BizProfiles

Modern society takes a lot for granted. We expect that when we flip the switch, push the lever, turn the knob, key in the numbers or press the button that the lights will come on, the elevator will open, phones will ring, the room will be heated or cooled, the toilet will flush, and, if we are threatened, alarms or sprinklers will get our attention. Few people stop to think about how these and many other more complex systems work in the buildings that we inhabit. As long as it’s all working, it’s all comfortably out of mind.

Not so for the engineers and designers of Optima Engineering, a full-service electrical, mechanical and plumbing engineering firm, who not only spend their talents designing electrical and mechanical systems, but also work to make sure that they function in the most environmentally friendly and most cost-effective manner.

“We support the built environment industry by designing systems most people never see,” says Keith Pehl, Optima Engineering’s founder, president and chief electrical engineer. “It’s not just about having these systems work; it’s also about designing an environmentally sustainable building. We call them high-performance buildings; designed to use the least amount of water, electricity and natural gas.”

Sustaining Growth

Started in 1992, Optima Engineering has built a reputation as a leader in the sustainable movement. “It’s one of the things that make us stand out from other firms,” says Pehl. The firm has completed over 150 green projects in the past few years. “Sixty to 70 percent of them are LEED certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the recognized standard for measuring building sustainability), but all of them were done with a focus on sustainability,” says Pehl.

“There are a lot of things we do that just make sense that the owner doesn’t necessarily ask to be done—solar thermal water heaters, for instance. Sometimes they argue; mostly they thank us. We go in with the presumption that we are the experts in this. If it doesn’t make sense, we won’t do it,” says Pehl.

Pehl earned his own LEED accreditation in 2004 when LEED methodology was gaining interest around the country. “I pushed my staff to seek accreditation as well. They pursued it first; embraced it later,” chuckles Pehl.

Ronald Almond joined Optima Engineering in 1994 as a partner and continues to serve as vice president and chief mechanical engineer. Together, he and Pehl have built their staff to 35 members. Among them were Brian Thompson and Steven Daley, both of whom arrived in 1997 and have now become stockholders and managing principals in the firm taking on the day-to-day operations.

“Our new positions and focus free up Keith and Ron to spend more time examining new innovations and trends, as well as on business development,” says Daley.

Optima Engineering has a significant presence within the Charlotte skyline. “We’ve worked on most every building in uptown Charlotte at some point or another,” remembers Pehl. The firm has completed over 10,000 projects since it began.

“Seventy percent of our business is in the Carolinas but we are registered in 40 states,” confirms Pehl. Often, out of state work is driven by client expansion. Pehl and Almond attribute their success to the acquisition of talented people, diversification and deliberate growth.

Many well known names comprise the list of buildings, sites and facilities which carry sustainable infrastructure designed by Optima Engineering: Carowinds, Capitol Broadcasting Company, Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, UNC Charlotte, Wells Fargo, NASCAR Plaza, Time Warner Cable, zMAX Dragway, Elevation Church, Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS)—the list is lengthy.

“Projects are generally complex and can take a year or more to complete. Then we offer ongoing support to maintain the sustainability of the building,” says Pehl. “Take Carowinds—it’s a city from our perspective. In the summertime, there are more people there using infrastructure in any given day than the population of most towns in North Carolina. We’ve just finished eight projects out there. They’ve been a client for the past 20 years.”

Historically, most of the firm’s clients were architects—around 80 percent. Now, architects make up about 50 percent of clients due to the impact of the recession on the building industry. The firm has become heavily involved in mission critical work including data centers, hospitals and medical offices. “Mission critical work is typically contracted directly,” explains Almond. “We actually have an architect as a consultant on our team in many instances.”

Becoming Mission Critical

Mission critical work involves buildings which require uninterruptible electric power and cooling systems, largely centered on the functionality of many servers, computers and other technologically advanced equipment.

“My big passion for several years now is called net-zero energy buildings—buildings that consume a certain amount of energy over the course of a year but produce the same amount of energy, as well,” offers Pehl. “It starts with efficient design and ends with solar panels.”

“There are currently only 29 buildings in the United States that perform at net-zero. Optima is currently working on North Carolina’s first such building—Sandy Grove Middle School in Hoke County. This one will actually produce 15 percent more energy than the building consumes,” says Pehl. “To me, that’s where we go as a society.”

Coincidentally, Pehl adds, the military is extremely interested in this technology so they won’t be dependent on the utility companies and vulnerable to security and reliability issues.

“It definitely helps to work with like-minded architects and builders because it’s not just the design but also the methodology,” says Pehl. “To build a clean building you need a ‘bring less on/ throw away less’ mentality.” The aim is for a dust free site which protects duct work and electrical systems.

“You have to realize that there is a lot of cost savings involved,” says Pehl. “We do a lot of education for our clients.” Many efforts, such as recycling, result in side industries. Pehl cites the development of a sheetrock recycling plant which lowers the cost of sheetrock: “You can pay by the pound to throw things in the landfill or get paid to deliver it to another building site.”

Optima Engineering designs dashboards for buildings which monitor and display energy usage by the minute, hour, day and week, etc. “It shows you exactly where your problems and issues are, the number of kilowatt hours being used,” says Pehl.

The firm’s work supports Duke Energy Carolinas’ Envision Charlotte program which is a national model. The kiosk uptown displays the results collectively for all the buildings in uptown. The purpose of the program is to reduce electric usage through awareness of usage. The goal is to see a 20 percent reduction in five years.

“The information affects your behavior,” attests Pehl, who likens the experience to his car, a Toyota Prius, which provides drivers with mileage efficiency information. “I used to be a very lead-footed driver. Now, if I’m not getting 50 miles per gallon, I’m mad. The dashboard has slowed me down. The dashboard does the same thing with a building.”

While there is an upfront cost to having a building dashboard, it’s very insignificant compared with savings, according to Pehl. “If it costs $55 million to build a school and the electrical system is $5 million of that, the dashboard will likely cost about $20,000. If they save five percent of their electrical costs, they have paid for it in six months.”

The work of the 35 Optima Engineering employees is divided about half and half between electrical and mechanical engineering (including plumbing and HVAC—heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Approximately half of the staff is comprised of engineers.

Optima Engineering has taken on an increasing role in consultation and education. Once per month existing and potential clients come to the firm’s office to attend Optima University, a lunch and learn program which teaches about sustainable building and design. Accredited by the American Institute of Architecture, architects can earn needed continuing education credits.

Growing Together

“We’re not the stereotypical geeky, pocket protector-wearing engineers holed up in their offices,” says Daley, with a smile. “There is a strong emphasis here on communications, both written and verbal; we try to bring every client along on sustainability and that requires teaching.”

Both Pehl and Almond thought they were going to become architects. For Pehl, the moment of truth was when he went off to college at North Carolina State University and saw the solar house installed there.

“I’ve always been fascinated by solar energy,” says Pehl who went on to earn his degree in electrical engineering. Pehl practices what he preaches in his personal life. His home in Denver, North Carolina features solar roof panels and a geothermal heat pump which uses wells in the ground. He also installed solar panels on the roof of the LEED certified building that houses the Optima Engineering offices on South Tryon Street in Charlotte. The firm, which owns a portion of the building, has occupied space in it since 2008.

“I’m a little too optimistic sometimes. My partner, Ron, grounds me,” says Pehl. “He wasn’t sure about the panels on the roof but six months after we put them up and were receiving a check every month from Duke Energy, he said “We need to expand this.””

Almond earned an associate degree in architectural technology but couldn’t find a suitable job. “No one was hiring so I went to work as a draftsman for a mechanical engineer. I was soon hooked and went back to school at UNC Charlotte for a degree in mechanical engineering.”

A high school internship in mechanical/electrical/plumbing engineering solidified Thompson’s interest in the field. He graduated from UNC Charlotte with a degree in electrical engineering.

Daley’s interest in engineering stemmed from childhood. “I skipped the fireman and astronaut phases. I always wanted to be an engineer.” Daley completed his degree in mechanical engineering at Ohio University.

Optima Engineering’s leadership has strong ties to the community and participates in numerous programs to give back. Some of these are: the ACE Mentoring Program, West Charlotte high School/Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology; South Mecklenburg High School Engineering Advisory Board; Friendship Trays; and the Make a Wish Foundation.

Pehl credits diversification as key in weathering the economic downturn of 2008-2009. Plus, the firm’s core product was, and still is, mission critical work which was never really impacted by the recession, according to Almond.

“The firm’s focus on sustainable building has allowed us to weather the storm economically better than some others,” echoes Thompson. “I see that sustainability is not going away with rising energy costs. People will always be looking to save money.”

The firm is doing more adaptive reuse projects now and pursuing net-zero usage through mixed use buildings in urban areas situated to share energy. Plus, the sustainability industry has created the need for maintenance over time which increases business.

“We do a lot of sustainable work in the Triangle Region so we’re planning to expand to Raleigh next year,” says Pehl. The firm is also considering Greenville, S. C., and Atlanta, Ga., as additional office sites.

The partners have been diligent in raising a second tier of leadership and developing a succession plan. “You see so many firms where engineers work until they’re in their 70s and 80s and then shut the door,” says Pehl. “That’s not us.”

“I’m very proud of the way our firm has evolved over the years to be a leader in the field,” says Almond. “We grew slowly and did a good job along the way.”

