Founder in Eleven

About

Founder in Eleven’s goal is to provide experience and quick tips to founders with a specific focus on IT Services.  As the site’s author, my experience comes from 35 years in IT services, 24 of those years as the founder of an IT Services Company called Technology Services Group (TSG).  Over the years, I have been involved in multiple peer groups, boards and other informal discussions with founders of IT services firms and other service firms.  In these discussions, many of the features of both service firms and IT services firms include:

• High demand: services and specifically IT services continues to be in high demand.  As both large and small companies struggle to attract and retain talent, the opportunity for small and nimble firms provide cost-effective and outstanding quality client services will continue to grow.
• Low start-up costs: Typical services firms do not require investments and can be “bootstrapped” where the founders invest their time and effort reducing the need for investors or other funds.  In just about all cases, the founder owns the majority of the company.
• Low risk: Given strong demand and low start-up costs, starting and maintaining and services firm to be profitable “out of the gate” is very feasible.  As opposed to other start-ups that require extensive investment, IT services are not as risky; profitability can be reached quicker for successful firms, and unsuccessful firms can simply disband having their founders/employees finding other jobs in the IT space.

Given the above benefits, many founders are new to the entrepreneurial space.  For myself, I began TSG as an individual contractor for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company in 1996.   My experience came from 9 years at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as well as many different peer group boards I was involved with, including the Young Entrepreneurs Organization (YEO now EO), The Alternative Board (TAB), and the Chicago Technology Roundtable (CTR).  CTR was unique as it was founded by myself and a couple of other founders with a sole focus  of IT services.  This website hopes to serve founders of any services firm with some of the methods of running a company that I found to be successful (and unsuccessful) in quick, easy to read in 11-minute posts. 

I owe a ton of gratitude toward so many people especially the 300+ people that at some point worked for TSG and put up with my “learning on the job”.  Too many names to mention (and I like to keep names off the site), but I can’t thank all of you enough. 

Thanks for reading and feel free to ping me at dave@founderineleven.com with questions or thoughts for other posts.