit. If you’re worried that someone is going to walk in and, in an instant, take your business then your customer isn’t the problem. You are.

I am asked often enough why a company needs a strategic engagement. Before I answer that question, it’s best to explain what a strategic engagement even is. If you sufficiently understand what it is, you will more easily understand where you and your company can benefit from these engagements. These are consistent whether it is a sales, financial, technology, or any other type of engagement.

We always talk about how we can help clients and what we can do for them. We post on social media. We post about products and services. We post articles about things we like. What we don’t post about is what really matters: Relationships.

Working through a merger or an acquisition can be very exhausting, time consuming, and complicated. There are thousands, probably millions of books about the right way to do an M&A. The reality is that those books offer good things to think about and good guidelines, but they’re not exhaustive. They’ll talk about financial systems and process, benefits, compensation, culture, technology, marketing, sales and many other areas. All of the things are easily quantifiable. The don’t cover one thing: being human. The dictionary defines humanity as “compassionate, sympathetic, or generous behavior or disposition”. You can make the best food, craft the finest clothes, crank out the best code, and put on the most heartfelt play. The common thread in all of those things are the people that perform those tasks and the people that are part of your organization are the most important asset to your company. Business owners think that without clients they wouldn’t need their employees, so clients come first. That’s true to an extent. They should also keep in mind that without your employees, they wouldn’t have their clients. If you don’t do the proper due diligence to ensure that your newly "purchased" employees don’t suffer, you’re just going to end up standing on the deck of a very expensive ship with no crew and, eventually, no passengers. Often times, employees look up to ownership as parental figures and aspire to be as successful in their future. Pre-acquisition leadership is often a beacon of light for younger staffers. It is important to lead by example and to show them how family deserves to be treated. It may make more of an impact that you think. “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients.” - Richard Branson

One facet of our business is technology consulting and I can’t help but be amused by a subtle nuance that I’ve seen every IT consulting company do at one point or another. They constantly refer to themselves as a “partner”. We do this at Corporate Strategy Partners too. Keep reading to see why we're different....

We have had potential clients across the United States ask us "Are you local?" I always grumble to myself when I hear that question because it's the token question many companies ask but don't really understand why they themselves are even asking it. Does it make a company less credible if they are local? Does it make them more credible if they're not?

It feels like, at least in small and mid-sized companies, there is a rush to get an "assistant". Like it's a rite of passage...