Like the business he’s founded and runs, Mike Bishop’s friendly and unassuming exterior overlays a rock solid core. He’s a quiet man in a white polo shirt, concerned about his friend who recently experienced a family loss, and conversant on topics of the environment and community service. But under the humble, people-focused exterior is a gutsy businessman who has driven significant innovation and growth in the Charlotte region since 1998.

His company, Blue Max Materials, may seem unassuming and “earthy” at first, but a quick survey of the surrounds yields an impressive array of all materials earthen. Although the company got its start selling dirt, rocks and sand, it has morphed to provide materials, ideas and support for everything from environmental projects to the construction of large outdoor living spaces.

The company has innovated technologies and products as well as customer-friendly approaches to keep it growing throughout the economic turmoil that has repeatedly plagued the construction industry.

Bishop founded the company with another partner, Denton Williams, to meet a need they saw in Charlotte in the 1990s. With his background in the aggregate industry, Bishop observed contractors and landscapers pulling into quarries to pick up materials for their jobs. He watched them maneuver their little trailers among the monster trucks and giant construction equipment of major construction companies. It was very time-consuming, inconvenient, and downright dangerous.

Furthermore, gravel, dirt and other supplies were loaded “by the bucketful” at other existing material yards, which meant that they were not measured in any meaningful way. Buyers had no way of knowing whether their particular “bucketful” would have enough material for the job. If not, they would have to return to the supplier for another load.

Williams and Hickman agreed that there must be a better way. “There was a need for a reputable company to come into Charlotte and be able to handle those size customers,” says Bishop. “To get them in and out quickly, do things at an affordable price and with good service.”

By 1997, the partners had purchased a location on Westinghouse Boulevard and stocked it with fill dirt, compost, gravel, and sand. The operation ran out of a small trailer, manned by Bishop alone.

Though their February 1998 opening was humble, it represented a significant shift for the industry. Blue Max Materials boasted something that very few mid-level bulk materials suppliers offered at that time: accurate measurements. From the start, they installed a truck scale to measure each load. The innovation introduced legitimacy to the industry, and enabled buyers to accurately estimate jobs.

Although Bishop describes his company’s growth mainly in terms of meeting customer needs, he admits that the innovation was a good business move for Blue Max Materials too, allowing for accurate inventory controls. The company’s safe environment and convenient locations have been a winning combination that has made Blue Max Materials a popular stop for contractors and landscapers.

Paving the Way

Though success came early and quickly for Blue Max Materials, it was not without challenges, chief among them, says Bishop, lack of staff.

“In the beginning, there were days when a customer would come in and tell me what he wanted, and I’d lock the door, go out and load him up, then run back down, weigh the customer out, and collect the money,” he laughs. “Meanwhile, the phone was ringing and another customer waiting at the door. It didn’t take long to figure out it was more than a one-man shop.”

In an industry that was notorious for hiring inexpensive labor, Bishop decided that they would distinguish themselves with a friendly, helpful staff.

Customers loved it. The building and contracting industry was in boom mode in Charlotte, and Blue Max Materials grew quickly. Within a year and a half, customers were asking for more. In addition to bulk products that they could load in the back of a truck or trailer, they wanted hardscape supplies: pavers, retaining wall materials and natural stone.

By late 1999, Blue Max Materials had teamed up with the well known hardscape supplier, Belgard Hardscapes, a division of Oldcastle Building Products out of Greensboro. Oldcastle provided not only high quality product lines like Belgard Pavers and Keystone Retaining Walls, they also brought aggressive research and development, a strong marketing presence, and training opportunities for customers. In partnership with Oldcastle’s “Belgard Universities,” Blue Max Materials started offering development opportunities for landscapers to learn the business of hardscape.

The partnership changed Blue Max Materials; it brought name brand recognition. Commercial landscapers and installers joined the base of customers, which had been primarily general contractors. Expanded training helped develop new landscapers and gave established landscapers new opportunities to grow their business.

It also opened the door to Blue Max Materials’ partnership with other divisions and products from Oldcastle’s comprehensive building products lines. Blue Max Materials is now recognized as one of the largest independent Belgard Hardscapes dealers in the Southeast.

By the end of 2000, Blue Max Materials had firmly established itself as a one-stop shop for general contractors and landscapers in Charlotte. Then in 2001, everything changed again. The 9/11 terror attacks and aftermath brought about an industry shift that turned out to be a business transition for Blue Max Materials.

“We were just really cultivating some of these contractors, and helping them out, when suddenly people decided to stay home and spend their money at home, as opposed to taking vacations,” explains Bishop. Everybody wanted the comfortable, easy access to materials and ideas that Blue Max Materials offered, and business boomed. Blue Max Materials enjoyed several years of growth, adding new product lines, cultivating both suppliers and customers, and further expanding their location in Indian Trail.

Sustainability

But when the bottom started falling out of the economy at the end of 2008, contractors were among the hardest hit. “We went through some painful times,” admits Bishop. “Contractors were having trouble collecting on projects, and in turn we were having trouble collecting from them.”

Simultaneously, new business from general contractors dropped off and the magnitude of projects fell severely.

Meanwhile, a new, vastly different market started to open up. Homeowners wanted to save cash by doing projects themselves, and they were showing up at Blue Max Materials wanting to buy materials. Bishop explains that homeowner projects tend to be smaller than general contractor jobs, and they don’t come with the built-in repeat business.

“Plus, educating a homeowner is a whole lot different than a contractor coming in and telling us what he needs for a job,” says Bishop. “We enjoyed it, but it did require more people for us to provide that level of guidance. We saw that we had to change the way we were doing business.”

The new environment meant lean times for Blue Max Materials. But the challenges came with gifts as well. Homeowners pay with credit cards and checks instead of invoices, so payment was always prompt and reliable. Blue Max Materials learned new cash flow management practices—running background checks and extended credit checks, tightening up invoicing procedures.

With a changed business model in mind and looking forward to future economic growth, Blue Max Materials made the bold move in 2010 of purchasing 40 acres near the original facility on Westinghouse. Ground was broken in 2010, a brand new 7,000-square-foot storefront and a 15-acre materials lot opened for business in September 2011, and in October 2012 a grand opening unveiled an Outdoor Living Design Center.

At first glance, it’s hard to believe the beautiful facility was built amid one of the toughest economic times to ever hit the industry. A concrete paver drive curves gently uphill to reveal a stunning waterfall cascade, a stone-faced building, and an enticing cobble path leading up to an inviting pavilion.

And, like so much else about the company, the facility is more than just a pretty face. Its user-friendly amenities amply reflect an increasingly important innovation in the construction industry: green building.

The gracefully curving paver drive represents the latest in water-permeable paving surfaces suitable for both residential and commercial applications. Its deceptively quaint appearance belies its toughness and practicality. Hundreds of tons of materials travel across those pretty little pavers on a daily basis, carried in heavy dump trucks and tractor trailers, sometimes as many as a 100 a day, that would punish the toughest pavement.

Under the 15,000 square feet of permeable pavers lays a base made of layers of incrementally larger sized clean gravel. This base combined with the attractive gravel filling in the gaps between pavers simultaneously allow water to flow through the gravel while filtering contaminants out of the water before releasing it into the groundwater. The system is so effective a fire truck can pump water into the parking lot without flooding or run-off.

Bishop says the permeable paver systems may have a slightly higher up-front cost, but on the other hand, they have a 50-year life cycle and can be designed to harvest storm water and reuse it for irrigation. They also provide a cost-effective and sustainable alternative to the bio-retention ponds that developers are otherwise required to install next to new parking lots, allowing property owners to develop this previously unusable acreage. For those who do choose to install a bio-retention pond or a rain garden, Blue Max Materials supplies and blends the products for those as well.

The Blue Max Materials demonstration of green building materials doesn’t stop at the curb. The main building’s gracious look is in part due to the masonry facade that covers the showroom exterior. This beautiful stone is actually a man-made product from Oldcastle called EnduraMax that installs without the need for a skilled mason, as easily as fitting a jigsaw puzzle.

It includes an R-13.5 value insulation foam on the back side and can be used in new installations or to provide a face-lift and better insulation to existing structures. It was recently voted one of the top 50 new products in the green industry.

Inside the building, an attractive lobby and a friendly receptionist greet visitors. Displays of building materials line the aisles, and skilled staff assist customers in making plans and selections. Among the offerings are many additional green materials, including all the supplies necessary to build green roofs.

Advancing Outdoor Living

By far, the most arresting innovation Blue Max Materials has brought to the community is its Outdoor Living Design Center, a beautiful ever-growing installation that attracts visitors from around the region. The center greets visitors with a stunning stone marker and stone steps leading up to a winding pavilion, complete with covered outdoor kitchens, grills, fire pits, lighting, waterfalls, and a peaceful koi pond.

Each element of the installation is accompanied by signage outlining what materials were used and who designed and installed that section, making it a useful tool for homeowners as well as designers and their clients.

The Outdoor Living Design Center is made possible by partnerships with landscape contractors and outdoor appliance and furnishing companies in the region who work with Blue Max Materials to select materials and create designs to fit the overall space. These masterpieces serve as a year-round business source for the landscapers, an idea center for visitors, and a place for contractors to bring clients to demonstrate concepts and choose materials.

