John Denise of Advanced Automation Consulting

MidlandsBiz:
What is the big idea behind Advanced Automation Consulting (AAC)?

John Denise:
I’m not so sure that we really had a big idea; it might actually be the oldest idea in the book.  We are passionate about finding out what the customer needs – and delivering it to them at a fair and reasonable price – so that everybody wins at the end of the transaction.

Sometimes, the bigger companies get, the further they get away from this common sense principle.

MidlandsBiz:
It is often hard to describe the business model of a technology company.  What is your 30 second commercial?

John Denise:
We provide Information Technology (IT) consulting and staffing services.  We provide our customers with consultants with the specific skill sets that they need.  We bring all the different skills to the table for the client:  project managers, business analysts, developers, tech writers, and testers to help our customers take a project from start to finish.  Our sweet spot is project management and custom application development provided in partnership with our clients as opposed to an outsourced solution.  We also help our customers purchase and implement off the shelf technology solutions.

MidlandsBiz:
Describe your journey from a company in the USC Incubator to where you are today. 

John Denise:
I had been in the consulting business for many years and had started a similar but smaller version of AAC in the DC market in 1987.  I sold the business in 1995 and relocated back to Columbia where I had earned a business degree at USC.  After starting a company outside of the technology field I went back into IT in 1998 working for a publicly traded IT consulting company.  After that company was purchased by an even larger international company whose business model was offshore outsourcing, I re-launched AAC in 2002.

I met Joel Stevenson from the USC Incubator program at lunch at an economic development conference.  Joel’s background and passion really impressed me.  He had started companies, sold companies, merged companies, and even taken a company public.  Joel believes as I do, that one of the best economic development models is to incubate local companies that have the potential for significant growth and will be grounded in the community.

In this second go around starting up a consulting business, I wanted to take it to the next level and make it scalable.  The incubator helped me stay focused on the big picture and learn how to make this company scalable.  The key is to make the company less about me and more about a great team working towards a common goal.

MidlandsBiz:
Outline your growth in revenue since 2003 and your growth in employees?

John Denise:
We started out with just me and one consultant.  Now, we have over 40 employees; revenue in 2003 was under a million and now has grown six fold.

MidlandsBiz:
I have heard it described by the people over at South Carolina Research Authority (SCRA) that AAC is a great example of how Columbia can put itself on the map in the knowledge-based economy.

John Denise:
The people at SCRA think we are a good story, and I’m flattered. 

One of the goals of everybody involved in economic development is to raise per capita income.  Knowledge economy jobs pay significantly more than the South Carolina average, and our employees are at the high end of the knowledge economy jobs.  The people we hire are typically well-educated and rank amongst the top 5% of earners in the nation.  We hire as many people from the local area as we can, but we recruit nationally for the technical talent we need to continue to grow.  I believe that knowledge-based jobs have the greatest upside for South Carolina.

I have a passion for keeping these high tech jobs here in Columbia.  We constantly try to strive for what’s best for our customers, what is best for our employees, what is best for South Carolina and Columbia.  We firmly believe that’s to have the work done by people who live here and contribute to the local community and economy, not people who come into town to work and then go home.  That’s hard on the people and their families, adds risk for our clients, and doesn’t do anything to grow our economy when all the profits, taxes, and spending occur out of town, out of South Carolina, or even out of the U.S.

A USC economist conservatively estimates that our payroll has had an economic impact on the local economy of over $19 million since we launched.  On top of that, because our employees tend to be active in the community and have a great deal of disposable income, they have a net positive impact on the economy and the region.

MidlandsBiz:
Where do you see Columbia in ten years? 

John Denise:
I want to see Columbia reach its full potential and become a hub for knowledge based companies.  We need to focus on recruiting more technology companies in addition to the traditional manufacturing companies that South Carolina has attracted.  I believe we can be extremely competitive because other areas can’t duplicate some of the amazing things that Columbia has to offer in terms of quality of life: its size, the climate, the location in terms of proximity to the ocean and the mountains.  In business terms we have advantages such as The University of South Carolina, Fort Jackson, and being the state capitol insulates Columbia from some of the economic volatility of other areas.  In addition we benefit from great geography and infrastructure for anybody looking at distribution of goods.

