Wednesday, June 8, 2011

New England CIO Innovation Awards: Mid-Sized Company

Martin King has a reborn Gurnet on growth trajectory

By Jill Gambon, Special to Mass High Tech

Martin King
President, Gurnet Consulting
Education: Bachelor’s degree in business management from Bentley College
Quote: “The technology has been the easiest part. For us the most challenging thing has been finding the right people.”

Building a startup involves a host of challenges, from developing a customer base to hiring the right people. Accomplishing those tasks during the worst economic downturn in a generation makes things even more difficult.

Martin King , CEO, founder and head of IT strategy for Gurnet Consulting, an IT services firm in Providence, R.I., turned to cloud-based applications and social media to recruit staff, build a brand, develop sales leads and collaborate.

“I knew we were going to grow. I had to look for tools to support a distributed work force, to help scale, to support (such applications as) calendaring, messaging and knowledge management,” King said.

King founded Gurnet in 1999 to offer e-commerce services to companies moving legacy applications to the web. But after the dot-com bust, he shuttered the business, taking a full-time job at Ciber. Gurnet remained mothballed until 2008 when King decided to take a second stab at his own startup. He offering IT strategy and project management services to small and midsize businesses.

Just as he was rebuilding the company, the economy collapsed. With a limited IT budget, he turned to cloud-based applications like Google Enterprise Applications, Salesforce.com and Jobscience and social media platforms that allowed him to rapidly create a scalable infrastructure where employees, who are spread out across four states, share ideas, collaborate on new services and develop software. He  adopted Agile management principles to guide internal change management and training practices.

Sales have steadily grown and the company has staffed up. The firm now has 30 employees and expects to add 10 more by year’s end.. While its client base has expanded, the company doesn’t have a sales staff. Instead, it relies completely on referrals — often through social networking — for new customers.

“In times like these, people are relying on who they know and trust,” he said. Social networking has also been key in recruiting new employees. “The technology has been the easiest part. For us the most challenging thing has been finding the right people,” said King, who is keen on preserving a reputation for quality services and a corporate culture where ideas are shared easily.