Blue Max Materials hosted October’s grand opening and charity event in the space, in partnership with Hands On Charlotte, with chefs from Johnson & Wales and local restaurants, live music and demonstrations. Blue Max Materials also offers the Outdoor Living Design Center space as an event location for community organizations and other interested groups including those they already support like the Eagle Scouts, Alexander Children’s Network, and Thompson Child and Family Focus.

As Blue Max Materials has grown, they have not gone without official notice. For instance, they worked in partnership with the City of Charlotte to create a planting medium based on soils and sediments native to our area, resulting in Garden Max, a good economical product that is now used in city streetscapes. The product attracted the attention of Daniel Stowe Botanical Gardens, which uses Blue Max Materials products throughout their plantings. They also partner with the U.S. National Whitewater Center for many of their materials needs.

Bishop, who serves as managing partner and 50/50 owner with one of the other founders, says that he does not expect massive growth for his industry or company in the next few years. The economy is still too uncertain. But he is cautiously optimistic and continues to look for new and innovative ways to serve his customers.

Expect a conservative approach to growth from Blue Max Materials, as its founder continues to focus on the rock solid core that underlies its heavenly exteriors.

New Year’s resolutions have a spotty history of success. Made in January, they are usually broken and forgotten by spring. But despite repeated failures on a personal level, there is a lot to like about business resolutions. They are another name for plans and when made by self-confident, decisive and resolute people, they often work.

Thanks to Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson and Nicholas Toman, writing in the July-August issue of theHarvard Business Review (HBR), there are a few new ideas that sales training managers might include in their New Year’s strategic mix. Should sales staff stay with the solution sales model that has guided sales training since 1975 or transition to Dixon’s 21st century-based insight selling model? Their article leaves little doubt as to their bias; it’s titled “The End of Solution Sales.”

Solution selling comes to the table with a long and successful track record. It radically changed the role of sales representative from product knowledge expert to a coach who seeks solutions to customer problems. Solution sales reps are trained to ask open-ended questions about what keeps their customers up at night. They learn to locate customer pain, build relationships, relieve angst through a sales solution, and deliver satisfaction.

Dixon finds that organizations where solution selling works—those companies with a clear vision, clear need for change and established demands—are not venues that attract top sales personnel. Organizations that are in flux with emerging needs, appeal to star sales performers.

In a recorded interview on the HBR website, Dixon examines the way we buy automobiles today. It’s a good example of how the sales environment has changed since 1975. Long before customers visit a dealership they have checked Consumer Reports ratings, Internet-based analyses and peer reviews. If unaware of their options by this stage of their research, they have at least narrowed the field. Potential car buyers then go on to obtain price reports that reveal a dealer’s true cost of the car or cars that meet their needs. They learn too what others have paid for similar cars and a suggested target price.

Dixon estimates that with help from the Internet and other resources, 60 percent of all purchase decisions are made before consulting a sales rep. There is precious little pain for the rep to relieve and few obvious problems left to solve.

So what is the role of a successful sales rep? Her job according to Dixon et al.is to focus on unacknowledged and unrecognized needs, the issues that should keep the customer up at night. “Here are the issues that could seriously disruptyour life if left unattended,” says Dixon’s idealized sales star. This is the essence of what he calls insight selling.

Customers don’t necessarily believe these tea leaf readers. They are skeptical and that is exactly what Dixon encourages. Challenger reps, as Dixon calls top sales performers, prove their worth by steering doubters away from disaster and into purchases that prevent pain from ever occurring.

A clever idea, but is it worth including in your 2013 sales training? We asked six Charlotte area sales training experts to weigh in.

“It is the worst article I’ve ever read about sales and relationships,” says Jeffrey Gitomer of Buy Gitomer and Train One. In Gitomer’s view, the author’s advice is “dangerous to sales people and their careers” because “there is nothing in there about value, respect, trust and relationships.”

As far as seeking out skeptical clients goes, Gitomer doesn’t buy that either. “If a client doesn’t like you, they won’t do business with you.”

Then there is the title of the article, “The End of Solution Selling.” Gitomer goes it one better. “Solution selling was dead the moment it was written,” he says. It relies too much on techniques and systems. “The key to selling is harmonizing,” he emphasizes. Techniques create barriers to authenticity and impede harmony.

Tim Conner, an author of 80 books on selling, sides with Gitomer. “The authors present a lot of old school stuff repackaged to look new and relevant,” he says. He finds that many successful people in sales are already following what the authors recommend.

Bob Henricks agrees. He heads up Henricks Corporate Training & Development/Sandler Training, a Charlotte sales training company. He says, “Insight selling sounds new and fresh, but at the end of the day, I’m not sure there is anything new here.”

Neither Conner nor Henricks are ready to write the obituary for an old, reliable workhorse. “Solution selling is not dead,” affirms Conner. “Solution selling still has a place,” agrees Henricks. “People buy for the same reasons they always have—to avoid pain and pursue pleasure.”

Keith Eades, founder and chief executive officer of Sales Performance International, would know if solution selling were dead or dying. He was an associate of Mike Bosworth whose research at Xerox Corporation helped develop the solution selling methodology, and has written The New Solution Selling and co-authored The Solution-Centric Organization. His take on the HBR article is more nuanced than Gitomer or Conner.

“The attributes ascribed to solution selling in the article and associated chart don’t remotely resemble what the documented methodology actually teaches—in some cases they are the antithesis of what is taught.

“Take the issue of the type of organizations where solution selling and insight selling are supposed to work—clear vision and established demands for solution selling and in flux for insight,” continues Eades. “If people or organizations already have clear visions of what they need to solve problems, they wouldn’t need salespeople. The real value solution sellers bring is when they can help someone see a way to solve a problem they didn’t know existed or a problem they didn’t know how to solve.”

“We teach the concept of latent pains, latent problems or latent opportunities,” Eades explains. “This is the world that exists within a buyer’s mind where problems or opportunities are hidden, dormant or inactive.” In these cases, solution selling provides clear vision; it doesn’t need clear vision at the onset.

Pat Heidrich, a Cornelius-based sales trainer, gives insight selling a passing grade on many of its ideas. After all, insight is what led Steve Jobs to revolutionize the computer marketplace with the iPad. And challenging a client has a lot going for it. He is quick to add qualifiers, though.

“Take insight…The problem is how do you transfer insight to others? If it is transferable, I can’t teach it in a one-day seminar,” says Heidrich. Enlightened organizations take the time to encourage and support insight and then develop salespeople who believe they can deliver it.

And delivery matters. “It is okay to challenge a prospect’s beliefs,” continues Heidrich. But it must be done short of insult. “There are techniques for getting away with challenging a client while maintaining rapport. You always keep a client in an okay state,” he says. That’s okay as in I’m okay, You’re okay, the classic 1967 text on transactional analysis by Thomas Harris. It’s a book that Heidrich refers to often.

Henricks thinks challenging clients even when done with rapport is not always a wise strategy. What if the client is a highly dominant personality type? “They don’t like to be challenged,” says Henricks. “Do that and you’re out of the office in 15 minutes.”

Jim Dunn of Dunn Enterprises of the Carolinas/Sandler Training is the one sales trainer that has gone beyond the HBR article. He has read The Challenger Sale, the 2011 book by Dixon, Adamson and Toman; it was a gift from one of the best salespersons he ever met.

His take: “Insight selling is dead on. I believe that 20 percent of salespeople have figured out the market. They are the professional salespersons the authors write about. The other 80 percent are getting bad advice, not reading books on selling and not doing the kinds of things that raise the bar of performance. They will find themselves out of a job.”

And does he believe that we have seen the end of solution selling? “Yes, I think so. The article and book express a different approach. They make a unique, valid and important statement.”

Selling Solutions for 2013

Putting differences aside, we asked all six for their best recommendations for building sales in the New Year. Where do they think the gold is buried in 2013?

• Increase prospecting behavior. Make more cold calls, says Pat Heidrich. “You can easily make 10 to 20 cold calls in an hour and it is an activity that is 100 percent under the control of the salesperson.” Whenever he can, Heidrich attaches social media to the call. He checks Linkedin for a prospective buyer’s profile to see if he and the client have contacts in common. If there is a common link, “I call my friend and ask a favor. Would you call X and see if he would take my call?”

• Ask negative questions. Jim Dunn approaches prospective clients with this observation: “You are probably not experiencing these trends that I’m seeing in other companies.” Surprisingly, clients often open up to that type of inquiry. “For established clients try asking, ‘What would I have to do in 2013 to lose your business?’” The result, says Dunn, is an honest conversation.

• Reinvent yourself. “The number one reason companies fail is that they have lost relevance in the marketplace,” maintains Tim Conner. He encourages CEOs to read books and articles by futurists and then ask how their own marketplace has changed. Conner recommends blending those trends into company policies and procedures.

• Get close to your customers. “Relationships matter,” says Jeffrey Gitomer. “Provide your customers with enough value and they will be loyal to you and refer others your way. If you can get every customer to refer one customer, you can double your business,” says Gitomer. Value comes from telling what Pat Heidrich calls—third party stories. For example, “Here are some of the issues others like yourself have shared with me. I don’t know if you are experiencing the same thing, but I’m hearing a lot of that.”

• Track prospecting. There are 70 cameras trained on every play in the National Football League. Coaches know what their players have done and what might improve player performance. “Sales managers could achieve the same result with prospect tracking software,” says Pat Heidrich. “The best salespeople will react positively,” he maintains. Keith Eades calls them “sales enablement tools” and advocates that they be linked to a company’s customer relationship management program.

