2014 Dynamic Dozen No. 6: JMark Business Solutions Inc.

The evolution of business technology changes daily. Market intelligence giant International Data Corp. estimates in coming years information technology departments will delegate half of their capital budgets to cloud-based services, pushing worldwide IT cloud spending to nearly $100 billion by 2016.    

At Springfield’s JMark Business Solutions Inc., President and CEO Thomas Douglas is pushing his business to evolve at a similar pace – or faster. To do that, he’s laying a good portion of the onus on his 71 employees, creating a framework of empowerment and responsibility along the way.

Much of the past year has been spent looking inward, preparing for the 2014 rollout of a profit-sharing plan and focusing on company culture.

Douglas says JMark has adopted aspects of speaker Stephen Covey’s “Five Choices to Extraordinary Productivity” time management philosophy and begun a shift from top-down management to a peer-to-peer model. Along with these tools comes accountability for exceptional performance that will help JMark set the pace for years to come.

That pace is already quite rapid. Those 71 employees – working from offices in Springfield, Fayetteville, Ark., and Colorado Springs, Colo. – represent a 2011-13 staff increase of 42 percent. The hires have been warranted, as JMark’s revenue growth for the same period was 55 percent, peaking just shy of $10 million in 2013.

Sherry Coker, executive director of the Mid-America Technology Alliance, says companies of today and tomorrow may struggle with moving to a cloud-based environment and managing the growing bring-your-own-device movement.

“Companies are challenged to provide proper access to applications and company data, while providing the proper security and protecting customer privacy,” she says. “The good thing for companies is that these services don’t have to be performed in-house. The challenge comes in having less control over the availability and integrity of the data, while retaining responsibility.”

To help navigate the shifting waters, JMark recently transitioned its chief operating officer position into a chief strategy officer. Douglas says the focus of the job, held by Todd Nielsen, is to plan for potential acquisitions and streamline the day-to-day operations in preparation for future growth, projected at 25 percent in 2014.

“We have to be careful about how quickly we add clients,” Douglas notes. “We could absolutely outgrow our capacity to provide services.”

JMark’s is migrating from a company that fixes computers at desks to a more strategic role, helping clients explore the best uses of technology to gain the competitive edge and propel businesses forward.

“It’s two pieces of the business growing concurrently,” Douglas says. “The traditional and this new consultative role we’re moving into, which all businesses in the future will have to have.

“We call it the ‘Virtual CIO’, and it’s going to be one of the most critical positions in any company, whether you’re a health care facility or a law firm.”[[In-content Ad]]