Case Study: Intersys Consulting

“Hire BLUECASE Strategic Partners and grow. We hired BLUECASE to run our Rockefeller Habits process this year and we have finally kickstarted our growth to 50%+.”

J.R. Carter, Founder and Former CEO

The Problem:

Intersys Inc., an Austin-based IT consulting firm, was ready for growth and looking to get a jumpstart on expanding their company. They took steps to grow the company, taking on necessary costs and making investments that they believed would lead to their expansion.

The problem? It wasn’t enough. “The biggest challenge we had among many was that we had positioned ourselves for growth, taken on all the costs to invest in the things we needed for growth, and stayed flat for two years,” said Former Intersys CEO J.R. Carter.

After trying for years to push their company to take that next step forward, the leadership team at Intersys realized they needed a fresh perspective and a clear growth strategy—and that’s where our case study begins.

The BLUECASE team came on board to provide strategic planning expertise and executive coaching to align and elevate the leadership team at Intersys. While Intersys had the means and motivation to grow, what they lacked was a clear framework to follow, and our team worked to set their growth in motion.

“We were a group of smart people and what we lacked was real alignment around a good strategy and plan for execution,” said Carter.

The Results:

Within the first year of working with BLUECASE, Intersys achieved a more than 50% increase in revenue.

That growth continued as we forged a lasting partnership with Intersys over the course of six years, ultimately tripling the size of the company from the time we started working with them.

However, while their success was immediate and significant, Intersys is also a clear case study for the cultural aspects of our growth strategy approach. While growth is a strategic challenge, it is also fundamentally a cultural one, as a rapidly expanding company can often see its culture become diluted and its values fall by the wayside.

By keeping culture at the center of our growth strategy, however, we helped Intersys strengthen and maintain the core elements that made the company so successful in the first place. “We tripled the size of our company from the time we started working with BLUECASE, that’s just a very clear result,” said Carter. “We managed to do it while still building a great culture.” 

In a tight labor market, Intersys was considered an employer of choice because of the culture they built and maintained. They worked leadership tools of high performance teams into all areas of the business and gained a reputation as a great place to work. 

Intersys was eventually sold at an above-market value with no earn out, and with no recurring revenue. It is unusual to not have an earn out; it is extraordinarily unusual for a consulting company to achieve this without recurring revenue. After our 6 years of partnership, BLUECASE was brought into the acquiring public company Apex Consulting to continue working with the Intersys team.

HEALTHY GROWTH STARTS WITH A STRATEGY

Growth doesn’t often happen overnight—and when it does happen, it’s crucial to have a plan in place to preserve the essential values and elements of the company throughout. 

At BLUECASE, we don’t only help companies grow—we help them thrive. As this case study illustrates, our growth strategy approach solves the hardest people and culture challenges associated with rapid expansion, all while providing the tools companies need to grow even faster than they imagined.