This week’s Spotlight Saturday takes us 413 miles up Interstate 5 to the Golden State’s capital city of Sacramento, CA. Amidst the seasonal hustle-and-bustle among the gleaming state government buildings sits Capitol Tech Solutions, an enterprise that provides an array of internet-based products and solutions to assist political candidates in running more efficient and productive campaigns. In its development over the past decade, CTS has overcome numerous challenges that growing small businesses face in their quest for survival and market share in an overcrowded services provider space such as information technology (IT) services. Founder and CEO Bobby Reed – a combined bachelor’s/master’s degree graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s renowned School of Computer Science – originally started CTS as a holdover while scouring the Silicon Valley tech job market for his next career move. While home for the winter to ski Lake Tahoe, Reed was approached by his best friend Steve Davey to provide freelance basic information technology and voter data collection services for the office of a Republican congressman whose election campaign Davey had been managing at the time. With a personal passion for politics and a desire to earn supplemental income while working flexible hours alongside his friend, Reed agreed to resolve any IT and voter data issues that arose during the congressman’s run-up to re-election. Reed’s affable demeanor, reliable service record, and thorough knowledge not only of IT infrastructures but of political procedures earned him a solid reputation in the niche B2B market of the Sacramento political community, a reputation which quickly garnered him follow-on referral business from Davey’s extensive network of political connections. His company’s initial value proposition and customer channel now validated, Reed opened shop in California as the proprietor and sole employee of what he then called Voter Connections LLC, and the seeds of a profitable enterprise were thus planted. Voter Connections’ client roster swelled from 2 in 2006 to 50+ just five years later; consequently, Reed abandoned his Silicon Valley aspirations to run the company as his full-time gig. In addition to advantageous customer segmentation and targeting, a key success factor for Reed was his timely rebranding and repositioning of his company. In 2008 Voter Connections changed its name to Capitol Tech Solutions, in order to emphasize to its current and potential customers that its portfolio of services available to politics-based businesses had expanded beyond the narrow pre-election and voter outreach tasks on which the company had built its initial revenue base. After encountering respectable yet flat revenues in the immediate aftermath of the rebranding, Capital Tech Solutions got its big break in October 2010, when it was contracted to serve as official on-site IT support providers for the three-day California GOP Convention in San Diego. This marquee assignment, which Reed and his team handled with no major glitches, proved both a marketing boon for the company and an opened floodgate to new business across the entire state of California. Company revenues rose more than 40% in 2011, then doubled from their 2011 mark as CTS upped its customer bandwidth considerably during the 2012 election year. With this influx of revenue – and based on specific product demand arising from within their closed-world politics user community – CTS reinvested in expanding its product line, branching out from its nuts-and-bolts business of IT support and data mining to the more lucrative fields of website creation, server and cloud architecture, and mobile apps development. Capitol Tech Solutions is a textbook tale of California’s enduring spirit of entrepreneurial optimism, and Ophanim Group is proud to retain CTS as its primary business partner in providing clients effective customized strategic solutions in the IT and data management sphere. capitoltechsolutions/
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 18:33:45 +0000
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