What tech companies need

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What tech companies need is periodic help

in making their basic company functions work

work well, and work in harmony.

WHAT WE DO

Discover and prioritize market growth alternatives
Evaluate and pursue opportunities for M & A or capital infusion
Develop lasting strategic business alliances with leading market-makers
Build a bottom-line oriented product management capability
Bring predictability to product release cycles
Plan and execute efficient channel routes-to-market
[Future] Make customer support a strategic asset
[Future] Boost maintenance renewal revenues

HOW WE DO IT

Executive-level Strategic Business Consulting

On-site, interactive workshops provide business strategy tools and best practice methods for discovering and pursuing market and business model growth alternatives. Align company strategy across the executive management team.

Corporate Initiative Development & Execution

Add executive and experienced bench-strength to accomplishing corporate initiatives for portfolio, market, and/or business model expansion.

Executive Coaching & Development

Develop, support, and groom key VP leaders through shadow coaching from experienced VP-level partners.

Interim Executive Interim Staffing

Interim staffing engagements help clients bridge functional leadership gaps which commonly arise in growing businesses. We bring functional executive expertise to augment the leadership team.

Who We Are

Established in 2007, WTCNeed is a leader in business strategy for growing tech companies, focused on those business disciplines which differentiate sustainable growth companies from common fits and starts of start-up businesses that do not function with a cohesive strategy and lack the best-practices across functional disciplines.

Click on name to view Biography:

Karl Chen, Pincipal Partner

Karl possesses more than 25 years of experience in IT Technology strategy and business management. He specializes in distributed systems, storage, enterprise software and virtualization. He has successfully built and sold two entreprenuerial start-up businesses including LeftHand Networks, which was acquired by HP for $360M in November, 2008 and NuView ManageX, which was acquired in 1997.

He has executive management experience in strategy development, business development, marketing, channels, sales management. Karl' s skills include P&L and business unit management, fund-raising, OEM licensing, and mergers & acquisition. His former roles include VP of Bus Dev & Marketing at LeftHand Networks, VP of Marketing at BMC Software, VP of Bus Dev & Marketing at NuView Inc., and senior management positions at Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, and Digital Equipment Corp. He has developed strategic partnerships and negotiated licensing deals industry leaders including Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, Intel, HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco & Citrix Systems and many other world-class enterprise computing companies.

Brent Compton, Principal Partner

Brent Compton is a 21-year veteran of the software/technology industry, having served in both executive roles for software businesses and Chief Information Officer roles within industry, while living in both Europe and the US. In VP-level and business leadership positions at Micromuse (IBM acquisition, 2006, $865M), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), and Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A) he managed software product portfolios through hyper-growth, turn-around, and business maturity phases. As CIO for Joint Commission International and Joint Commission Resources (health care), he re-built IT teams, infrastructure, and created a SaaS product team producing software with over 20,000 visits per week. During his early technology-focused years, Brent held consulting roles in HP's Professional Services Organization, focused on IP networking, UNIX, and database technologies. Brent holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science from Weber State University and has studied business with the University of Denver Executive MBA and Graduate Certificate in Finance programs.

In Addition, WTCNeed brings industry leading senior level consultants across multiple disciplines including business strategy, corporate development, business alliances, channels development, customer support, marketing, product management, public relations, and sales management.

WHO WE SERVE

Growing Tech Businesses:

Growing technology businesses frequently need an infusion of capital, an assessment of their business strategy, and/or extending their executive skillsets when scaling-up for initial success and building the business to a more sustained and predictable levels. We serve a growing business's leadership by bridging short-term executive skill gaps, fine-tuning the business strategy, being catalysts for new initiatives, and by training functional teams to use best practice tools and methods.

VC & Private Equity Communities:

Companies funded by VC and Private Equity investors frequently require practical augmentation to existing management teams. WTCNeed helps these equity owners bridge gaps and up-skill executive staff members in key functions within their portfolio companies. WTCNeed can also assist equity firms in providing functional assessments of technology businesses for target funding investments and valuations.

