Welcome to IT Profit Reboot

Scintillatingly subversive hello to you from the mighty city of Vancouver where the action never stops even as we change our socks.

I'm Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, and if you run an entrepreneurial information technology firm or you're a solo IT professional who's looking for ways to improve business, then you'll find this website helpful.

Especially if you want to...

If this is case, you might as well stay here and see what sort of ordeal this website can offer you.

Why You May Find The Information On This Website Valuable

Buyers of IT products and services are strange creatures. But all IT sellers need them to stay in business.

You can't sell anything without someone's buying it from you.

But there is a huge difference...

In the traditional sales model, aggressive, hard-nosed sales hunters go out and chase, hunt, hound, pound and bludgeon buyers until they relent and hand over their money... often for something they don't want or need.

The salesperson is happy because she's making quota.

The sales manager is happy because his sales team is performing really well and the money is rolling in.

By the way, I'm not attacking salespeople here. Most of them are good people, but they've been told to operate on a faulty, obsolete premise.

The premise of dialling for dollars and banging on doors, and doing all that lunacy harder and longer because sales is a numbers game, and if you want to hit your numbers you have to play the game.

Oh and the other part of the game is to be able to take preponderance of verbal abuse from people on the buyer's side.

And who's told salespeople to operate like that?

In most cases, the sales gurus of the 70s and 80s, who've been teaching their methods for 20-30 years, but haven't actually sold anything in this new, post-Internet economy.

Besides, most of those sales gurus sold impulse-purchase commodities to the unwashed masses.

Here we're talking about selling highly differentiated products and services to niche markets.

Anyway...

But somehow, in the middle of this shuffling madness of feverish prospect-chasing pandemonium, sales managers have forgotten to tell their salespeople that the game has changed and no one wants to meet them anymore.

Thanks to the Internet, buyers have all the information they need, and don't give a rat's arse about meeting salespeople.

Actually, they do their best to avoid them like the plague.

How do you know? - You may ask.

Well, in a former life, I spent 16 years in the high tech industry on the buyer's side of the negotiation table.

I've seen and heard what you and most IT sellers have probably never seen or heard.

Before getting into IT business development in 1998, between 1982 and 1998, I worked in the high tech industry as an electronics/computer engineer, project manager and technical buyer, and participated in the purchase of some $610 million worth of high tech products and services.

I'm one of the very few IT business developers with university-level subject matter expertise and extensive industrial experience, apparently the top two attributes smart buyers are looking for when hiring external professionals.

In that capacity, I've "digested" over 8,000 pages of proposals, ranging from small projects to large, high 7-figure IT infrastructure design and development projects.

I sat through over 2,500 hours of sales presentations and saw the good, the bad and the ugly and how buyers respond to them.

Since 1998, I've worked with some 450 privately owned "entrepreneurial" IT companies all over the globe on a broad range of business development issues.

Since 1982, I've talked to over 5,000 business owners and economic buyers about the ins and outs of how they buy IT solutions.

All these interactions have made me understand that the earlier you can enter the buying process, the sexier projects you can land, the better clients you can acquire and the more they pay you.

So, this website is all about how to do all this business development stuff using as low headcount and as high systemisation and automation as possible.

So, having read so far, I hope, you have a better understanding of my perspective and frame of reference regarding buying and selling.

Or maybe I've managed to totally flummox you, and now you're shaking your head in bewilderment and feel more dazed and confused than Robert Plant and Jimmy Page could have imagined while writing the Led Zeppelin evergreen "Dazed And Confused" in the late 60s.

But I hope not.

A while ago my girlfriend read an article - if I remember correctly - in Cosmopolitan. The article's title was, "Unless you've learnt how to go down on a woman from a woman, you're probably doing it all wrong."

This business development stuff is pretty much the same.

Unless you've learnt it from someone who's lived and worked on the buyer's side, you may be making some major or minor errors that, instead of attracting, repel buyers.

