Dynamic Edge

In this 5 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 25MB), Bruce McCully, CEO of Dynamic Edge, states his desire to grow staff by 43% and double the number of customers in the next year. He expects that two modifications to Dynamic Edge's business model will help enable that growth. First, in the past year, Dynamic Edge has moved from having all employees report to a central location to having them start from home and going directly to clients. This speeds responsiveness to client needs and cuts down on required office overhead.

Second, planned growth from 35 to 50 employees will mean that Dynamic Edge's current flat reporting structure with most management decisions coming to Bruce will no longer suffice. Bruce is going to add teams with team leaders who will report to him. We expect to catch up with Bruce sometime in the future to hear what comes next on his path to growth.

In this nearly 6 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 28MB), Bruce McCully describes how he formally started Dynamic Edge as Junior at University of Michigan in the late 1990's. He was effectively the family member that a number of business associates were using to fulfill their IT needs, in other words, one of the resources Dynamic Edge tries to substitute for now. He had a summer internship all set with IBM but was convinced that he could make a business of helping out small companies.

He wound up spending the summer cold calling and roller blading. Then, in the midst of the dot-com downturn, he decided to conduct a two year experiment to see if he could actually get the business up and running. While success might have seemed improbable, Bruce remarks that Dynamic Edge's IT service business works in up and down economic cycles. In down cycles, companies tend to cut too much. In up cycles, they cannot hire fast enough.

This 8 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 43MB) follows our discussion of how Dynamic Edge maintains internal communications while staying close to the customer. In this discussion, we turn to the question of substitutes. Dynamic Edge substitutes for three types of internal company resources:

• The employee with some IT background who has come to play a vital role in a small company's operations. Usually, Dynamic Edge is called in when the employee runs into an unsolvable problem and needs some help.
• The skilled relative who helps out in a company's early days. Dynamic Edge is usually called in when the owner realizes he or she has outstripped the relative's capacity.
• The IT staffer who does not have rare skill sets. Networking is a big seller here.

In this segment (download iPod compatible, 42MB), Bruce McCully and I discuss Dynamic Edge's knowledge and customer management and how the two help them resist the commoditizing force of globalization. A central component of Dynamic Edge's business is to stay close to the customer and simultaneously provide them a level of expertise that is not available within their company. A difficult trick in this type of business then is to have good internal communication while maintaining a high degree of client contact. Dynamic edge uses a number of tools to this end:

• A wiki acts as a sort of note board for what is going on in the company.
• A Google Mini search appliance allows Dynamic Edge to quickly find relevant information in documents stored on the network.
• IM and voice over IP allows team members to stay in touch and communicate about undocumented items.
• Finally, Dynamic Edge assigns one person as the principal contact for each customer so that a coherent interface is maintained.