Here’s how I got there.

The Beginning

With a BBA in corporate finance from the University of North Texas, my first “real” position was trading securities as a stockbroker with Fidelity Investments. While there, I learned a great deal about business best practices, and was an early user and trainer for Fidelity Online Xpress (FOX), one of the first user online trading systems.

I soon wanted to expand my skill set from pure finance to operations and became a financial manager at CuDerm, a manufacturer of skin testers for the cosmetics and clinical industries. As a good ol’ boy from San Antonio who had barely heard of moisturizer, I wasn’t expecting a career working with the likes of Revlon, the Dove brand for Unilever, and the Cover Girl brand for Procter & Gamble!

However, I soon realized that digital technology was revolutionizing decades-old business practices, and I made it my mission to grow CuDerm’s physical products with new digital tools. I bought the company from its founder, and we digitized the results of our litmus test strips, designed an app to remotely analyze results, and married in-store promotions with digital marketing efforts. We grew the company over 2,000%, and I became even more convinced that successful small businesses were the ones that were investing in digital operations solutions.

Enhancing Business Operations Through Technology 

Colleagues with their own companies began to ask me to fix their operational headaches. I started acting as a fractional CFO and interim COO for various organizations, including a soccer products distributor and a web design company making $100K+ websites for Fortune 100 companies.

I heard the same story over and over. My friends would have a major pain point (or two or three) in their business operations – a tax audit, a landlord/tenant dispute, a hopelessly outdated payroll system – but they had never been able to shift their focus from growth and sales to non-core operations.

Following the traditional business playbook, they would respond to growth with more infrastructure, more employees, more meetings – but that only spent resources and built up communications silos, without tackling the underlying workflow issues.

No matter the industry, the solution was the same: digitize your operations. Implement SaaS tools that your team will actually use. Aggregate data from different departments and put it in the cloud, so you can make better strategic decisions. Take advantage of the Digital Revolution before your competitors do.

The Future of Business

You can order and pay for a latte with your watch. You can be on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, decide it’s finally time to read Who Moved My Cheese?, and be listening to the audiobook in seconds. So why does it still take your company two weeks to get back to a potential client with a quote?

Ten years ago, I couldn’t have started ONE Department. But now, communications technology allows us to aggregate multiple areas of business operations, manage them remotely, and bring them into a single platform for our clients.

There is no need, today, for a small or medium sized business to build up costly and inefficient internal architecture when you can outsource your non-core operations – your server maintenance, your social media, your credit card reconciliations, your website management, your contract review needs – to a specialist who can do it more efficiently. But managing dozens of outside vendors has its own internal costs. What you need is an operations partner who can manage all these areas, aggregating them into “one department,” without expanding your infrastructure.

We do not want to build the large, monolithic enterprises of the past. We are striving to build flexible, streamlined, on-point knowledge organizations that will flourish in the new digital age.

If you’d like to know more, please connect with me on LinkedIn, or send me an email at hello@one-dept.com. I’d love to help set your company up for success.