Contegix: Take a Bet On Your People (and they will deliver!)

By Matthew E. Porter, Vice Chairman and Founder

Contegix is a cloud computing, manager hosting provider. We house infrastructure for a number of customers, including household brands like Chico’s, Panera, and eBay. In 2013, we began a data center consolidation process in Saint Louis. We were moving all of our local infrastructure from 3 previous generation data centers into a modern facility. This was a phenomenal upgrade for our customers in terms of resiliency, security, and future-proof capabilities. The challenge was moving thousands of customers with a large computing footprint that runs production critical applications.

We made the decision to hire an outside firm that specializes in data center migrations. While cost is always important, we have two core values that were at play - “Wow the customer every time, every engagement with integrity and no exceptions” and “Respect People, Time, and Data”. We believe the core values are there to help make the hard decisions. As such, we spent the money to hire the experts in this. Unfortunately, they never understood how deeply we hold these values and how much we genuinely care about our customers.

The outside firm ran two simulation events, and both were horribly executed. They went over the allotted time frames and were performed poorly. After chatting with the firm, they told us that we could expect this to be the best performance possible and that we should anticipate the process taking 16-18 months. These are the top experts in data center migrations.

My Vice President of Operations presented all the information to me. He emphatically stated that we could not hold up our core values based upon the current execution path. More important, he asked for the chance to take this project on internally and to fire the consultants. This was one of the simplest decisions I have ever made, especially given the weight. It was effective the question “Would I bet on the team that knows our core values, our mission, and our vision whom I hired OR would I bet on strangers?”

We built our own data center migration practice in less than two weeks, including the logistics. We executed the full data center migration with excellence in 13 weeks. The best part is, we honored every core value along the way, with every individual pulling an astronomical amount of weight. It was considered the utmost success. It proved that we can accomplish amazing feats when we work together and honor our cultural goals and core values.

And it happened because I bet on our people. It was one of the greatest blessings I have ever received running Contegix.

Hope you enjoyed reading this. It put a smile on my face writing it.