Our founder Jeff Roberts recently sat down with Bant Breen on The UnCAGED Show to talk about his career as the founder and CEO of Innovation Vista, an IT consultancy providing tech strategy & leadership services to small and midsize organizations on a contract basis. The interview discusses our beginnings and how we’ve built a consulting network of over 300 successful former C-level IT leaders, from which we choose the best fit for each client’s tech vision based on technical expertise and industry experience.
The following is a transcript of their conversation…
Bant Breen
Welcome to UnCAGED, the show that celebrates thought leadership from today’s top business leaders. The program provides a voice to amazing executives from around the globe who are shaping the world of business today and mapping the path to the commerce of tomorrow. Today we’re speaking with Jeff Roberts. Hey, Jeff, how are you?
Jeff Roberts
I’m well; thanks for having me on the show.
Bant Breen
Yeah, it’s great to talk with you, Jeff. I’m excited to learn more about what you’re working on. Jeff is the founder and CEO of innovation Vista, which is a it consultancy, providing sea level tech strategy and leadership services on a contract basis to small and mid sized clients in the US, Canada, UK, and other English speaking markets. I tell you, that world of small and mid sized businesses is interesting and so we’re excited to dig deeper there, Jeff, but before we get there, tell us a little bit about yourself and your career.
Jeff Roberts
Well, thanks again for having me on. So I am let me start with I’m happily married for 27 years. Four kids – two boys, two girls – all grown now, and one granddaughter that we are spoiling. We’re really just loving the grandparent life. So I love what I do. I’ve known since I was 13 years old that I wanted to be in IT. I was one of the lucky few that went into college knowing exactly what I wanted to major. I started my career as a system developer, data modeler, then entered project management and finally IT leadership where I’ve been since 1996. So 27 years now in IT leadership had 5 tenures as CIO of midsize companies. I just decided in 2019 that rather than trying to find CIO chair number six, after my last employer was acquired by a larger competitor, that I would start Innovation Vista.
Bant Breen
That’s awesome. Well, I’m tempted to ask you what was your first computer that you got…
Jeff Roberts
I got a VIC 20 for Christmas when I was 13. Commodore VIC 20 – I’ll never forget that little thing. I moved on to the Commodore 64 and other things after that. That VIC 20 I tore into it and learned everything I could about what I could make it do.
Bant Breen
Yeah, there were those several brands – Commodore was one that really captured the imagination of that generation. I remember and they kept on you know, the Commodore 64 when that came out, super exciting. And now I know why you were passionate about the world of it at a young age. I definitely can share that love with you on that. But tell me a little bit more about Innovation Vista. So you built up this consultancy? You’re working with small and mid sized clients. Tell me about some of the challenges and opportunities that are in that market.
Jeff Roberts
Yes – it’s fun every day; it is different every day. I have kind of a perfect balance of personal projects in consulting myself. I’m helping companies in an advisory capacity helping their board of directors, CIOs, with their IT strategy. I have one Digital Transformation underway, and I’m helping one startup company go from the ground up with their tech. Then I get to collaborate and mentor the consultants that we engage for other Innovation Vista clients which is really fun. We have a spectrum of what we offer. Our clients need sometimes help with Stabilizing their IT after crashes or breaches or negative events. They sometimes need help Optimizing their IT – their systems maybe don’t talk to each other, numbers don’t foot across reports from different sources, things like that. And then we really enjoy projects where we can help them Monetize their IT, which has a lot of different labels for that – Digital Transformation is kind of a buzzword these days. We really we love those projects and really our CIO consultants have a lot of experience finding revenue streams and accelerating revenue and driving top line impacts from technology and data.
Bant Breen
Jeff you started Innovation Vista in a really interesting moment. I mean, being there the year before, during and now after the pandemic. I’m curious to understand the challenges that customers faced in that time and perhaps how it actually impacted the way you and your team worked.
Jeff Roberts
Yeah. It’s a great question. I joke all the time that I had just fantastic entrepreneurial timing, to start a business in 2019. My initial idea was to build something where we also could engage some other consultants and really kind of spread the wingspan, and not just be a freelancer, but really building a practice. And we had some great early traction – like many people that starts with who’s in your Rolodex, who’s worked with you personally in the past or who knows someone. I learned a lot of lessons about branding, marketing and sales and have tremendous respect now for those people. I probably didn’t, earlier in my career, fully understand that there was someone was out there finding revenues for all my employers.