• The universal truth. Bob Henricks reiterates, “People buy for the same reasons they always have—to avoid pain and pursue pleasure.”

• Probe, learn, listen, ask questions. Keith Eades says, “If people or organizations already have clear visions of what they need to solve problems, they wouldn’t need salespeople. The real value solution sellers bring is when they can help someone see a way to solve a problem they don’t know existed or a problem they didn’t know how to solve.”

In the not too distant past, data were small and manageable. They (“data” is a plural word like numbers) were easily manipulated with a calculator or pencil and later by a computer. Small data were structured bits of information like tally marks, sales per quarter and percentages. All that information resided comfortably in a database until it was made visual by graphs and pie charts.

Big data differ from older, more familiar and traditional small data in four significant ways.

Volume: Walmart collects enough data in an hour to fill 50,000,000 filing cabinets. That volume exceeds the processing capacity of conventional databases. Without specialized software, storage, processing and querying capacity there is just too much big data to make sense of it all.

Velocity: Thanks to the Internet and mobile phones, all that volume is not just picked up and recorded. It streams into business systems on a river of bits and bytes. To be effective, business response must stream out equally fast.

After a terrorist attack in 2004, Madrid, Spain, completely revamped its emergency system. With big data monitoring points throughout the city, it is able to answer 81 percent of its police, fire and ambulance calls in less than eight minutes. That’s an extremely fast and tight feedback loop for a metropolitan area of over 230 square miles.

Variety: Some big data are tidy and structured like its smaller counterpart. These include a wide variety of test scores, financial data, personal information and the results of our last physical. Most big data are formless, messy, unstructured information like user clicks, GPS readings and social media text messages. If there is meaning here, it is not obvious. If there are trends, they are obscured by so much noise. Those who handle big data are able to extract meaning and importance from what resembles your grand-parent’s cluttered attic.

Veracity: Big, fast and formless data are also uncertain data. Uncertainties arise from incomplete data, entry errors, processing problems, sensor inaccuracies, social media, latency of information, modeling approximations and plain old deception. When big data managers speak of ensuring data quality, they are referring to its inherent lack of veracity.

A New Life Example

In the era of small data, scientists claimed in any discussion that, “Data wins.” Those with the numbers, observations and statistics trumped those that speculate from their cubicles. Today, the technology of information has expanded the old mantra; it is now, “Big Data wins.”

Here’s an example from the popular retail department store, Target that put it and statistician Andrew Pole in The New York Times Magazine and Forbes. Pole’s unique contribution to big data was that he developed a pregnancy predictor algorithm from Target’s purchase tracking card, the Guest ID, demographic data and Target’s baby registry database.

As every parent knows, pregnancy changes everything. What Target knew was that pregnancy changes and solidifies shopping habits. Pregnant women became company-loyal parents.

Pole and his team at Target’s Guest Data and Analytics Services examined all the purchases made by thousands of women who signed up for the company’s baby registry. Probing all the data at their disposal, Pole noticed the products these women purchased early in their pregnancy. The list included unscented lotion, vitamin supplements, hand sanitizers, scent-free soap and washcloths. Further study expanded the list to 25 key items.

Through statistical and other analytic tools, Pole could predict from a woman’s purchases and demographic data if she was pregnant and, within a small window of error, her due date.

He then applied his pregnancy predictor to every regular female shopper in Target’s national database. The result was a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. From its Guest ID data, Target knows exactly how to use coupons and ads to trigger purchases for each of those shoppers.

They then send coupons via mail, email or to the checkout counter for pregnancy- and baby-related items to women with high potential pregnancy scores. The coupons are a reminder that Target has what pregnant women need at each stage of their pregnancy and when they became mothers.

In order to avoid the charge that Target was spying or invading their privacy, the newborn-related coupons were mixed with neutral discounts.

As The New York Times Magazine reported, in 2010 Target’s Mom and Baby sales increased dramatically and Pole was promoted.

How Big is Big?

Like maternity sweatpants, digital data are produced in a variety of sizes—small, medium, large, XL and Big. Knowing the digital data prefixes is an integral part of Informatics 101.

• Kilobytes: This article contains approximately 40 kilobytes of information. A kilobyte is 1,000 bytes and this article is 40 times that figure. A byte represents one character such as a single letter in this sentence.

• Megabytes: A good high resolution digital photograph suitable for framing at a large size would ordinarily contain one megabyte or more of data. That’s one million bytes.

• Gigabytes: Seven minutes of high definition television? That’s a gigabyte or one billion bytes.

• Terabytes: The total Internet traffic for the first quarter of 1993 was a terabyte or one trillion bytes. Today, the amount of Internet data used in one second exceeds four terabytes. In a 2011 report on big data, McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2009, nearly all sectors in the United States economy with 1,000 or more employees had, on average, 200 terabytes of stored data.

• Petabytes: A petabyte or 1,000 terabytes is what Google all by itself processes each hour.

• Exabytes: This year, one exabyte of digital data or one million terabytes is created every 9.6 hours by the vast worldwide array of electronic devices.

• Others: There are further extensions such as zettabytes and yottabytes all useful and mind boggling descriptors quantifying the enormity of big data.

Despite the ease of finding everyday examples of terabytes, petabytes and exabytes, these large datasets are beyond the ability of ordinary software to capture, store, manage and analyze.

McKinsey Global Institute states flatly, “We are generating so much data today that it is physically impossible to store it all.” These facts of digital life today make the old maxim, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” even more difficult to put into practice. New tools, new software and especially new skills are needed to mine, manage and salvage big data.

Big Data in the Classroom

Charlotte’s leader in big data education is Dr. Yi (pronounced Yee) Deng. He is dean and professor of the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Deng and his 60 plus faculty members oversee the education of 1,400 computing and informatics majors and grad students, the next generation of technologists and big data miners.

“Every day we generate nine times as much information as in all of the libraries in the United States combined,” says Deng. “Ninety percent of the world’s data have been generated in the last two years.” That’s information from cell phones, iPads, wireless devices, emails and computers plus old fashioned information in the form of reports, messages, television, radio and books. To further drive home the point, Deng adds that this massive data avalanche doubles every two years.

Charlotte Conference

     In May, Deng and his associates hosted a major big data conference at the Ritz Carlton. Charlotte Informatics 2012: Competing + Winning through Analytics attracted over 300 local and regional business leaders. The conference panelists discussed Informatics as it refers to big data, analytics, visualization and a host of other IT-related terms that describe the collection and analysis of data in new ways to drive strategic business insights.

Deng emphasizes that Informatics is one of the most important areas of study emerging today. Then he adds a wakeup call: “Companies that employ informatics in the strategy and management of their businesses are outgrowing and outperforming their competitors.”

To drive home the point, Deng cites a big data example presented at the conference—one closer to home than Madrid’s emergency response system. “Computers can sift through mountains of bank transactions,” he says, “and detect a few odd or questionable ones.” In the past, officials had to visually examine paper records to uncover fraud or the rare money laundering scheme. Today, for bankers armed with informatics programs and visualization techniques, fraudulent transactions stand out like buying unscented lotion at Target.

Supply, Demand, Skills

UNC Charlotte teaches informatics and computer science at the undergraduate and graduate level, but they are not the Queen City’s only big data educator. Northeastern University in Charlotte offers an MBA in health informatics as a hybrid program. Six MBA students currently study big data online and on the ground, says Assistant Dean of the Graduate Program in Computer Science Bryan Lackaye. Speaking about the program in Boston, Northeastern’s main campus, “We can’t graduate students fast enough for the jobs available,” says Lackaye.

UNC Charlotte’s professional science master’s degree in bioinformatics interdisciplinary program would never be confused with an MBA. It emphasizes biology, chemistry, mathematics, statistics, computing, informatics and engineering.

Given such a rigorous program, it is no wonder these multitalented graduates are in demand. “Eighty companies have come to recruit,” says Deng. “Some are hiring 20 to 30 of our grads. Others need two or three. Demand exceeds supply.” Unfortunately, cuts to UNC Charlotte’s budget are only exacerbating the supply of what has become a scarce and important human resource.

Data Science

Note that there’s one key discipline missing from the UNC Charlotte’s current informatics curriculum—business. Deng and Steve Ott, dean of UNC Charlotte’s Belk College of Business, are taking steps to combine education in business and informatics. A new North Carolina Initiative for Data Science and Analytics (NC-DSA) is in place linking the Belk College and the College of Computing and Informatics. NC-DSA rests on three pillars: new interdisciplinary academic programs in data science, state-of-the-art training in big data for working executives and managers, and a industry-university partnership that leverages academic research for business and industry innovation.

“We are in the process of creating a professional science master’s in data science and business analytics,” explains Ott. “We hope to offer it in Charlotte in a couple of years.” A new interdisciplinary professional degree in health informatics, a partnership among the College of Computing and Informatics, the College of Health and Human Services and the University Graduate School, is already being offered this year. Together these education and training programs will produce over 200 grads each year in coming years.

Writing in the October issue of Harvard Business Review, Tom Davenport, who keynoted the May conference in Charlotte, said that currently there are no university programs offering degrees in data science. He noted that North Carolina State is “busy adding big data exercises and coursework” to its master of science in analytics, reflecting the surging demand of talents in this area.

