The journey to becoming an entrepreneur often doesn’t follow a well-defined path.
For Matt Wienke, Founder and President at Infoverity, a leading systems integrator and global professional services firm, the start of his entrepreneurial adventure was somewhat of a happy accident.
“In the case of Infoverity, I’m a bit of a serial entrepreneur,” Wienke tells The CEO Magazine.
In his previous role as a partner at an enterprise data management practice, Wienke saw how easy it is for businesses to fall into the trap of taking on too many projects. “The company was trying to do a lot of things. It was spread pretty thin and not all of them were achieving success,” he says.
As the finances grew strained, the options appeared limited. “I thought, there’s a lot of opportunity here for what we do, so why do we have to all split up and go our separate ways?” he explains.
“I appealed to a number of my key employees that I think we’re stronger if we stick together.”
“I appealed to a number of my key employees that I think we’re stronger if we stick together.”
That’s how the 100 percent employee-owned Infoverity was born in 2011 in Dublin, Ohio.
The original goal wasn’t to eclipse the size of the previous business, but thanks to consistent growth, this is what Infoverity has managed to achieve. As the professional service firm has developed, a clear focus has been placed on ensuring projects can still be managed comprehensively and consistently.
“We’ve got to have industry solutions for our clients that are not expressions of information management capability, but are really focused on their business problems and our translation of business pain points to actions,” he adds.
People-Driven
Despite being a relatively young company, Infoverity has already achieved a great deal, which Wienke attributes to the remarkable talent of its people. By following a culture similar to that of family-run organizations, where everyone fully supports each other, Infoverity puts employees first.
“There’s the old adage, if you always hire people smarter than you, get out of their way and offer them an environment that rewards motivation and teamwork, you’re going to be successful. That’s my belief,” Wienke says.
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At its core, Infoverity is a personnel-driven organization and it works hard during challenging economic times to maintain this commitment. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, competitors reduced base salaries, laid off staff and cancelled internship programs.
For Wienke and his team, it simply wasn’t an option to tell young people that they would no longer be able to work at the business. “At no time did we ever seriously consider canceling our internships or reneging on the offers that we had made to our new hires,” explains Wienke.
This long-term vision is paying dividends today, with a number of young people who undertook internships and graduate schemes now working full-time at the business.
“We’ve looked around the room and said, “If we hadn’t made that decision, these people wouldn’t be with us today, three years later – and they’re some of the most valued people in the organization,” he says.
Long-Term Partners
However, no matter how much expertise his team has, there are always going to be those client requests that require a niche level of skill that is only available externally. When supporting clients in highly technical industries, for example, there will often be a need to bring in the right mix of skills and technologies to fix a problem.
Since 2011, Infoverity has partnered with Informatica, the leader in enterprise cloud data management, in a collaboration that spans across their product management, services, customer success and sales organizations.
“If you always hire people smarter than you, get out of their way, and offer them an environment that rewards motivation and teamwork, you’re going to be successful.”
Grounded in Informatica’s extensive continuous improvement and the expansion of its platform’s capabilities and industry solutions, Infoverity has found success in Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform, which provides a broad set of enterprise data management capabilities for clients.
“We have experience and trust in the platform’s capabilities and its road map, and have many shared successes to be proud of. We’re proud to be the most experienced implementation partner of their latest cloud data governance and mobile device management solutions,” Wienke says of the partnership.
For Wienke, the journey of building Infoverity continues, with people driving the sustainable growth the business is achieving. There may be ups and downs in any business, but thanks to its strong commitment to its workforce, Infoverity is ready to meet the ever-changing needs of its clients.