If you think it's worth finding out what those practices are and how they may apply to your business, you can download my white paper called More Brain, Less Brawn, referring to the two human elements that IT companies use to acquire clients. Some use brain, some use brawn. But they all use something.

What you find on this website is all about using more brain and less brawn. If you like this philosophy, then read on.

About IT Profit Reboot

IT Profit Reboot is a globally operating consulting firm in Vancouver, Canada, run by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan.

It specialises in helping progressive, socially responsible privately owned "entrepreneurial" type information technology companies to better market and sell their new, complex, expensive and/or hard-to-explain products and services to business-savvy, sophisticated buyers in the B2B arena.

Its domain expertise, industrial experience, insights and understanding of market- and organisational dynamics ensure that its clients achieve lasting results without running army-sized sales forces and resorting to filthy, ugly, heart-sinking, bone-jarring, soul-sucking cold prospecting drudgery.

Realistically, I'm the only person in the company, and I use my reliable connections to put together "Hollywood teams" of specialists as projects require.

The same concept that movie producers use to put together different temporary teams for different movies.

And I use the skills I learnt in the military to lead these teams with great precision.

About Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

Tom 'Bald Dog' VarjanI'm an engineer-turned business developer who was forced into a new career in his late 30s.

Having grown fed up and frustrated with the ruling communist dictatorships in Hungary, in 1988, I defected to England. As a penniless refugee, I started a new life and got my higher education.

I obtained the highest level of English certification from Cambridge University that is given to non-native speakers and earned my degree in electronics and computer engineering at the University of Greenwich in London.

My career took off nicely, but in 1997, I decided to immigrate to Canada.

After arriving in January 1998, to my surprise, I found out that the engineering profession was tightly regulated by the government and, as an immigrant, I would have to crawl over broken glass and rusty nails to be able to work as an engineer in Canada, including going back to university for four years to earn a "proper" degree in engineering.

I was also told by the Canadian engineering authorities that my engineering degree wasn't good enough to work in Canada because I earned it in an underprivileged, industrially inferior country with dubious educational standards. Well, that is the UK. Hm.

First I argued that in my view the UK was a bit of an industrial giant. The government woman told me that relative to Canada, the UK was barely an industrial pigmy.

Well, as American comedian, Ron White put it, "You can't fix stupid", so instead of fighting it, I decided for a career change. I got into IT business development early 1998 and set up the forerunner of IT profit Reboot, which I ran under my own name.

Over the years, my journey of learning has led me to some of the best experts in the industry. The best experts at business development for entrepreneurial businesses (as opposed to giant corporations).

Actually, this is why I dropped the idea of getting an MBA in marketing. It would have taught me how to market giant corporations that sell mass-produced commodities to the unwashed masses.

I was more interested in marketing and selling expensive, complex, hard-to-explain and highly differentiated products and services to sophisticated buyers in B2B niche markets.

Products and services that present such thick and impenetrable purple haze to marketers without subject matter expertise and industrial experience, that they couldn't cut through it.

Not even with Jimi Hendrix as their personal guide.

And doing that for privately owned entrepreneurial businesses.

So, as I look back over the years, all the way to the humble beginnings in 1998, I realise that this business development stuff is an expression of who I am as a person. It's a perfect blend of my craft and personality.

I loved engineering too, but this seems to be different. It seems to me I'm still on my honeymoon with my current career.

A sort of perpetual infatuation. I reckon that confirms I have a strong romantic side.

More as a hobby than a career, I'm also a joint venture partner in four family-operated artisanal farms where we raise pastured and grass fed heritage breed animals and where I work as a marketing guy and butcher.

In my spare time, I like hiking, skydiving and studying "special forces" type military strategy and its application to business. Not a surprising hobby for a former soldier.

Now that you know something about the business and me, you can review who I work with..

       

[1] Acquired or extrinsic capability. Your business is dependent on a "system" which it neither owns nor controls. It's a liability. It's like having an accountant with a gambling addiction.Continue where you've left off...

[1] Inherent, innate or intrinsic capability. Your business is dependent on a "system" which it owns and fully controls. Continue where you've left off...