Data science is the new discipline linking informatics and practical applications. “Its practitioners are a new breed,” writes Davenport. “They are a hybrid data hacker, analyst, communicator and trusted advisor.” They focus on the “I” in IT and the “D” in R&D. All are college educated at the bachelor’s level and beyond and conversant with social media.

Some like Andrew Pole at Target are oriented toward the retail sector where they focus on determining what customers need before they know it themselves. Others are car nuts with an eye toward monitoring engine performance, customer satisfaction, social media and shop statistics to reduce repeat repairs.

In short, data scientists will have what Davenport calls “the sexiest job of the 21st century.” He equates this new profession with the “Wall Street quants” (quantitative analysts), physicists and mathematicians who shunned academia for careers with investment firms in the 1980s and ’90s.

When academically trained data scientists reach the marketplace in three to four years, they will join a self-made corps of practical data wranglers. These “grandparents” include D.J. Patil, who co-authored the Harvard Business Review article with Tom Davenport. He is an executive in residence at Greylock Partners in Silicon Valley.

So is Jake Klamka, a physicist who created Insight Data Science Fellowships, a six-week post-doctoral program based in Palo Alto, California. Klamka’s short course bridges the gap between academia and a career in data science. Add Jonathan Goldman, the data scientist that devised the “people you may know” feature on LinkedIn, a virtual space where thousands of data scientists hang out.

For parents needing guidance on post-high school education for their children, Carol Fodell has some advice. She is program director for global university programs at IBM and spoke at the May informatics conference in Charlotte on the topic. “Tell your kids to major in analytics!” she says, “That’s the bedrock of data science—the software and statistical methods organizations use to understand data and manage risk, performance and decisions.”

Even with new programs, more graduates and increased motivation for studying statistics, math, experimental design and visualization, there will continue to be a gap in the United States between high demand for big data talent and low supply. McKinsey Global Institute estimates the gap to be in the area of 50 to 60 percent in 2018.

Whether they come from do-it-yourself post-doctorate programs or UNC Charlotte, data scientists and their big data spinoff occupations are here to stay. A world without computers, smart phones and dozens of yet-to-be-invented devices may be the only aspect of big data that is unimaginable.

When a major logistics company wanted to provide information on fuel costs, weather and specialized route information to their drivers on the road, they needed a way to deliver that data to hundreds of trucks all over the country.

When AAA Carolinas wanted to learn more about what services their customers used and how to make better customer-focused decisions, they needed to pull data from multiple disparate systems to create actionable customer information.

And when a manufacturing company wanted to understand the profitability of different SKUs, customers and regions, they needed to bring together data from financial accounting systems, inventory management systems, and sales management systems.

All three of these companies turned to Intellinet Corporation, an Atlanta-based management consulting and Microsoft-centric technology services firm. Founded by Frank Bell in 1993 as a boutique technology services company, today Intellinet is a broad-based management consulting and business technology services firm consulting on IT strategies, processes, and the complete stack of Microsoft enterprise-level products.

While the corporate offices are in Atlanta, Intellinet operates regional offices in Charlotte and Durham, and the Carolinas market is playing an important role in the company’s growth strategy.

Carolinas Key to Growth

Bell still serves as Intellinet’s chairman, but Mark Seeley, president and senior partner, now oversees the day-to-day operations. Seeley joined Intellinet in 1996 after working as a senior management and process consultant at Andersen Consulting. In his over 20-year career, he has founded or co-founded five different companies in a variety of industries including software, e-commerce, logistics, and real estate.

Intellinet entered the Charlotte market in 2003, and because of the Carolinas market’s rapid growth, the company decided to further focus business development efforts by brining in Glenn Williams as regional vice president in 2007 to run the Carolinas practice. Prior to joining Intellinet, Williams served as the vice president of sales and co-owner of Infovision, a Charlotte-based Microsoft Business Solutions partner.

Then, about two and a half years ago, Intellinet reorganized to focus on its clients’ business strategy and process needs, linking business strategy to technology solutions.

“That is how our strategy and process practices came into being,” says Seeley. “It has worked out great as our strategy practice is made up of seasoned IT professionals who understand strategy and the implementation disciplines needed to execute that strategy.”

Although Intellinet has over 900 customers in 42 states and eight countries, they remain a Southeast-focused company. In the Carolinas market, Williams focuses on Charlotte and South Carolina, while his sales representative in Chapel Hill handles the Triangle area and works together with him to cover the Triad. Intellinet customers range from Fortune 500 corporations to venture capital-backed start-ups.

“Although we have customers of all sizes, I would say our sweet spot is what Microsoft calls their Corporate Account Managed space, which is typically about 800 to 5,000 employees,” says Williams. “While we cover all industry verticals in the Carolinas, I would say our leading vertical in the region is manufacturing/distribution.”

“Of the just over 5,000 projects we’ve done since our inception, our biggest category by numbers is professional services,” adds Seeley. “Beyond that, it would be manufacturing/supply chain, healthcare, and financial services.”

Intellinet divides their business into two main categories: management consulting and technology services.

Management Consulting

Intellinet’s consulting practice evolved from their belief that a company’s business strategy should drive technology decisions. The firm helps clients define their IT strategy, optimizes business processes with change management and project management techniques, and provides assistance with business solutions that allow companies to better align their technology with their business objectives.

“Our strategy practice will give a CIO a three to five year technology road map,” says Seeley. “What technologies should they use for data analytics? Should they look at the cloud or consider localized or geo-distributed data centers? How are they managing and evolving their core applications or dealing with mobile? How are IT funds allocated and managed across the organization through a PMO or other project management functions? It’s really a services strategy that goes across people, process, and technology.”

Once the IT strategy is defined and a road map is created, Intellinet also can help their clients implement the proposed changes. They help clients with effective project and program management methodologies, addressing organizational and process issues that can result in projects being late, over budget, or never adopted. The firm’s project managers and business process leads average 15 to 20 years of technology and project management experience.

The third pillar of Intellinet’s management consulting practice focuses on helping IT leaders align and implement effective solutions to become a best-in-class IT provider to the business. These solutions address portfolio management, budgeting and planning, organizational effectiveness, and innovation.

While management consulting solutions may include many of the Microsoft products the firm offers through their technology services, Seeley is careful to point out a key difference between the firm’s consulting and technology practices.

“While all of our technology services are centered on Microsoft, our management consulting is at its core technology agnostic,” explains Seeley. “On the strategy side, our clients work with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Siebel, for example. We provide strategy, process, and implementation guidance across all technologies. But on the delivery side, when you get down to implementation and ongoing maintenance and enhancements, that is where we really focus on the Microsoft stack.”

Technology Services

According to Seeley, most of the 640,000 Microsoft partner firms focus only on one or two components of the Microsoft product portfolio. By contrast, Intellinet is one of a much smaller subset of technology services firms that can implement the entire Microsoft product stack, allowing them to solve customer issues in five different technology practice areas—portals and collaboration, business intelligence, application development, cloud and mobility, and infrastructure.

Portals and collaboration solutions connect the people and processes of a company’s business environment to information. One solution might be an intranet, an internal company website that provides employees with access to the information they need to do their jobs. This might include documents for knowledge sharing, collaboration space, customer information, financial information, and much more.

Another solution might be an extranet, which allows the customers of a client company to access secure information about their mutual business relationships. The answer to a business problem might also be an Internet site, allowing the general public access to information the company wants to share.

Closely connected to portals and collaboration is business intelligence—solutions which allow a company to collect data from a variety of disparate systems and convert that data into actionable knowledge. Business intelligence is the back-end applications that collect data from the client company’s operating systems, while portals are the front-end applications that allow employees, customers, or the public access to this information.

Intellinet uses Microsoft tools such as SQL Server to bring the business intelligence data together, and SharePoint to create the portals that allow the information to be shared, analyzed, and delivered as dashboards with actionable knowledge.

“Clients have many disparate systems and none of them talk to each other,” explains Williams. “They might have data in a financial reporting system and other data in a customer relationship database. So what business intelligence allows us to do is to take data from those disparate systems and create a data warehouse so that specific data from each system goes into one place where it can be cleansed, validated and accessed.”

“The two most tightly related parts of our technology practice are portals and business intelligence,” he continues. “While they are two separate practices within Intellinet, about 50 percent of our customers who use us for portal solutions will also use us for business intelligence because they are so tightly integrated.”

The third technology focus, application development, builds custom software applications for clients with specialized needs where off-the-shelf Microsoft software is not appropriate. These projects could involve special configuration of out-of-the-box software or complete custom development projects.

The fourth area is cloud and mobility. Intellinet works with clients interested in evaluating or moving to the cloud to determine a cloud strategy, prepare for moving to the cloud, and performing migrations. Intellinet has a specific cloud practice that is one of the largest in the Southeast focusing on migrating corporations’ email, portals, data, and communications to the cloud via Microsoft Office365, Microsoft InTune, and Microsoft Azure.

For companies looking to take advantage of mobile technologies, Intellinet helps their clients develop strategies for managing, creating and securing mobile applications, as well as developing custom mobile applications that support a variety of different devices from smart phones, to tablets, to the desktop.

The final technology area is the IT infrastructure practice which focuses on core foundational enterprise network infrastructure systems operating in on-premise data centers as well as in the cloud. Intellinet works with these clients to create an infrastructure strategy and associated solutions that maximize availability and minimize vulnerabilities, and provide effective ways to manage network systems.