If our area is going to realize its potential I think we should also focus on organic growth and try and incubate companies and industries here in Columbia.  It’s so inexpensive to help companies incubate and companies that start here are more likely to stay here.  Dell and Microsoft weren’t recruited to Austin and Redmond, they were launched there and will almost certainly always be headquartered there. 

With groups like the Incubator and SCRA poised to help companies form and grow, economic development soil conditions have never been better.  Columbia is a great place to raise a family and grow a company.   If we leverage all of our resources and inherent advantages, then we have some tremendous opportunities in emerging technology areas such as fuel cells and nano-technology. 

MidlandsBiz:
What are your long-range goals for AAC?

John Denise:
Ultimately I see us as a regional company with offices throughout the South East. We would like to start by expanding into Greenville, Charleston, and Charlotte because we could initially service clients in those cities from here in Columbia. 

To duplicate our success in these other markets we need to apply our model of utilizing local resources.  The key to that is finding the right people in those who will buy into our vision.  I would much rather grow slowly and in a sustainable manner, then to rush into those markets and add headcount just for the sake of growth. 

MidlandsBiz:
What have been a couple of keys to your early success?

John Denise:

The first is definitely our people.  We hire the best people we can find and do our best to keep them happy and motivated.  The second is our approach.  We put our customer first and are passionate about using technology to help them improve their business.  We approach both relationships as a genuine partnership, which is amazingly rare these days.

To us, it’s just good common sense to listen to the customer and d
eliver what they need.  It’s all about building strong relationships.  That’s what makes us successful, or any business for that matter.

MidlandsBiz:
How and where do you find your IT/management consultants? 

John Denise:
We have professional recruiters on our team whose job is to identify strong candidates from the hundreds of resumes we see on a weekly basis.  A large chunk of our hires come from local referrals, which is the best way to recruit.  Our focus is to hire local talent because if we hire locally, we don’t have to relocate someone and that helps mitigate risk for our clients because not only do we avoid stress of the consultant and their family having to move, but also because our team has so much experience in the local market it’s easier for us to verify someone’s credentials early in the process.

Because we all feel so good about Columbia, we have also had success recruiting on a national scale and relocating people to our area.  Once people realize the quality of life they can have here vs. most anyplace else, they become big fans of Columbia. 
We look for people who love technology, are passionate about what they do, and who have good people skills.  We try to avoid the super techies who are really strong technically but don’t grasp the bigger picture.  They may be able to create some cool applications, but cool technology alone doesn’t pay the client’s bills.  Our consultants usually have industry experience, technical skills, and they have the ability to speak in business terms as well as tech! 

MidlandsBiz:
Who are your typical customers?  How many years have they been in business?

John Denise:
Although we do have some smaller clients who look to us to help them establish an internal IT department, the majority of our customers tend to be more established businesses with an existing IT department.

These larger companies typically know what works and what doesn’t work and have IT battle scars to prove it.  They have good long-term vision and they appreciate our partnership approach to help them get there.

MidlandsBiz:
There have been some IT train wrecks out there at some pretty major companies.

John Denise:
Absolutely.  IT departments have a sometimes well deserved, negative image by many business people.  There are innumerable IT implementation nightmare stories out there.  Something starts out as a great concept, the next thing you know the scope creeps, the project is late and over budget, and the business is frustrated because IT hasn’t delivered, but keeps reporting that the project is 95% complete.

Implementing sound project management practices is the key to avoiding the majority of the failures. The problems begin long before there are any symptoms and it usually starts with a lack of communication beginning with a clearly defined scope.  The business side generally assumes that what they want done is very clear and shouldn’t be that difficult.  IT generally gets forced to give a prematurely precise estimate of the time and cost involved to develop the system without clearly documenting the scope of the system or building in a change budget to allow for the additional functionality the business will request later, that they were sure was always supposed to be part of the system.  The further down this track they go before realizing there is a disconnect, the closer they are to the train wreck.  

