Happy 9th Birthday, EVOTEK!

As we quickly close in on our first decade in business, I am in complete awe with what we have accomplished.  Numbers, growth, and accolades aside, for me, the standout has been our culture and our people.  When I started EVOTEK my goal was to build a business founded on conscious capitalism where employees felt safe and were incredibly vested in our culture and also the transformation of our customers and now, looking back on 9 years I can confidently say we have truly achieved this objective.

While we have exited the challenges of COVID, we continue to ensure that we are investing in the essential necessities of our people.  With the pressures of inflation and the macroeconomic situation around us, I am proud that we are able to deliver best-in-class health care for all of our employees.  This year, like in years past we have again absorbed 100% of the increase in premiums so that our team is not impacted. 

 

Investment in talent in uncertain times…

We see these uncertain times as the biggest opportunity to serve our customers.  The best way to serve our customers is to continue to attract top talent and you would have seen this when every other week we are welcoming a new team member to the EVOTEK family.  As big IT continues their layoffs and as traditional VARs struggle to create value, EVOTEK is accelerating as we believe that this is an opportunity to pick up amazing talent. Also, we are in a unique situation as I have never taken a dollar of profitably which gives us strength during tough times where our competitors might struggle during these tough economic times.

 

Robust & disruptive business model…

With the macroeconomic headwinds all around us, we only see opportunity with our robust and disruptive business model.  I have spoken previously of the role we play with our customers as IT Strategist, and this couldn’t be more important than in times like these.  As customers look to navigate the uncertainty of post-COVID times, dealing with pressures of inflation and how to manage costs in highly complex enterprise IT environments, a strategist’s perspective is essential.

Our Executive Advisory organization led by Matt Shufeldt has continued to grow from strength to strength led by a group of industry practitioners who all have customer experience ranging from Sony, US Army, Cognizant, PWC, Red Robbin, Sports Authority, and City National Bank to name a few of their past organizations.  This team of nearly 12 professionals is impacting our clients in the most profound way I could have ever imagined.

 

EVOTEK‘s disruptive business model, combining a world-class consultancy with a world-class technology solutions provider is providing true value to our customers.

 

Programs not products…

Our strategist lays an incredible foundation for our customers coming from a point of experience and having done time in the seat. We have learned that when a customer is ready to buy they want a partner who can deliver them programs, not products. 

 

2023 has been a year of continued investment here where we have refined our Strategic Sourcing capabilities that have delivered some amazing outcomes resulting in multi-million dollar impacts for our customers.  A standout for me this year was the $5M in savings we generated for one of our clients by optimizing their cloud spend with a simple but strategic shift from a perpetual license to a cloud deployment.

 

This example is not in isolation, we have had several significant multi-million dollar impacts for our clients taking our ability to solution to our customers’ exact requirements by leveraging our role as a partner.

 

Our ability to deliver programs is further enhanced with some recent hires that have multiple decades of experience in designing integration and logistic offerings to accompany the products that customers buy all with a focus on helping drive speed of deployment and return on investment.

 

Post-COVID return to work…

It has been interesting to observe the economic transition to a post-COVID return to work.  There is no playbook for this, every organization is different and the expectations from employees have changed forever.  For us, we continue to remain a hybrid organization, supporting those who want to return to the office with our newly built HQ in Solana Beach or co-working space in Denver….and we equally support our team who have built a new normal for themselves and their families working remotely in a way that best serves the needs of our customers.

 

As we spoke to our customers the need to help them shape their organizations for the future was too strong to ignore.  Earlier this year we announced the acquisition of AV Tech who have added immediate value to our customers helping to design and deploy modern workspaces, leveraging modern technologies and architectures that are future-ready.

 

Community…

Community and giving back have always been core tenets of EVOTEK.  This year we have been fortunate to welcome the talented J/R Mendoza as our Community Outreach Director whose impact is being felt instantly.  Her background and passion for the community are shaping new directives for the EVOTEK Giving Foundation by partnering and supporting our customers’ chosen charities and also the launch of 3 new scholarships on behalf of Jonathan Oliver, Kathleen Mito, and Kevin Buckley who were all taken too early from us.

 

Power of partners…

Back to our inception, we knew that our vision as a business would only become a reality with good partnerships.  Through the course of our nearly 10 years in business, we have had 3 incredible distributors Arrow Electronics, Climb Channel Solutions, and TD SYNNEX who have delivered immense value to our business and our customers.  To the leaders of Arrow, Climb & TD Synnex, thank you for the additional investment, thank you for the support, and thank you for the partnership in helping EVOTEK serve our customers, our community, and our people…we are excited to be committed for the next 5 years together.

 

To the future…

As we look ahead to the next decade, I am excited to take all our learnings of the past which we use to continue to transform our business to better serve our employees, our customers, and our community.  The learnings for me have been most profound when thinking and re-engaging with many of our past employees.  These individuals, while no longer working at EVOTEK, have shaped the course of our future with all of their input and effort into our business.  To ALL of our past team members, I extend a heartfelt thank you for everything you did for EVOTEK while you were here and for what many of you are doing to positively impact EVOTEK in your new capacities.

 

We have an incredible operational foundation that is led tirelessly by Mari Rodish and her leadership team and EVOTEK is financially strong with reinvested profits that position us to leverage that strength to continue to grow.  I am grateful for everything that our sales operations, service operations, SDMs, HR, Finance, Legal, and Talent Acquisition teams do day in and day out to ensure the success of our wider organization.

 

We will continue to invest in the best talent as the most potent fuel for our growth, after all the future direction of EVOTEK is in the hands of our people.  While our leadership group(Mari Rodish, Matt Shufeldt, Mark Campbell, Jason Myers, Ned Engelke, Mike Mayo, and Daniel Danielli) gently guides, it’s our people who inform us, they are the mouthpiece of our customers that we care so deeply about. At our recent QBR at Mission Bay Resort, we had our people shape the future of where we focus our efforts and our resources to impact our customers most profoundly.

 

EVOTEK is unique, not a VAR, not a consultancy but a unique combination of both that is manically obsessed with our customers and their need for tailored technology programs and solutions that allow them each to achieve their business goals.  As we look to the future, I see the EVOTEK platform continuing to expand in capacity, capability, and geographic reach through talent and strategic acquisition.

 

I feel blessed every day to be part of this incredible team and community. 

 

Thank you team EVOTEK for what you have done to get us here, for what you are doing today, and for what I know we will achieve tomorrow…I am so honored to leading this company and looking forward to our very bright future!!

 

Happy 9th Birthday, EVOTEK