Brace Yourself For Meeting Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

An engineer by training, business developer by profession and educator at heart, Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan is one of the handful of high-tech business development strategists with over a decade of experience in various engineering and technology positions, including being a technical buyer, which he calls the perfect preparation for his business development career.

This weird blend of backgrounds and insights also enable him to help his clients to develop practical business solutions for their clients, as opposed to merely peddling the next latest and greatest, robust, state-of-the-art technical gadget. That is, using technology better to improve business results, not merely using more technology for technology's sake.

In contrast with many sales experts who teach their clients how to sell, Tom, a former buyer himself, helps his clients to understand how buyers buy, which is drastically different and more profitable from ugly, filthy, mind-numbing, bone-jarring, soul-sinking cold-prospecting grunt work and old fashioned sleazy sales tactics. So, Tom's clients are sought out by the cream of their target markets as recognised experts and never have to live the miserable life of dreaded peddlers.

Over the years, Tom has helped his clients to amass some $430 million in new revenue with as high as 78% net margin, achieving as high as $1.34 million revenue per employee in productivity.

In his work, Tom uses his military[1] training and hands-on experience of working in and leading peak performance teams, and translates it into building low-headcount high-impact business development teams, modelled after the most effective and dependable team mankind has ever assembled. The smallest, yet the most feared group of cross-trained professionals: The military commando.

What makes Tom's help and support unique is the highly diverse, and seemingly unrelated, perspectives he brings to his clients' tables through his past stints as a butcher, embalmer, gravedigger, hearse driver, coffin maker, bouncer, personal trainer, university lecturer, crematorium attendant, engineer, aerobics instructor (He's the inventor of Metalrobics, high-low aerobics to heavy metal music), farmer and even a rock singer for a short time. In the 1990s, with an amateur punk rock group in London, UK, he recorded a cover version of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK. Nevertheless, he has never been discovered as a rock singer, and his singing career hasn't taken off... yet.

And while all these experiences may look innocent and irrelevant enough on the surface, we know from Gabriele Veneziano's theory of quantum physics...

"Everything is connected with everything else."

On the academic side, Tom studied English and adult education at Cambridge University, electronics and computer engineering at the University of Greenwich and leadership and business development at the London on Business School. He is in his final lap to earn his Certified Management Consultant designation, which is achieved by fewer than 1% of management consultants.

On the practical side, he's studied under the tutelage of some of the top business experts, including but not limited to Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, Bob Bly, Jay Conrad Levinson and Michael Gerber, Robert Middleton and several other accomplished entrepreneurs.

And of course he's studied the old classics, like David Ogilvy, P.T. Barnum, Clyde Bedell, Leo Burnett, John Caples, Robert Collier, Claude Hopkins, John E. Kennedy, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, Victor Schwab and some others.

When it comes to business development, many companies hire MBAs and other academically mass-produced[2] "experts" who have impressive resumes and were so shiningly alive within the small confines of university campuses and the sterility of classrooms, working on purely theoretical scenarios with no real-life relevance, while standing clueless, hopeless, hapless and helpless like a deer caught in headlights when real "trench-level" expertise is called for to solve real-life business development problems to generate real clients who pay real money.

Clients hire Tom because he, in close collaboration with his clients' key people, actually implements his advice, unlike so many "experts" who operate on an "Advise & vanish" basis.

And beyond all that, Tom's spare time is dedicated to skydiving, enjoying the outdoors, studying military strategy and running a microscopic fitness and lifestyle advisory practice for female executives and business owners.

Among high-tech business developers and copywriters, hands-on technology expertise and experience are very rare, and being a former buyer is even more unheard of. But this extra is essential if you want to make sure that every message that comes out of your sales and marketing department has unquestionable, full credibility with high-level decisions-makers, many of whom have advanced technical education and expertise. This is what you get when you work with Tom.

[1] A study by Korn/Ferry International and The Economist Intelligence Units has found that 59 companies on the S&P 500 headed by ex-military CEOs provide an average annual shareholder return of 21% over the three year period ending September 2005, versus 11% for the S&P 500 Index during the same time. Maybe this is why former Coca Cola CEO, John Hayes; former State Street Bank CEO, Marshall Carter; and AOL founder, Jim Kimsey refer to the military as the "World's finest business school". Continue where you've left off...

[2] North America produces just shy of 100,000 MBAs and about 350,000 other business graduates every single year. If this is not hard-core me-too-ism, then I don't know what is. Continue where you've left off...