But when COVID hit, like everyone, there was sort of the family focus first, and just the unknown fear factor there. None of us knew which end was up. Right around that weekend from March the 13th. I’ll never forget Friday the 13th kind of has a different meaning for me now – through Monday, the 16th of March. We went from having the work on the plan, scheduling etc., to all of the sudden, clients are calling saying – you know, we need to pause. We’ve talked all weekend long; our people are calling in saying that they’re scared to come into work. This is not the right moment to start an IT strategy engagement and Digital Transformation, right? Yeah. So it took a while to figure out what I could do productively during that time. But, like a lot of things, there’s a silver lining in that cloud. Even, I think, just society-wide.
Of course, people got a lot more comfortable with technology like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, etc. That really opened up a lot of potential for us. Where before, we would think about a “fractional” CIO, where someone would need to be in the same city as the client. Really COVID and the whole remote/virtual transformation that happened in the span of about a month there, opened up all of these other possibilities. So we’re thinking about “virtual” CIO not “fractional” as much. We have consultants now in New York that are supporting clients in California, and consultants in Washington State that are supporting businesses in Florida. So it’s it really is interesting, just that broadening of the horizon, and it really helps because it lets us find the very best fit, even if someone is sitting in New Zealand to support a client in Australia. They’re really the best fit on that expertise basis and industry experience basis. We can make that match and put them in touch with that consultant. So as it ended up, we didn’t have a lot of client work through spring and summer of ’20, but what I was able to do is build my network and meet those consultants.
Bant Breen
It’s interesting, I feel like just from my own experiences, there were certain issues that popped up more. I mean, suddenly because we were working at home, customers were worried about IT issues like “well, I’ve got my staff at home now. How do I deal with the cybersecurity issues?” I mean, did you see those types of things bubble up for you?
Jeff Roberts
Yeah, we did. We did. We actually we gave some free consulting a lot during spring and summer because people were scared. They were also scared to open up, you know, vendor engagement and sign on a new consultant. So we did a lot of networking and a lot of talking, and not a lot of invoicing, for spring and summer. But you know, it was great to build the network, I was able to talk to probably 800 CIOs that are freelance consulting now. And, you know, from that we chose our team, which we’re now at over 340 consultants in our network. So that really gave us that depth. I’ve learned so much from from people on that team and just being a sounding board with each other and in trading ideas. Yeah, COVID created a bunch of new challenges, and cleared the deck of some others. And so when it all came around in 2020, we had just tremendously more horsepower and flexibility to really find matches.
There’s a lot of consulting firms out there that have a bench of people, and when they get a new client, they decide on someone that’s sitting on the bench that’s not serving a client actively. Whereas with our model, we really began to have the best possible option, and when we find a client that needs to help we’re able to choose the perfect person -they’ve done it, they’ve worked in that industry, and they’ve achieved a lot of the things that the company has in mind for their technology.
Bant Breen
I love the area and the customer base that you’re going after. I feel like this again is just my personal bias. So tell me if I’m totally wrong, but the small to midsize market gets shortchanged quite often in things like IT systems because all big players, the brands that we hear about, are not really geared towards how a small and midsize business works. Tell me about your experience with that challenge.
Jeff Roberts
Yes that’s very true. They either are not targeting them at all, or if they do, sometimes those contracts are pretty rigid and pretty one-sided. So you have to know where those knobs and dials are, that they are willing to negotiate around. So it’s tough and a lot of small and midsize companies don’t feel like they have the budget for an experienced CIO, which really creates a market opportunity for our whole model our whole value proposition.
CEOs are so busy, right? They’ve got so much on their mind. I have tremendous respect now for CEOs that I have worked under in the past, being in this chair now. If they came up from a non-technology kind of career path IT is just daunting. I mean, the pace of technology change is faster than it’s ever been, but at the same time it’s accelerating. So it will never be this slow again. And that is a hard thing to really grasp.
But those small and midsize companies that don’t have someone in the CIO chair leading their IT that has seen multiple places, don’t have the experience or understand how to keep up with that fast moving pace. It can be a blind spot basically. And so vendors can take advantage of that. The other thing we see a lot is that just they undershoot the target. There is a widespread belief that if IT is keeping the lights on, and they’re keeping the hackers away, that that’s full success. And so a big part of what we do is education and eye-opening for these executives to see the kind of impact that’s become possible. Just in the last five years things have changed so much – things that maybe were just economically impossible or not feasible, now they are, and there’s so much more affordable. The flexibility of the cloud and what you can do with data and AI and BI – just all of these things, you know – they sort of have a lightbulb moment, honestly that “wow”. So keeping the lights on is really just the start of the story.