A People Business

The foundation of any service business is the people. Unlike many of the Big Four consulting firms which often employ droves of very bright, but inexperienced recent graduates, Intellinet focuses on hiring seasoned IT professionals. Their management consulting practice features a number of former CIOs and many associates with previous Big Four experience. The consulting practice averages over 20 years of experience and the average experience across the technology practice is about 16 to 18 years. But even though Intellinet feels their people are among their most important competitive advantages, finding the right people is one of the biggest challenges they face.

“Candidly, one of our biggest challenges is finding technology architects and growing the technology architects within our own ranks to be able to lead our customers along this new paradigm of cloud-based services, mobile development, and all of the new products that are out there,” admits Seeley. “The marketplace has really taken off in the Carolinas and the rest of the Southeast, so we’re hiring around project disciplines, strategy disciplines, and technology disciplines.”

To help attract the best and the brightest, Intellinet has built a culture based around seven core values—people, optimism, balance, wisdom, integrity, service, and humility. These seven values drive the way the company delivers value to their clients and create a great place to work for their associates.

“My goal as chief executive is building a firm where people would say, whether they were here for two, 10, or 20 years, that Intellinet was the best place they ever worked,” says Seeley. “We balance the idea of family life and professional life. We look for continuing professional education opportunities for all of our team. And we truly care for our employees overall health and well-being through a lot of fun family events, quarterly 5K runs, health club memberships, and the like.”

The company has also set up the Intellinet Foundation as a way to further give back a material amount of their profits to the communities they serve. Company employees get a chance to choose the non-profits which Intellinet supports through time and donations throughout each year and during the holidays, Intellinet’s clients select between three charities to which Intellinet will make financial donations on their behalf.

“When Frank Bell founded the company, his vision was not just to build yet another services company, but to have one that truly stood for something,” explains Seeley. “He set out a vision where our word is our bond. We see that delivering on our promises is really our most compelling advantage in the marketplace for a services business that is built around people.”

“On the back of our business cards is our motto, ‘Promises kept,’” concludes Glenn Williams. “I bet a majority of our employees would say that’s one of the main reasons they came to work for Intellinet. Beyond us being a great strategy and technology company, we strive to do what we say, and at the end of the day, that’s what’s most important. After all, we’re in the people business.”

Natalie Tindol planned and studied to be a cruise director, but the love of her family’s business and the car industry changed her mind. Now she spends her time helping car buyers cruise out of her dealership in Ford and Subaru automobiles.

Through all of the challenges of first-time business ownership, 9/11, a flailing car industry, and the downturn of the U.S. economy, she has led Tindol Ford in Gastonia to be one of the most successful dealerships in the Charlotte region and the Southeast.

“We sell about 180 cars, trucks and SUVs per month,” says Tindol, who is the company’s dealer principal and owner. “We’re not the biggest and not the smallest, but we work hard to be the best.”

Tindol Ford is a full-service Ford and Subaru dealership serving the Hickory, Gastonia, Charlotte and Concord areas. The dealership also includes commercial sales, finance and parts departments as well as a body shop.

Family-sized

Many Gastonia area residents will remember Tindol Ford’s early days when Earl Tindol, Natalie’s father, came to town in 1974 and bought the dealership on Franklin Boulevard.

“We were always at the dealership” remembers Tindol.  “There’s lots to do when you’re the dealer’s kid—paint the curb yellow; pick up cigarette butts from the lot. The whole family would go to the dealership after church on Sundays. While Dad would get some paperwork done, Mom would wash the bathrooms and water the plants.” Natalie, then 9 years old, would play with Matchbox cars across the floor with her brother, Chris, when they didn’t have chores.

“By the time I went off to college at UNC Chapel Hill, I was convinced of three things: I was never coming back to Gastonia; never going into the car business; and never living at home,” she laughs.

Tindol completed her degree in recreation administration in 1987 and set out to work in travel and tourism. She found a job with a Florida hotel. The problem was that there was a gap between graduation and the position’s start date, so Tindol decided to come home and work for her father for the summer.

“It was eye opening,” she says. “I saw a different side of the business and liked it.” Tindol decided to give the car business a year, and says she has never looked back since.

Over the next eight years, Tindol worked in every department of the dealership and learned about every position including service advisor, body shop estimator, service cashier, and finance assistant.  “I even learned to change oil and painted the parts department.

In 1995, Tindol was made general manager, a position she would hold until 2001. “Those were really great years. The job was easy and fun because cars were selling; the economy was good and people were happy.”

About the same time Earl Tindol was thinking about retiring, Ford MotorsCompany was suggesting that the dealership build a new facility. The plan became to build the new facility and sell the dealership but, as Natalie pondered what she would do next, she realized that she wanted to stay where she was. In 20012, she bought the dealership from her father.

“I was deep in debt for the first time in my life, and happy about it! I had no idea what I was getting into,” she says, shaking her head.

A sharp turn

The first big game-changer was 9/11. After the terrorist attacks and the establishment of The Patriot Act, the federal government laid out voluminous new regulations designed to red flag and prevent further attacks.

“These made buying a car more difficult for the average person and for the dealership,” says Tindol. “What used to take 30 minutes, now takes three hours.”

At the same time, the auto industry was moving into a downward cycle. There was an influx of Japanese and Korean cars. American manufacturers were losing the race for safety, quality, price, technology and gas mileage.

“They took their eyes off the ball,” says Tindol. “In Ford’s case, diversification in investments distracted from the goal of building the best vehicles.”

By 2007 and 2008, credit issues were looming large, banks were getting tighter, and it was much more difficult to get a loan, including car financing. The national SAARS (seasonally adjusted annual rate of sales) rate dropped from a strong 18 million cars per year in 2000 to a low point in 2008 of 10 million.

Although Ford Motor Company was in serious financial distress, it made the decision not to accept federal TARP (bail-out) funds. This decision called for sacrifice on the part of all the Ford dealerships. Tindol Ford’s staff went from 110 to 70.

“It was an extremely challenging time,” remembers Tindol. “But, I had fabulous employees, a great management team and strength in the Lord. I knew that no matter how bad it got, it was going to be okay. Even if we didn’t sell a lot of cars, we would still find a way to stay in business.”

Although she had faith in Ford’s future, Tindol decided to diversify, so she bought the Lincoln Mercury franchise in 2007 and the Subaru franchise in 2008.

Rally cry

Tindol attributes the major turnaround of Ford  to the vision of Alan Mulally who arrived as president and CEO in 2006 at a time when the corporation was poised to lose $17 billion. With a new strategy, he made the bold decision of adding $23.5 billion in debt, even as profits were going down, to invest in Ford’s product line. Introducing a “One Ford” philosophy, he reset the company’s agenda to making the best cars and trucks and SUVs in the world. He divested the corporation of everything not related to that agenda.

“He did something that Ford had never done and that’s to maintain the same focus and goal for more than 1 year,” says Tindol. “Now, six years later, we have an incredible turnaround. It’s amazing what one man with a plan and a lot of teamwork can do.”

At the end of 2011, Ford reported $128 billion in sales and earned a net profit of $20 billion. The SAARS rate for the month of September 2012 was back up to $14.9 million; the best performance since the 2008-2009 crisis, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.

Through the tough times, Tindol took the time to work with her staff to develop the dealership’s core values of integrity, excellence, growth, family atmosphere, and commitment. She maintains, “When you do the right thing honestly and fairly, it pays off.”

Tindol describes her sales process as low pressure. “We’re professional, friendly and respectful and give to people the best information we can. Then, we let them think about their decision. When people have been treated well and the price is competitive, they will come back to you to buy.”

Tindol reports that staff are up to 83 plus 10 part-time positions. These positions are spread out: 30 in sales and finance; 15 in administration; and 45 in service, parts and body shop. “The service side didn’t generate as much activity when sales were going great,” says Tindol. “People would oftentimes buy a new car instead of repairing an older one. When sales dropped, service and body shop rose tremendously.”

Showing off

“I would put a Ford vehicle up against any other vehicle and stand tall,” says Tindol.

Tindol will have the chance to do just that at the upcoming Charlotte International Auto Show which is owned and operated by the Greater Charlotte Auto Dealers Association.  Tindol is chairman of the show and she also holds the position of Chairman of the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association.

The show, which is made up of 100 dealers representing all manufacturers, comes once a year for four days to the Charlotte area to showcase their new models. The equivalent space of six football fields will be filled with automobiles.  This year the 2012 show is Nov 15-18.

“It’s wonderful for the consumer who can see all the new models under one roof and learn about the quality, technology, safety, gas mileage and reliability of each one,” says Tindol. The show also features a “History of the Automobile,” exhibit with about 40 vintage cars, a section for eco-friendly cars and a kid-friendly area for family fun.

The manufacturers are particularly happy to show off their new hybrids and plug-in cars. “Hybrids (gasoline and electric powered vehicles) are increasing in popularity because they are becoming more affordable and more flexible. People want excellent gas mileage, but they also want the peace of mind of knowing they won’t be stranded half way through a trip.” says Tindol. But things are changing. Ford has partnered with Best Buy to install a plug-in station at the homes of new buyers for those autos with electric only options.

The Charlotte International Auto Show has a dual purpose each year. Not only can consumers see all the makes and models in a non-competitive environment but a huge portion of the proceeds of the event go to charity. Dealerships at the show represent a nine-county area and YMCA’s have a presence in each of these counties, so this year the show has chosen the YMCA to receive all proceeds from the Auto Show Preview Event. In addition, the association will distribute Auto Show proceeds to many other charities.

