Deb and I owned Crown Trophy of Boulder for almost 18 years before selling our business to Letitia and Darius, the new owners. They are a great hard-working couple who will take care of our existing customers and grow the business in our community. We couldn’t be happier for all of us!Crown Trophy is the largest awards supplier in the country with 150 locally owned stores and the largest online awards sales channel. They are awards and business promotional items specialists. Call them for sales & recognition awards of any kind. They can also handle every business promotion need ranging from corporate apparel, tradeshow giveaways, and literally any item with your logo on it.

In this role I was responsible for identifying and closing consulting projects related to both CRM and early Service Oriented Architecture (now known as Cloud Architecture). I was blessed to have an amazing Systems Architect who could work a blank whiteboard in front of a group of skeptical Enterprise Architects and CIOs like Gandalf with a magic wand. Even with this advantage it was often more of a political decision to make the migration to SOA at that time. It was disruptive to the existing structure and we always had to find a senior level executive who understood where things would inevitably go. That person had to be able to articulate the vision and urgency for action. They also had to be willing to take the fall if we were wrong - which we weren't. Still, we got thrown out of more boardrooms than we were welcomed in.Overall, a great last consulting gig before I abandoned hi-tech for the awards business.

In this role I was responsible for leading a consulting team that implemented a hosted CRM solution for enterprise and hi-tech start-up clients. US Internetworking (USi) was the first company to deploy enterprise class applications (Oracle, Siebel, Peoplesoft) into businesses with the server architecture being hosted in our data centers instead of within the client's network.This presented some unique challenges for the consulting team. We had to first educate our prospects on the solution, which was at the time radically different from the other solutions on the market. Our value proposition was that USi worked with the client IT team to deploy an enterprise class solution that was completely outsourced and management by USi.Our consulting team swooped in and worked with the business to identify and re-engineer business processes. We then mapped the appropriate technology to the re-engineered processes, deployed the fat clients on the user desktop computers, trained the users, and supported the ongoing system for the period of our contract (usually 3-5 years).We had a couple of showcase data centers in Annapolis, Maryland and Milpitas, California that were impressive with our NSA level security and guaranteed .99999 availability. We needed these to convince skeptical business and IT executives that their data was safe with us.The model worked for a few years. During that time we had dozens of deployments and the company blew through four billion dollars. But then something happened. I first recognized it when a small company called salesforce.com asked us to submit a bid to host their application. Not unusual - our enterprise hosting division was already developing and hosting well known sites like hpshopping.com.This one was different. If salesforce.com achieved their stated business objectives, then our disruptive enterprise application outsourcing model was itself disrupted by this new model. And so it was.

In this role I was a member of a specialized IBM Global Services consulting team that worked with enterprise clients to examine the client's sales and customer service culture and processes. Working with the business, we developed detailed process flow diagrams and then redesigned processes that mapped to the recommended technology solution, typically Siebel.I view my IBM consulting role as a transition experience between my work inside a corporation to deploy CRM and my eventual role as a consulting director for USi. IBM taught me how to be a business consultant and gave me valuable and practical experience on both the business development and implementation phases of large technology consulting projects

In this role I worked with a small team to deploy a wildly successful sales automation system, built in 4D on the Mac, to every Dex Media sales office in 14 states. We trained over a thousand sales people on the system, which was designed and built by sales people. The system was called Wild Thing.Also, during this period, I was blessed to lead a team of about 20 sales people, who were identified as technology leaders within their local sales offices. These people became Sales Force Automation Managers and were responsible for ongoing training and evangelizing of technology in their local sales offices. This investment paid dividends in high adoption rates by sales people, increased sales, and enthusiastic support of ongoing improvements to the system, based on end user feedback.This SFA team stayed in place for more than a decade after I left the company. Unfortunately, we were automating a dinosaur. The Yellow Pages, once a necessity for every local business, is now consigned to the recycling bin of history.

Shortly after I secured my first 'corporate' job as a service rep for AT&T in 1977 I saw a guy walk into our office. Everyone treated him like a God. I asked my cube mate who he was. She told me that he used to be one of 'us' but now he was a Yellow Pages salesperson. He made 50 grand a year - selling yellow pages! I was confused. I previously thought a business 'earned' a larger Yellow Page ad depending on how established and good they were. When I realized it was actually a business choice I knew immediately that I wanted to sell Yellow Pages. Why wouldn't a business want to have the largest ad they could afford? How could they afford not to? It seemed like the easiest sale in the world -and it was.It took me seven years to get in, but I finally became a Yellow Page salesperson for US West in 1984. I was very successful. I was also the first sales person in my office to adopt technology. I bought a Macintosh 512K and entered all of my accounts into a database. I designed my ads using MacDraw. I earned President's Club every year I was eligible.I was so successful integrating technology into the yellow page sales process that I received a visit from a Corporate Technology Director, Don Kado, who came to Bellevue unannounced one day and asked me to show him what I was doing. Shortly after that I was re-assigned to the IT Department. I was given a corporate American Express card and told to "go forth and evangelize - and keep my POs under $25,000 each". Over the next year and a half I visited every sales office in the US West 14 state region. I purchased Mac computers for every sales rep who agreed to use the computer in the sales process. I also set up any staff artist who wanted to use a Mac for ad design. I set up the first AppleTalk networks in these offices so users could share files and print to networked printers. In that short period of time I equipped and trained almost a thousand sales reps.