A conversation with Randy Schilling

Randy Schilling is the Founder and CEO of Quilogy, a national IT professional services company with headquarters in St. Charles, Missouri. With 250 employees at 17 locations across the country, Quilogy is a leading Microsoft National Managed Partner—one of a select number in the country. Quilogy is also Oracle's largest authorized training delivery partner in the United States. More than 5,000 students attend Quilogy technical training every year.

What's your background, and how did you get started?

I have an electrical engineering degree from the University of Missouri and an MBA from the University of Illinois. Right out of school, I worked for a public utility and was given the task of designing the control systems for a new electrical substation. One of my jobs was researching different pieces of information, such as, manufacturing data, engineering drawings, property accounting, etc., a most tedious task. The personal computer had just come out, and I had one of the few computers in the company so I started aggregating all this information in my new PC.

One day, we lost one of our generators, and the chief engineer spent a day and a half looking for a relay device to get the power station up and running. Finally, he came to me and said, "We know you're doing this database thing, is there any way you can help us find a replacement relay switch?" I quickly found one, had it installed, and the service area technicians got the power plant up and running, saving a ton of time and money. At that point, he said, "We like what you're doing, here's a budget, put a plan in place to put a computer on each engineer's desk and network them together so they can see the same database." From that point forward, I became an internal consultant working with the IT department training them on databases, networking, data modeling and other computing technologies.

After five years, I joined Grant Thornton to start an IT practice around Client-Server computing. I became a poster child for Gupta Technologies having worked with the technology for five years and having written a number of technical articles on the topic.

I left Grant Thornton after a few years because the market was quickly changing, and I found myself more interested in emerging technologies. So in 1992, I started Quilogy with a single client, a public utility in New Orleans. Shortly thereafter, I started doing Microsoft training, and was quickly working with leading companies like Southwestern Bell, AG Edwards, Union Pacific and others. With this initial influx of training money, I hired my first consultant, and by the end of 1993, I had eight or nine consultants. We grew from there.

What makes Quilogy successful?

It's definitely the people, but how do you attract great people in IT? I think part of our success can be found in our business model. Our employees don't have to live in the big IT centers, like Boston or San Francisco, to work in technology. For us, it's literally and figuratively about doing cutting-edge technology in your hometown. Our headquarters is located in five historic buildings in St. Charles, a suburb of St. Louis. When we expanded, we followed the Southwest Airlines flight map, which took us to Kansas City, Omaha, Louisville etc., symbolically Main Street, USA. Now we're able to tap into a supply of extremely talented people who prefer to work in their hometown.

How do you think about the role of culture at Quilogy?

We always use the three-legged stool analogy to describe the company culture. The first leg is what we talked about earlier, and that is our employees and the family-oriented, Midwest ethic that comes from our Main Street sensibilities.

The second leg is our clients. We're very dependent on client referrals, and our case studies for new business. To keep this resource growing, our philosophy is that at the end of the day, we are not going to be in business very long unless we're consistently helping our clients improve revenues, business efficiencies, reduce costs or solve a compliance issue.
The third leg is the bottom line, the financial leg, making sure we're a profitable organization. Whatever we do, we've got to be able to make money for long-term survival.

The seat of the stool is integrity. That is, making sure we're doing what we said we were going to do, even when it's painful. We'll take a hit at the bottom line to make it right for clients if we're in the wrong. We define integrity as standing by our work and our employees.

How does this culture manifest itself in your company?

We want an open, collaborative environment where everything is shared. To that end, we borrowed a concept from Microsoft about managing the company's calendar to the rhythms of the business. It's a way of saying here is the calendar for the year around which we plan and collaborate on sales, clients, employees, company events, etc. Every month we produce a video (we have a studio) through which we communicate our results for the month, quarter and year using streaming video. We also have an annual employee summit. It's like a company shareholder meeting, where we share results, but more importantly, we break into brainstorming sessions to collaborate on ways to improve the business. At our last sales summit, we asked every location to submit videos that describe their office. It's an excellent way for everyone to see what each other is doing, what's working, what's not and how others can pitch in when needed, since compensation is tied to local and company performance.

What are the challenges for managing a culture across 17 locations?

Clearly, one of our challenges is creating a bunch of mini-Quilogys, in which we can profitably use technology to solve client business problems and attract, recruit and train the right kind of talent and keep them motivated. I consistently see evidence that all of our offices follow the company culture, but when we find ourselves getting a little bit sideways, it's generally right before we do an employee summit. Then when we do the employee summit event, it really brings people together and gets us back on the same page.

What advice would you offer other executives with respect to corporate culture?

I think the biggest thing I've learned is that building a company is more about your people skills and dealing with people than it is about technology. I think people getting in the business think it's all about technology, when it's more about finding the right people and finding people that have passion. Passion is far more important than finding pure analytic type personalities.

Finding those people with what I call practical IQ is important. There has to be a certain level of knowledge, or IQ, about your industry, technology or business, but you also have to find the person that, beyond that, has the ability to get the job done even when there are a certain amount of challenges.

So, I think the biggest thing I learned about culture is the importance of it to your people and company, and the reinforcement you place on corporate culture, with things like the rhythm of the business, and doing things that take you out of your comfort zone, and as a leader not being afraid to do those things.

The other thing is the ability to let people develop. I let go of the presidency, and I now have a president of the company, Manish Chandak. I did that two years ago and from my perspective and experience, it's about focusing on the people side, our employees, our customers and our vendors.

You can contact Randy at rschilling@quilogy.com or visit Quilogy at www.quilogy.com.