“Through this association we’ll give $100,000 or more every year to over 30 charities,” says Tindol.

In her role as chairman of the NCADA, Tindol serves as a liaison between dealers and the state association and is an advocate for the dealers. NCADA provides support, education and representation to the dealers in the industry.

Equally important to her is the philanthropic aspect of her job with respect to the community.

“We enjoy being community partners and I think it’s a vital part of what we do. If all businesses contributed a little bit it would make the total community stronger,” she says convincingly.

In addition to her professional affiliations, Tindol is personally involved with numerous community-based organizations and their boards. She also co-leads a Girl Scout troop and teaches Zumba at the local YMCA.

Tindol Ford’s biggest competition comes from the Internet. “You can shop 10 dealers in about two minutes,” says Tindol, “if it’s all about price.” Tindol says she finds that potential car buyers need more than that. “For most people, it’s the second biggest purchase they’ll ever make, next to their house.”

Things to consider include help with credit issues, warranty service, and attention from the dealer. “There’s nothing like sitting in it, touching it, feeling and driving it—most people want that. The majority of customers will not buy a car sight unseen.”

People want safety, great gas mileage and technology, according to Tindol.

These days fewer dealerships are family-owned. That is an important distinction for Tindol: “Being family owned means you can make decisions from the floor and employees are empowered to help people. We don’t have to wait for corporate to tell us what to do.”

Tindol believes that working side by side with her father, the way he guided her through the dealership, has had a big impact on her success. “Although I am confident in my abilities, without his tutelage and the opportunities he afforded me, I wouldn’t be the businesswoman I am today. He is a great person and a great businessman. He taught me how to take the high road.”

Though keenly aware of her responsibility, Tindol credits her employees for the continued success of the dealership. “They are the ones on the front line taking care of folks and representing me and our dealership.  They deserve the accolades for making good things happen.” Tindol smiles.

“I am proud to be part of a company that provides transportation needs, which is such an integral part of what America is.”

“We (car dealers] employ a lot of people across the nation and world. I am proud to be a part of that,” says Tindol.

It was the height of the Gulf War. U.S. Marines were preparing for the ground invasion of Iraqi-controlled Kuwait but they faced a deadly obstacle. The Kuwaiti beach was lined with razor wire and land mines. A hundred yards up, a string of machine guns, backed by artillery, aimed toward the shore. Without intervention, the Marines faced unnecessary casualties.

“We worked 18-hour days for two months,” says Jerry Snyder, “and built a rocket device. Carry it to the edge of the minefield, pull its pin and the rocket flies over the land mines laying down a huge rope of explosives that cuts the wire, shreds the land mines and clears a safe path for the Marines.”

The mission was a success and more significantly to Snyder, no Marines were lost in the assault. “I wanted to make a difference,” he says.

Making a difference is a philosophy that follows Snyder throughout his career. Snyder is founder and president of Advanced Mission Systems, LLC, a company that specializes in technical surveillance and physical, personal, electronic and cyber security. The company, which he began in 2006 on the edge of Charlotte, is the logical outgrowth of a background that seems pulled straight from the latest military thriller.

With a B.S. from Ohio State University in aerospace engineering and a master’s with honors in systems engineering from John Hopkins University, Snyder has more than 25 years’ experience leading the development, delivery and training of systems and advanced technologies for the federal government.

During his 10 years of service as a federal government employee, he led “tiger teams” deploying special equipment to destroy land mines, developed remote sensor systems to assist in reclaiming U.S. training ranges in Panama, and worked with the military in many special operations and clandestine and covert exercises.

In the private sector, Snyder has led the development of special communications for the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command and also the development and delivery of counter-IED (improvised explosive device) systems which made a difference by saving a reported 1,500 U.S. Marine lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Snyder began Advanced Mission Systems (AMS) with a number of colleagues from his years in government service and continues to work with people and partners around the globe that fit his most important criteria. “We always look for the best people with the best experience,” he explains. “We have partners in South Africa; we have suppliers from Israel, Russia and Germany; we do training in the U.K. We use the best in the industry and get them to work as a team.”

Engineering, Product Development and Training Ops

In 2009, Snyder transitioned AMS from a consulting business into an engineering and product development company. The new focus gave Snyder the ability to fill a significant need.

“I had friends in Special Forces who couldn’t get equipment they required because it was too expensive,” Snyder explains. “Wherever I went at Fort Bragg, they asked me if I could build this or make that. A lot of special operations needs are small—they cost a couple of hundred or a few thousand dollars. A billion dollar company isn’t interested in that kind of business, but we can help them.

“Typically, the military buys equipment that’s expensive and often antiquated because it takes four to five years to become an accepted piece of equipment. We do it differently. We use commercial components and build custom equipment from them so we can develop a remote camera or a listening or tracking device from what comes out of a typical cell phone. We can use what’s being developed for other industries, like the medical or multimedia industry and integrate it into products. This allows us to turn around a product line quickly. Our development time is normally less than six months.”

AMS’s first product was a global tracking device which allows real-time tracking of people or assets. Its effectiveness and easy to use design make it a favorite among special operations forces but Snyder says the best part is its competitive price. “There’s not one item we sell that isn’t one-fifth the cost of what the military is currently paying for a comparable device,” he says.

In addition to an array of tracking equipment, AMS also offers a wide range of technical surveillance products and services.

As part of a team, AMS recently won a contract to deliver all the technical video surveillance for the Department of Homeland Security. Under the contract called “Tech Ops,” non-Department of Defense government offices can purchase the latest in technical video surveillance equipment.

Snyder explains that there is a “push and pull” when it comes to product development. “Our clients definitely come to us and ask us to design and build something to fit a specific need, but often, we also find something interesting and tell them how it could be of use to them. It’s a continuous back and forth.”

And while AMS’s early business model focused on building equipment they soon realized something that substantially changed their business. “We were delivering equipment but our customers had third parties training them on it. It was so frustrating to get a call from overseas that our device wasn’t working when training issues were to blame. We realized that equipment without training was useless.”

Training is now more than 50 percent of the AMS business. Training on the equipment is part of that percentage but AMS also offers a variety of operational training.

AMS employees are a large factor in that good relationship. Not surprisingly, about 50 percent of employees are engineers—electrical, software or system engineers—and retired Special Forces and former FBI agent are also on the payroll.

“The company is now how I’ve always wanted it,” Snyder says, “high caliber engineers who can build things like a ‘MacGyver’and senior NCOs with 20 years of operational experience. The NCOs tell the engineers what they need to build and how it should work. The engineers then build it and our operators, the retired Special Forces people, will deliver the equipment and perform the training.”

Security Across the Board

And while the majority of AMS’s current business is with the military or government agencies, they believe that their products easily translate to law enforcement and even commercial and individual use.

“Our equipment and experience has direct application to law enforcement so we want to get the word out to police departments, the DEA and U.S. Marshalls,” says Snyder, “but we want people to know that we also have training and equipment that can protect corporations.

“Companies spend tremendous effort and money on security. They invest in cyber security with firewalls and anti-virus software, and physical security with cameras and door swipes, but a single employee can compromise all of that.

“We were looking into security for a client once and discovered that each afternoon an employee was tweeting from the company parking lot. Mobile tweeting links your tweet with a location so we were able to identify the employee and were able to check out their personal information on Facebook, other websites linked to Facebook, like an online dating page and public records. Within two hours we knew basically everything about them. Given many people use personal information to create passwords, we potentially had access to that company’s computer system—all from a tweet.

“It’s just awareness. Educating your employees on what not to do is as important an investment as other security measures. And AMS can provide training or products to any company whether they are setting up a security system or evaluating the system they have. We can define requirements, recommend procedures or even test the system they already have.

“We have what we call a ‘red team’ that can try to break into your system and identify vulnerabilities. We train on how to protect your device, your local network and your server.”

Safe Travels

The company’s push to develop commercial applications for their products and services gets a boost when they launch their newest product at the beginning of next year. The idea for the app, called the Global Travel Assistant, grew from an emerging and disturbing trend.

Snyder tells how it came about: “We started seeing reports of business executives traveling overseas who were being kidnapped and held for small ransoms. Business is more and more global which means corporate overseas travel is on the increase. Everybody’s jumping on a plane without knowing anything about their destination and without resources to assist them once they get there.

“Many AMS employees have traveled thousands, if not millions, of miles over their careers. We figured that with all of our experience and our technological capabilities, there must be a way we can make this travel safer.

“The Global Travel Assistant is a really innovative app that we’re building for the iPhone or iPad. Its foundational function is tracking people as they travel overseas, but we decided to take the knowledge, experience and resources of the company and add that into the app too.

“It can start with getting you safely from the foreign airport to your hotel. We can vet trustworthy transportation companies. We can put information about your driver on your phone so you can walk out of the airport and pull up a photograph of your driver to check it against who’s waiting for you. We can give you their cell phone number so you have an additional way to confirm their identity. We can even provide a plug-in for your phone to verify fingerprints, if that’s what’s needed.

“After you’re in the car, the app will tell you what the safe routes are from Point A to Point B. Danger zones are highlighted on a map. If you start migrating toward those areas, the app can provide you with directions away or give you emergency numbers for law enforcement or the State Department. We can even arrange a local contact in the area who can be of assistance should you need help.

