Branding Matters: Genesis10 Savors Success But Finds “Word-of-Mouth” Only Goes So Far

New York – Harley Lippman has built his Genesis10 consulting, staffing and domestic outsourcing company primarily by word-of-mouth, competing successfully against much larger firms without a marketing department and no big PR campaigns, just a staff of hand-picked employees and a small sales team.

So far, “it’s been all organic growth, there is no secret sauce,’” Lippman says of Genesis10’s rise into the middle market. “It’s all in the execution, that’s what it’s all about.”

With its motto, “under promise, over deliver,” Genesis10 has experienced organic growth of approximately 29 percent since Lippman founded the company in 1999 and its revenues are now at the $200 million mark. Asked how he’s done it, Lippman replies, “We’re very quick to say ‘no.’ We [only] take on things we’re very confident we can succeed at and excel at.”

Even during the recent recession, “we were attractive to a lot of our clients because they saw that they could save money with us,” Lippman says. “By conventional wisdom you’d think that when the market goes down we would go down with it, but it didn’t happen like that.”

The company models its IT outsourcing services after India’s great offshore success but with a twist. “We do what they do in India but our model is that we do it only in the United States,” Lippman says. He believes in bringing work back to the U.S., especially now that offshore and domestic labor and other costs have become competitive.

In fact, Lippman says, the company has sacrificed profits on occasion to keep the work in the U.S. “While profits are always important, you have to strike the right balance between profits and social responsibility, and the No. 1 issue in the United States still is jobs,” he points out.

Over the past five years Genesis10 has established outsourcing locations in low-cost areas known for having an abundance of talent, including Kansas City, Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Florida. About 80 percent of the company’s 2000 employees work at those locations or directly at client sites. By design the NY management group is kept small.

Lippman insists Genesis10 can hold its own against any competitor – including the largest IT consultants and the major off-shore companies – and has a higher success rate than they do.
At the same time he acknowledges that the flattening of the worldwide outsourcing market requires a new approach if Genesis10 is to continue to succeed where it is.

“The mid-size is a really good place to be because we’re big enough to scale and we’re also not so big that we take the client’s business for granted, or we fail. Failure is just not an option,” he explains.

“The very large companies, the largest, frankly can fail, and do fail, and it’s not a dent in their armor because they have brand name,” Lippman says. “They’re often hard to work with and they impose a methodology, a way of doing business, whereas a small company, the under $20 million, they have passionate CEOs very often but they don’t have the depth of knowledge and they don’t have the ability to scale, which is critical.”

But, he also admits, “The challenge that we have is we don’t have the brand recognition. That’s what gets in the way more than anything in our ability to be as successful as we’d like to be.” Asked what he’s doing to remedy that situation, Lippman says “things like this. Earlier we shied away from the press. We also didn’t know that we’d grow so quickly.”

Genesis10’s new strategy to gain greater brand recognition has included adding a sizeable marketing department and hiring a public relations firm. Also, Lippman has become somewhat of a thought leader on business trends. He’s been interviewed by well-known business publications and has appeared on national TV a half dozen times in the past 18 months.