Looking in the Rearview Mirror

Recruiting and retaining top employees. Satisfying state and federal employment regulations. Establishing and maintaining financial controls. Managing information technology. These are among the top challenges CEOs face when launching and growing a business from the cash-starved startup phase to full-fledged contender in the marketplace, according to the Rearview Mirror survey recently conducted by CDW.

CDW asked more than 800 CEOs and senior officers at companies across the country with 100 to 5,000 employees to think back to their early days of starting their businesses and share insights on what worked and what didn’t as they grew. Not surprisingly, the top concern, according to 52 percent of respondents, focused on employee recruiting and retention. The next-biggest problem area for 38 percent of respondents? Managing IT to the company’s advantage.

BizTech’s editor-in-chief Lee Copeland asked five chief executives — John Chuang of Aquent, Al Goldstein of CashNetUSA, Ganpat “Jim” Jain of ICC Enterprises, Lucas Roh of Hostway and Gary Slack of Slack Barshinger — to look in the rearview mirror and share their best and worst IT investments, as well as their advice for leveraging technology to grow their businesses.

The interviews were conclusive. The common thread was simple. There’s not much distinction between the business and the technology that run today’s growing firms. In fact, IT no longer simply “supports” these businesses in the backroom. Ever since the public embraced the Web, customer touch points are as much a part of the IT infrastructure as they are part of marketing, sales, customer service or billing — forever intertwined in every department, every customer experience and every interaction.

Interviews

BizTech Geek-O-Meter

BizTech asked numerous entrepreneurs who participated in our Rearview Mirror survey to rate themselves on a scale from 1 to 5 in terms of their personal technology use. The scale consisted of:

5 Total Geek	4 Power User	3 I do what I have to with the tools my staff provides or recommends	2 Technology and I seldom get along	1 I still use a slide rule

The vast majority of the CEOs interviewed ended up at the high end of the scale. But that’s no surprise. The Rearview Mirror survey showed a strong correlation between business growth — in revenue and number of employees — and an owner’s level of tech savvy.

According to the survey, only one-quarter of executives involved in IT decisions identify themselves as total geeks, compared with 60 percent who consider themselves power users. Still, 73 percent of respondents who dubbed themselves total geeks also reported double-digit average annual growth in their businesses over the past five years. In terms of the number of employees, within five years of launching their businesses, 48 percent of the total geeks reported that they had reached the 100-employee mark, compared with only a third of respondents overall.