“Real time information, from local databases, can tell you what’s going on in the area and local alerts warn you what to watch out for. We can handle all the security needs of an overseas traveler, from the most basic to the most comprehensive.

“The Global Travel Assistant can also be of tremendous value to a college student studying or traveling overseas or even tourists on vacation. Our goal is to make it affordable for the individual who wants to buy a subscription for a few weeks or an entire summer while they travel, but also to offer extra features and functionality a corporate traveler might want and need.”

Snyder says AMS will continue to expand its products, training and markets as it moves its headquarters into a new, larger building in the Whitehall area of Charlotte at the end of the year. Its satellite office in Fayetteville, N.C., serves their customers at Fort Bragg and Snyder is looking into the possibility of a satellite office in the southwest to assist the U.S. Border Patrol.

His criteria for additional offices, products and training is simple: “We look for a need,” Snyder says. “We want the things we do to make a difference.”

Carolinas HealthCare System is using big data to yield big insights. By transforming the way it interprets data, it hopes to benefit patients and the community as well as the health care system.

In an initiative to use data such as clinical and financial information to predict local health needs and identify opportunities to improve care, they hope to mine data to identify challenges, define problems, and target solutions, in an effort to become an industry leader in advanced analytics and business intelligence.

To further that initiative, CHS created the Dickson Advanced Analytics Group in January, consolidating nearly 90 employees with specific data expertise into one department. The analytic group’s efforts are currently focused on the CHS’s metro hospitals. Carolinas HealthCare owns, leases or manages 33 hospitals in the Carolinas.

Through this initiative, CHS hopes to meld clinical data with financial information to focus on service lines that can be improved, and to help the health care system to be more assertive in adopting new strategies or adding services, rather than waiting for problems to arise.

Dickson Advanced Analytics (DA2)

“We see advanced analytics as a key strategy to enhance the value of our care,” says Allen Naidoo, Ph.D., vice president of operations at Dickson Advanced Analytics Group, or DA2, the preferred acronym for the CHS’s new big data analysis center. “This type of approach enables Carolinas HealthCare to be more assertive.”

He cites the additional example of the CHS app alerting users to the less busy of the system’s 21 urgent care locations. This simple, timesaving and possibly lifesaving application is but one of DA2’s early results.

“There are a lot of sophisticated algorithms involved in the wait time application,” says Michael Dulin, M.D., medical officer for analytics and outcome research at DA2.

Located in the former AAA Building on East Morehead, DA2 has only been in operation since February 2012. It is the successor organization to the R. Stuart Dickson Institute for Health Studies, an interdisciplinary and collaborative program of applied research and public health studies.

Naidoo, is responsible for the integrity of the massive data collected at DA2. Trained as a biostatistician, Naidoo likes the emphasis on statistics and analytics. Michael Dulin, who has a private practice in family medicine in addition to his work at CHS, insures the accuracy of the center’s clinical data.

Naidoo, age 48, came to CHS in May after a career in health insurance. “I’m beyond the term ‘big data,’” he says. “It is a thing of the past. I like to talk about big insights from data. Companies can have big data, but lack the computing and people power to do something with it.” At DA2, Naidoo and his team of specialists are taking big data to the user level. That often means the physician, nurse or nurse’s aide working at the patient’s bedside.

Best Practice Protocols

One of the first assignments given DA2 was to reduce the hospital readmission rate for elderly patients by 20 percent by the end of 2013. Using data collected from 11 home health agencies and statistical tools that isolate primary and secondary predictors, DA2 discovered the most salient and preventable determinant of readmission.

“The number one predictor was whether patients were adhering to their oral medications,” he says. “Those who had their medications carefully monitored by their home health care worker had the lowest readmission rates. Those on their own with a medication list and little else had the highest.”

Based on these findings, Naidoo and his team developed best practice protocols for all 11 home health agencies. When workers spent more time on oral medication instruction, the result was 200 fewer unnecessary readmissions, a six percent reduction. That Big Insight saved CHS over $2 million and helped improve the quality of life for 200 elderly patients who would prefer to stay at home.

Admittedly, big data is relatively new for CHS. As little as three or four years ago, medical data were handwritten on paper charts. Today, that’s all changed. Transcription software has made electronic medical records more accessible, whichs make diagnosis, treatment and outcome data more accessible and easier to analyze.

DA2 integrates vital clinical data with billing information, data from dozens of federally-mandated registries with prescription data and community data like address and English proficiency with psycho-social data such as patient satisfaction, age and sex. Thanks to Medicare and Social Security, physicians and patients have unique identifying numbers that are also entered into the mix. As Naidoo points out, that’s a lot of big data begging for big insights.

The statistical software DA2 uses to analyze their data was developed at North Carolina State University. Software Analysis Systems or SAS (pronounced sass), located in Cary, N.C., originally developed analytics programs for agriculture research. Today SAS is a major player in the business intelligence market and hospitals are some of its best clients.

The heart of DA2 is the Enterprise Data Warehouse, a concept developed in the late 1980s by IBM. A data warehouse gives DA2 a centralized, consistent and unified view across the entire hospital. To date, DA2 has a 1.5 petabytes of data in their warehouse. From this massive storehouse managers produce white papers, graphs and dashboard reports for physicians and administrators.

But that’s not its real strength. That comes from queries and forecasting—asking it intriguing health and business questions and having it build alternative, futuristic care models.

Polychronic Patients

The hospital’s polychronic patients are a good example of the potential of the CHS data warehouse. Polychronics are typically elderly people with multiple chronic illnesses such as diabetes, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease and asthma. Some are dually enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid—they are elderly, poor and chronically ill. Because of their multiple needs, polychronics consume approximately 80 percent of the hospital’s health care dollars and resources.

“These are patients having a tough time controlling their diseases,” says Dulin. On the plus side, they are a small group, less than 20 percent of all patients. In its data warehouse, DA2 has information on over 60,000 diabetics and 20,000 asthmatics.

By querying the data warehouse, DA2 staff can isolate the polychronics and build model treatment scenarios that lower the cost of their care while at the same time personalizing it. One innovative model mobilizes a corps of human resources and recruits them for the treatment team.

CHS staff coordinates and monitors the work of nurses embedded at the YMCA, home health agencies, hospice workers, families, friends and pharmacies. These medical and non-medical groups support the care plan, provide advance warnings of patient improvement or deterioration, keep the physician manager in the loop and help lower costs. They also provide warm fuzzies like encouragement, hugs and friendship. The medical staff provides all of the treatment oversight and care decisions.

Wait, there’s more…Using the DA2 data warehouse, CHS now sends lists to area physicians of their high risk diabetic patients. The list notes those that smoke, have elevated blood pressure and need their medications refilled.

“As a doctor, I look at the list and have my nurse call the 20 or so patients, ask them to come in for an appointment, get their medications refilled and remind them to quit smoking,” says Dulin. “We are using the DA2 data proactively to help patients stay healthy.”

Limits, Challenges and Concerns

All this emphasis on complication prevention, early action, proactive care and readmission reduction improves quality of life for patients, but not necessarily for the hospital.

“We are penalized to some degree for working on these quality initiatives,” says Dulin. “When you keep people healthy, you keep them out of the system and hurt the hospital’s revenues. We are not recognized for that under our current reimbursement system.”

As DA2 operation officer, Naidoo is troubled by personnel shortages. “It is a challenge to find qualified people to assume the key roles at DA2. Statisticians are not available; epidemiologists, not available; health economists, not available; biostatisticians, not available,” he says.

Academic doctorates are not staying at universities to teach, but Naidoo says, “They are being picked up by industry. With professors in short supply, the United States is not producing enough graduates in math and the computational sciences.”

In a 2011 report, McKinsey Global Institute, the business and economic research arm of McKinsey and Company, also focused on the talent shortages in big data. “The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to analyze big data and make decisions based on their findings.” No wonder DA2 finds so many talent sectors unavailable.

Other issues concern the completeness of the data warehouse. “We aggregate data, but not all systems are involved,” says Naidoo. “There is a ton of data sitting out there untapped.”

In their 2011 report, McKinsey Global Institute raised the issue of data discarded by hospitals. They estimated that the United States health care industry discards 90 percent of all the data they generate. That’s a figure Dulin finds surprising.

“We don’t discard a lot,” counters Dulin. “We hold on to videos and imaging data like MRIs and CT scans. It might be that 90 percent of our data were not actively utilized in some type of report or study, but it’s not discarded.”

The Future of Big Data

In the next few years, big data will help lead the charge on greater transparency and reduced health care waste.

Americans have had access to their credit reports for years—why not their medical records since many are electronic files?

“Physicians are a little scared of that type of transparency, but I think it will be good for us,” says Dulin. In as little as a year to 18 months, Dulin envisions patients logging on to a secure Internet portal to view their most recent lab reports and physician notes. He predicts that transparency will result in greater patient autonomy, fewer data errors, enhanced doctor-patient communication and more shared decision-making.

A study published in September by the Institute of Medicine estimates that the United States health care system wastes $750 billion each year. Thirty cents of every health care dollar goes to unnecessary services, inefficient delivery of care, excessive administrative costs, inflated prices, prevention failures and fraud.

Both Naidoo and Dulin agree, many of these waste categories—especially unnecessary services and inefficient delivery of care—could be reduced if hospitals put their big data to work finding more best practices.