MidlandsBiz:
You said you also help customers purchase and implement IT solutions.  Does that include high-end Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as SAP, Oracle?

John Denise:
Yes.  We apply the same partnership approach and project management expertise in that area.  The principles should be practiced on all projects but the stakes are even higher when implementing a business critical application like an ERP system.  Decisions to implement something as major as an ERP system can make or break careers.

If you are a CIO at a major company, this is most likely a once in a career event because hopefully you are going to implement a system that you will use for 10 or 20 years with only minor upgrades and modifications.  So to me it makes sense to have impartial experts acting as your advocate.

We help clients select an ERP system, help them write the specs, help them bid the project out, select  a vendor, and help manage the process through to successful implementation.  We actually spawned a separate business that focuses specifically on ERP implementations for customers in the Utility sector.

MidlandsBiz:
What are some key attributes of an entrepreneur?  Is it really something that can be taught?

John Denise:
I don’t think the core make-up of an entrepreneur can be taught, but I do think that entrepreneurs can be taught to be smarter about their businesses.  The person with the idea is not always the best business person in the world.

An entrepreneur’s strengths and weaknesses might not lend themselves to the entire life cycle of a business.  The education that they can get can help them understand what they are good at and where they need help. 

MidlandsBiz:
What entrepreneurs do you most admire?  Why?

John Denise:
Truett Cathy, Bill Gates, and locally people like Don Tomlin and Weldon Wyatt are great stories.  What these people have in common is that they are not necessarily inventing something new, but rather finding ways of doing things better then their competitors.

The other common trait I admire in them is that they are good people first and strong business leaders second.  Truett Cathy for example takes people up through the company from fry cook to Chick-Fil-A owner.  He also uses huge amounts of the company’s profits to help children.

MidlandsBiz:
If you weren’t running a start-up company or any business for that matter, what would you most like to do in the world?

John Denise:
The truth of the matter is that I have to be involved in the start up phase of something – that’s just something that I have realized about myself.  Some have called me a serial entrepreneur, though I’m not too enamored with that description because to me it sounds like it’s just a small step away from serial killer.

I’d like to go on a crusade to try and change our approach to children’s health in this country, in particular physical fitness and child obesity.  I have heard medical researchers say that obesity in the U.S. is an epidemic and that despite advances in medical technology that our children’s generation might be the first to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.  Parents definitely bear the ultimate responsibility but our schools are making the problem worse.

When I was a kid we had PE everyday, we had a ½ hour of recess, and when we got home we went out and ran around the neighborhood until our parents forced us to come inside. Today we have too many kids sitting on the couch, drinking soda, eating potato chips and playing video games. 

Schools today are so focused on test scores that they have completely ignored PE.  My kids in elementary school have PE one day a week, and 15 minutes of recess time per day because they want more time to teach and prepare the kids to take the standardized tests.  I think that’s ridiculous.  I don’t have any research to back this up, but I would be willing to bet a bunch of money that if you gave the kids more time to exercise and burn off some energy, that the test scores would  improve with less teaching time per day.  Kids would be more prepared to concentrate and probably re
tain more information.  And at the same time we would be doing a great deal to address the obesity epidemic.

This is something I think we should be able to address locally, soon and with little expense.  Then we could implement it state wide and be a model that other states could follow.
 
MidlandsBiz:
What business books would you recommend?

John Denise:
Good to Great is a classic.  I would also recommend anything by Truett Cathy.  It’s Easier to Succeed than to Fail is a great place to start, but all of his books are great and quick reads.

The Bible has some decent advice in it as well.

MidlandsBiz:
What accomplishment are you most proud of at AAC?

John Denise:
Unquestionably the thing that I am most proud of is our team. 

We have fantastic people; and the great thing is we need more of them!