Not all customers are clients...
A client is a valued partner with a sense of confidence and trust that comes from experiencing high value consulting engagements. , not just someone who paid you some money. There are customers who don't understand value, trust or integrity. It's their loss.
The following organizations I consider among my best clients and trusted friends. I would love to have the opportunity for you to join this distinguished group.
Alex Johnson and Darin Daskarolis lead Facebook's construction program. Both have experience in the construction industry and although they are spending multi-billions of dollars on data centers, they are down to earth gentlemen who understand the value that their project teams bring to the table. It has been a pleasure working with Facebook on their projects in Utah, New Mexico, Iowa and Ohio.
IBM
Pete Pellerzi was one of just a handful of engineers who were responsible for much of IBM's Global Services platform infrastructure. After prospecting at IBM for a couple of years, I was asked by Pete to visit the Southbury, CT offices where he showed me around and told me what he had in mind. We were able to put a team in place to help IGS get into compliance with its customer SLAs in Brazil, North Carolina and Connecticut.
RagingWire Data Centers
When George Macricostas called to ask me to help him build his business in Sacramento I was extremely busy and overseeing a practice with almost 100 staff and having difficulty finding qualified candidates to fill vacancies. Several days of persistent calling resulted in a meeting with George in Sacramento to size up a few locations for their new flagship headquarters. I agreed to an advisory role and with one other individual helping me, we were able to get Ragingwire off to a start. I am pleased to say that after a short two years, they were cashflow positive, and I learned a valuable lesson about value proposition and people. Today Ragingwire has expanded its offerings to the east coast in Ashburn, VA and continues to be a premium data center colocation provider.
General Motors
My relationship with GM started in 1999 when they asked me to write their critical facility standards manual. I agreed to an insanely aggressive schedule and they agreed to fly 10 executives to Minneapolis for a week. The results were phenomenal and resulted in future engagements.
Wellington Management
In 2010, Wellington Management needed help architecting a transformation and migration of their enterprise technology. Because of their trust and openness we were able to uncover the underlying value and addressed the challenges together head on. Subsequently, they sought us out to assist in the implementation of the vision we helped create.
Intelligence Community
When my former partner Bill Mazzetti - a former Army Ranger - introduced me to this crowd in 2004 I was wary but awed by the immensity of the responsibility these people live with every day. They are regular people like you and me, and go to work every day trying to do their best. Their successes are never acknowledged and their failures usually fatal. I am filled with pride at the integrity of these people and the trust they placed in me for their most critical technologies.