A six year-old 130 employee B2C client was preparing to seek a Series D round. Existing investors and advisors noted that operational technology costs seemed excessive and there seemed to be numerous customer service and sales up-time problems. The CFO started the hunt for a VP of IT to find and solve the business technology expense and up-time issues. His problem was he didn’t know how to find a qualified person. In a inciteful move, he reached out to those same investors and asked if they could help.
One of them suggested he contact vCIO to ensure there were well defined expectations of the new role and help vet applicants. We set up a 60 minute meeting. In the first 30 minutes we were able to determine that the company did not need a VP level technology person. What the company required was a discovery audit of existing systems, solutions to problems, and implementation of those solutions.
An initial discovery was performed the first week. We were able to narrow the biggest pain points to four areas.
The next two weeks were spent in discovery where we did high-level documentation of existing technologies, how each were used, and who used them. We used this information to determine our first efforts. .
The next three months constituted implementation and training on new systems and process. How did we solve?
We looked at why sales and customer service had to be on-site. Sales and Support were on Windows because the secondary phone systems only had a Windows client. No other Windows-only software was required. Within a week, we started a pilot of five Sales and five Customer Service people using Chromebooks. The pilot was a success using $350 Chromebooks. We negotiated an exit for the secondary phone system and discounts for the move to a new secondary phone system vendor that supported web-based communication. Additionally, we were able to remove the cost of the Windows servers.
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