When a Crisis Creates a Crowd
by Michael Matesic
Here’s the scenario, you name the sector:
- Government mandates improvements to existing systems to prevent a looming national crisis.
- Government offers millions in funding for technologies to deliver those improvements.
- Tech companies start up and spin out in droves to capitalize on the mandates and funding.
Is it Energy? Health Care IT? Both fit. But the year this scenario hit full force was 2005. The crisis at hand? Johnny couldn’t read—or add or subtract very well compared to his global counterparts. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was the government’s solution. It was also the catalyst that launched countless software solutions into the education sector, promising data-driven results to every school system.
The same story is being written in the energy and healthcare sectors today. Big, established players are off to the races, and entrepreneurs with dollar signs in their eyes are right behind them.
In a land-grab situation where dollars buy attention and most solutions offered are still unproven, how does a small, local startup compete against so many entrenched players with enormous budgets and start-ups offering miracle cures?
According to the team at OnHand Schools, there’s no magic to the answer. Gil Iacono, Toby Basalla, and Tom DeMarco founded their company in 2004 to provide instructional management systems to educators. Today they count over 100 Pennsylvania school districts as customers. And they’ve just signed their first district in New Jersey.
So, lacking magic, what tactics did they use to emerge as winners? They stuck to the tried and true tenants of successful entrepreneurship.
Says Iacono, “We saw “change” as opportunity. NCLB drove a change that was already underway and pushed the “need to have” curve ahead. We were at the right place at the right time to catch that wave.”
Each of the three founders was already a seasoned player in the education space. Basalla was working in IT at Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), DeMarco was Director of IT at North Hills School District, and Iacono was an IT consultant to PPS. They understood the problem and had experienced the pain first hand.
Also critical to their success, says, Basalla, was focusing on their strengths. “We determined early on what our sweet spot was. We found the intersection between specific pain points and our ability to address them. And we didn’t chase problems we knew we couldn’t yet solve. We didn’t overpromise.” They had a high quality, powerful hammer, and instead of swinging at every problem as if it were nail, they delivered by hitting the real nails square on.
“What made us especially effective,” says Tom, “was our connection to both the end-users and the purchasers—the teachers and the administrators. We built relationships, we listened, and we were agile enough to adapt to what we were hearing.” They did this through building a Quality Classroom Consortium of area school districts to promote professional development – and if they accomplished their development through the OnHand toolset, all the better.
In the end, they knew their industry, they exploited their strengths, they actively listened to their customers—and they embraced change.
Says Iacono, “All of the noise and commotion around NCLB was like a storm. When you’re in the middle of it, you know where you want to go but you have to be constantly aware of the changing winds and be ready to lift the sail, so stay agile.”
Start Me Up appears monthly in the print edition of TEQ Magazine.