MANCHESTER, NH – There was “Forcivity” (Forcivity, Inc) and there was “Jolt” (Jolt Consulting Group LLC) and as a combined organization with Jeff Oskin as CEO and Steve Baines as President and Chief Growth Officer, we might just want to call them Forcivity 2.0. These leaders in B2B technology consulting, announced yesterday the planned merger of their businesses, creating a breakout leader in digital service operations.
The company will operate under the Forcivity name. Jeff Oskin, founder and CEO of Jolt, has been named CEO and Steve Baines, founder and CEO of Forcivity, has been named President and Chief Growth Officer.
“Combined under the Forcivity brand, we will draw on our decades of experience to push the boundaries of customer experience and remain focused on delivering outstanding technology capabilities and best-practices to our customers,” said Oskin.
Seven months ago, I talked with Steve Baines about Forcivity’s breakout results with 2400 percent growth that landed this Manchester-based company at position #157 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America.
On March 31 I revisited Steve based in Manchester along with Jeff Oskin in Saratoga Springs, NY, thanks to the immediacy of video conferencing. My executive summary of our conversation would boil down to a highly compatible merger of teams with shared values, shared leadership style and a vision that will leverage technology while transforming service operations.
Jolt is well-matched here, having doubled in size in terms of revenue in each of the last five consecutive years. They have been recognized by Salesforce.com, Inc. as being in the top 2 percent of worldwide partners within the service operations sphere. This is a merger of complementary skill sets and complementary offerings to better serve their customers. With humor, they refer to the new business internally as Forcivity 2.0, but really, this is a great implementation of practicing what they preach. They will create more effective results faster and offer a broader pathway for customer engagement and staff growth opportunities.
“Do it right, or do it right now.”
While many companies were thrown into remote work, the topic of remote/virtual concerns never came up. We all agreed that the businesses with the greatest opportunity for growth are quick to adopt new methods and adapt to change quickly. The power of products created by Salesforce.com and the backroom service operations they allow for let a business of any size quickly scale up to meet challenges and opportunities as they arise. Even a business of one person, working from home, can have a backroom support operation around the clock and around the world.
Our conversation brought up their shared values around the important things like honesty, integrity and hard work. Both leaders strongly hold these values. The positive chemistry allows them to mesh well and quickly leverage expansive internal resources on joint sales calls. With today’s pressures it is not speed to market alone but quality of what you deliver. Steve says one can “do it right, or do it right now.” He and Jeff had long conversations up front to look at team chemistry and they’ve been most gratified with the results.
What’s exciting to these guys? Steve says “they have already had some joint sales opportunities as a unified company, delivered projects together as a unified company and it’s been great to see the collaboration across the teams. We have new folks, new experiences and new perspectives on how to do things.” They have an internal knowledge base they can tap into to make them successful. They are creating jobs as part of this synergy and growth. They are already trying to fill a couple of positions because the demand for what they do “is through the roof.” There is a real positive economic impact. They are creating jobs.
You may not like change, but understand, adapt and deploy the new tools and with a team behind you, any size organization can transform quickly. As Jeff Oskin said, “The formation of this company has created the single largest provider of business and technology services for the service operations world. There’s nobody else out there that does what we do.”
And today, unique and effective are important components to leverage.
Forcivity is headquartered at 1000 Elm St. in Manchester, NH. Learn more here.
Keith Spiro’s Communicast cranks up the volume on the great things good people are doing in and around our city and state. Want in on the conversation? Contact him at keith@keithspiromedia.com