Bant Breen
You know, it’s an interesting one, I certainly can see the differences in small to medium sized businesses face and I certainly can see that in the near future, we’re going to have a whole new set of challenges that companies are needing to think about. You know, when you look forward here we are at the tail end and 2022 Can you believe it? We made it to 2022 I’d say a couple years ago I wasn’t sure if we make it here. But here we are at the end of 2022 looking into 2023. Tell me more about what is on the horizon for your company and your customers.
Jeff Roberts
Yeah, it’s exciting, actually, right now. We continue to grow; we’ve had growth every quarter since fall of 2020 really began this growth curve. So we’re excited about that. I really want what we offer to be life-changing for the clients that we work with. I don’t want to sound too hyperbolic with that. But there are a lot of people who go to work every day and spend their time on things that really are beneath human intelligence. I mean, you know, tedious things and things that really, a computer can very easily do. So we help companies navigate that what’s possible – what’s the investment, what’s the return on that investment look like? What makes sense to really maximize what they can get and managing the impact on people, frankly, is the most exciting thing about that.
You know, we see some companies in our target space – we go from about 50 million up to a billion in revenue generally on our client profile – some of those companies get it and they are retaining their people. They see that they’re investing in IT, and people are excited to be at a leading-edge company. There’s a culture of innovation that creates this positive cycle when they come up with new ideas and then, they think of themselves as a place where leading-edge things are happening.
And then there are other companies that don’t get it. Maybe because the CEOs are busy. And the pace of change is so fast. The gap is widening between what made sense five years ago and what they should do today. And at some point, sad to say if they don’t realize it, I do think a lot of these industries, the companies that are innovating and really creating unique capabilities that their competitors can’t match, they’re going to take over. The word “disruption” is thrown around all the time – frankly, too much in my opinion, but there is this possibility of having brand new capability. No one can get pricing power that you can doing it so much more efficiently, that you can really take the knees out from under your competitors.
I see that happening at an increasing level, maybe inflation and what we’re looking at for some economic struggle in 2023 is a catalyst for more of that, where companies that think they’re doing fine but they’re operating still on the old mindset – they wake up one day and realize, oh, my gosh, we should have been doing this for the last five years.
Bant Breen
Yeah, I think you know, the interesting moment is I went through this obviously, you know, I have a technology business. I’d say over the last 10 years, we built it as a technology-driven business as well, in terms of how we use CRM, ERP. All of these types of systems as efficiently as possible. And finding the right systems is hard. Getting it set up is doubly hard and then getting your teams to embrace it from a cultural perspective is the most critical thing, right? That’s kind of the moment where it starts to become “the way you work”.
And then once it starts to really work, you have this moment where you’re just like, “I can’t go back”. Like “what was I thinking before?” It’s crazy, and I’ll come across companies, owning an agency as well, and having customers in that agency. Sometimes I come across companies there that you’re using, obviously a ton of technology but they use it really in a support capacity or “as needed”, really they don’t want it put in the center of their business. And it’s crazy to me to see it. I’m kind of going like “how do you function?” Right, it’s a weird one.
I’m so excited to see how you guys have grown Jeff, it’s been an amazing story. If somebody wanted to learn more about what Innovation Vistais doing right now, where’s the best place to find you?
Jeff Roberts
Probably our website is the best place to go – innovationvista.com. We’re on LinkedIn as well – very active with company posts as well as being personally active there, and on Twitter as well. Certainly we love this stuff. So you know I appreciate your question, because people are sometimes reluctant to reach out because they think the first thing you’re going to do is try to get them to sign an SOW. I mean, we are in business for that, but we’re also happy to just sounding-board and discuss “does this make sense?” or “is anyone trying this kind of thing?” I love those kinds of conversations, and sometimes we can we can connect people with with other services or other technologies, and it has nothing to do with billable hours for us. So yeah, so I would encourage people to reach out if they want to brainstorm or just hear a little bit more on these topics.
Bant Breen
That’s awesome. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for being on UnCAGED today.
We’ve been speaking with Jeff Roberts. He’s the founder and CEO of innovation Vista, an IT consultancy providing C-level tech strategy and leadership services to small and midsized clients, really all over the English-speaking world. They’re working in a variety of areas, Digital Transformations, stepping in as Interim CIOs, the lovely hybrid world we live in now – the Virtual CIOs, and much much more. We’ve been talking about changes in that landscape over the last couple of years and really what’s gonna come to the forefront over the next couple. Jeff, thank you so much for being on UnCAGED today, and we look forward to having you back.
Jeff Roberts
Thank you so much for having me…
Click here to see the full interview on the UNCAGED YouTube channel…
