What’s perhaps most impressive about TI’s growth over more than three-quarters of a century is it’s been entirely organic, meaning no outside acquisitions.
“When you serve your clients well, other talented individuals gravitate toward you,” says Landrum. “It’s about having the right amount of resources for the right amount of revenue.”
Powers sees it as another example of doing things right. “One of the things that’s enabled us to grow like we have since 2004 is doing the basics with a sense of urgency,” he says. “There’s a lot of mediocrity in the service sector.”
Learning the Hard Way
Landrum and Powers have considered and talked about several possibilities to be TI’s first acquisition but haven’t found the right match yet. They’ll continue to be open to the possibility — perhaps more open now than in the past — and are “looking to grow some of the services that are adjacent to what we do,” says Landrum, choosing not to be more specific and divulge the company’s strategy.
This desire to bring aboard an outside company comes despite what Landrum and Powers both described as TI’s darkest hour, when they invested in and started three small companies that didn’t have a complementary aspect to TI’s mission not long after taking over the company.
“It took a lot of time and energy and took some of the focus away from what we wanted to do here,” says Landrum, noting it sold two of the companies and closed one within a few years of the startup.
Powers sees it as part of the company’s Blue Ocean Strategy stage, meaning it was trying to move into places where there was no competition but might not have been the best fit for TI’s mission.
“They all failed for different reasons,” says Powers. “On the back side, we said we should stop trying to move so far away from our core business. Once we went through that period, we decided to stick to our core and go back to basics.”
From 2007 on, “we started to really see growth and our direction,” says Powers. TI grew very slightly from 2008 to 2009 before its profitability “skyrocketed” in 2009, says Powers.
“We’ve become more process-driven, regimented and defined in what we do, but as technology evolves, opportunities for creativity emerge,” says Landrum. “In a custom industry, an organization must have a ruthless adherence to process and standards. Those disciplines must be practiced within the framework of allowing our team’s creativity to move our solutions forward for customers that expect more than the functionality of the individual products.”
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That creativity comes through TI’s four tools, one each for customer relationship management (CRM), proposals, back-end enterprise resource planning (ERP) and service and help desk issues.
“Within our ability to use our database of vendors and other information, there’s also an engineering group that can foster and share good ideas throughout the company,” says Landrum.