CONTACT US

Karl Chen, Principal Partner
kchen@wtcneed.com XXX-XXX-XXXX

Brent Compton, Principal Partner
bcompton@wtcneed.com

Barry Hutt, Senior Consultant
bhutt@wtcneed.com

For more information on WTCNeed, feel free to e-mail info@wtcneed.com

GROWTH PLANNING

WTCNeed provides strategy assessment, quantitative modeling tools, executive workshops, and follow-up coaching to help growing companies identify and prioritize both organic and inorganic growth opportunities. In shaping these growth planning deliverables, WTCNeed Principal Partners draw from their collective experience in:

Successfully funding start-up and emerging growth companies
Developing and refining target market segments to pursue
Analyze revenue opportunities, profitability, and competitive dynamics
Streamling go-to-market partnerships and channels
Navigating from a single product to a product portfolio
Pruning the portfolio to make room for new growth
Positioning and orchestrating the sale of tech companies
Providing executive leadership during and after the acquisition of tech companies

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

WTCNeed leverages its vast strategic executive-level contacts throughout the technology industry and business development methodologies to maximize rapid development of partner eco-systems that accelerate revenue attainment.

By optimizing go-to-market execution plans around strategic business alliances, companies benefit from efficient ways to leverage its internal resources to create a multiplier effect on revenues, while limiting its marketing, sales, and business development investments.

As part of this practice WTCNeed will:

Access your business development strategy compared to your targeted competitors
Recommend a plan that will help you leapfrog your competition
Forge executive-level strategic partnerships with industry leading market makers
Define joint sustainable partnership goals with measureable results

This practice is lead by WTCNeed Principal Partner, Karl Chen

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Experienced product management leadership typically differentiates one-hit businesses from those which develop the staying power of a sustainable-growth company. Once a tech business has its first successful product, executive product management guidance is frequently brought in to sustain and grow the business. WTCNeed executive leadership assists its clients to:

Distill shifting market demand through primary and secondary market research.
Translate distilled market demand into actionable product development options.
Model product development options to guide financially sound product development decisions
Control product release cycles to improve release predictability and quality.
Communicate product release value through go-to-market selling channels
Feed the sales machine

This practice is led by WTCNeed Principal Partner Brent Compton.

CHANNEL DEVELOPMENT

Companies have a variety of options when developing their routes to market. Depending on their targeted market segments, they may choose to pursue sales through a direct or indirect channel model. Direct sales models may include hiring a direct sales force, selling directly through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) or hosted model. Indirect channels may include OEMs, ODMs, distributors, VARs, system integrators, service providers, hosted or cloud providers.

WTCNeed will assess your sales strategy and pinpoint integral channel partners to streamline efficiency and effectiveness. Your sales soar while minimizing channel conflict.

In this practice, WTCNeed will:

Evaluate your current sales and channel model
Align the best routes-to-market that maximize revenues and profitability
Develop a plan and execute on channel partnerships with clear sales productivity metrics

This practice is lead by WTCN Principal Partner, Karl Chen

DELIVERING RELEVANT CUSTOMER SUPPORT

As the customer base of a growing tech business increases, ad-hoc customer support efforts by the development staff are usually no long sufficient. Frequent support ‘fire drills’ tire the development staff and can significantly diminish customer satisfaction of an otherwise successful product. WTCNeed assists it customers to stabilize customer support by establishing repeatable support processes supported by leading customer support technologies. Once stabilized, WTCNeed helps top performing companies systematically provide closed-loop feedback to the Product Management function, thus ensuring that the needs of existing customers become a key part of the market feedback entering successive product release cycles.

WTCNeed will assist clients with:

Identifying the right support business model. Is it a cost center or revenue generator?
Recommend customer satisfaction best-practices and customer care team structure
Provide a closed-loop feedback mechanism to Product Management, Sales, and Channels

This practice is jointly led by WTCNeed Partner [TBA] and Principal Partner Brent Compton