Business: IT services for companies
HQ: Palm Beach Gardens; second office in Melbourne, Fla.
CEO: Adam Steinhoff
COO: Aaron Underhill
Year founded: 2002
Employees: 50
Website: www.dedicatedit.com
Just before Thanksgiving, Dedicated IT employees gathered for a holiday luncheon and afterward took a company picture. CEO and founder Adam Steinhoff looks at the photo and gets a little emotional.
“There are a lot of stories in that photo, people getting married, people having kids, getting promoted, buying houses. Our company is making them better tomorrow than today. We are of the size now where we can focus on employee development. It’s neat to see the number of mouths that are fed as a result of this little dream I had almost 20 years ago now.”
There is a lot to celebrate in 2019.
CEO Adan Steinhoff accepts GrowFL award for DedicatedIT
Dedicated IT, a managed service provider or MSP based in Palm Beach Gardens, will close this year with 50 employees, nearly double the number it had in early 2018. GrowFL, a statewide economic development agency that supports the growth of second-stage companies, recently honored Dedicated IT as one of the 50 Florida Companies to Watch.
“We have been growing revenue about 40 percent, which is a pretty good place to be, We’ve been told recently we are the No. 2 Cisco Meraki dealer in Florida and in the top 1% of the Microsoft partners in the Southeast. We were recently invited to Microsoft headquarters to meet with them,” said Steinhoff, who is an officer on the board of Palm Beach Tech Association.
The company also is acquiring a VOIP telephone company. “The goal is to offer our clients one more piece of the technology puzzle as a one-stop shop… We will be bringing on not only a new technology but a really solid team that thinks like us, and our clients will be very well served because of it.” The acquisition of T5 Telecom, based in Michigan, is expected to be complete by the end of the year.
BREAKING OUT
Dedicated IT would seem to be in a crowded space – providing IT services to companies – but the last couple of years the company focused hard on differentiation. Steinhoff and the team were inspired by the book Blue Ocean Strategy to swim upstream from the pack.
While much of the MSP industry supports companies with 10 to 50 employees, Dedicated IT focuses on companies with 150 to 1,500 employees. These companies have very different needs than smaller companies. They likely have IT departments but need a new set of eyes to assess and resolve complex pain points and implement solutions alongside the departments.
“We are co-managing the IT with them now,” Steinhoff said, adding that the strategy has been a boon for Dedicated IT, especially with healthcare companies. “We are now competing at a national level rather than a regional or local level.”
DedicatedIT employees and their families enjoy a company holiday celebration.
About three months ago, the company freshened and sharpened its core values. “We use them to make sure the people who want to work for Dedicated IT are going to embody what it is that makes us who we are at the core. It’s the secret sauce of Dedicated IT. It’s the thing that really makes us us.” Steinhoff says. Those values steer all hiring decisions.
The core values are: “We attack challenge with action and innovation. We deliver results and are obsessed with excellence. We value partnership over profit. We encourage people to have fun and let their hair down.”
Even more importantly, DedicatedIT doubled down on its mission statement: “We help people and organizations be better tomorrow than today.”
That mission statement empowers everyone to make the right decision, not a short-term fix but a solution with long-term impact. “It’s a comfortable place to be as a business owner to be able have your entire organization making decisions the same way you would. When you have 10 or 15 employees, you can be involved in everything, but not at 50. By having this really solid foundation, it empowers them to do the right thing and stay on mission.”
FACING CHALLENGES
To be sure, it is challenging to double the company in a short time. It means putting systems and processes in place and adding middle managers that weren’t there before. Scaling the company to this next level took a couple years of laying the groundwork.
As the breakout year comes to a close, Steinhoff, an avid reader, recommends to entrepreneurs three of the books he read in 2019 that helped him with current challenges.
Measure What Matters looks at breaking goals down to milestones and how best to measure those milestones. Necessary Endings talks about why some relationships need to be ended, whether they are partners, clients, employees or whatever, in a way that doesn’t burn bridges.
It’s Your Ship, an older book, is about a commander who had the worst ship in the Navy and ultimately turned it around. He did this by getting everyone on the ship to not only own their particular jobs but to take ownership in the entire ship’s performance by cross-training in various roles and learning to work as a cohesive team. “It helped me to understand how to foster teamwork and to understand how to be a better leader,” Steinhoff said.