We received the Pinnacle Award in the Business Technology category from the BBB for surpassing the standards put forth by the Better Business Bureau. We distinguished ourselves by showing dedication to exceeding client expectations, recruiting and retaining the best talent, answering ethical challenges in the industry and bettering our community. Here are some areas highlighted by answers from our winning application.
Client Satisfaction:
“It is extremely important to us to build a valuable working relationship with our customers where we find a place of mutual benefit.”
“We constantly assess the quality of our project and if that quality drops we make sure to respond to what occurred in not only an honest manner toward our external partners, but also internally to make sure that it does not occur again.”
“We delve into the clients’ needs and identify how we can provide value, and only after both the need and the value-add are identified do we have a valid place to move forward.”
“We will pass up on projects if we cannot meet budgetary needs instead of taking them on and then surprising clients with changes or price increases.”
“We consider our contract our word, and meet it even if that has a cost to the company.”
Attracting and Keeping Top Talents:
“Guiding strong minds to good career decisions is important outside our own goals, but inevitably some audience members end up interested in us as a company.”
“Our CEO is also active in university presentations, and having had exposure to how our CEO thinks, what we value and who we are is often the beginning of a recruiting conversation.”
“We value home lives, and work to achieve both happy customers and happy spouses and children.”
“We encourage employee initiated events, like a monthly company sponsored happy hour, sometimes with trivia, others where everyone brings their dogs, and some where we just set up a kickball team.”
Ethical Challenges in our Industry:
Offshoring for onshore pricing
“Many companies seem to have a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy regarding offshoring project work and then passing it off for high-end trained specialist prices.”
“We only deliver software of the highest quality, developed by local, trained professionals. Our solutions think not only of the immediate return on investment for the company we’re working with, but also for the long-term impact of the systems we provide.”
Intellectual Property Trickery
“Another worrisome unethical practice in our industry concerns Intellectual Property ‘fine print’ that sometimes even gets passed off to clients as a value add, but is extremely dangerous for them.”
“The first scenario occurs when there is no grant of license, which means that the vendor owns all rights to the software other than the use of the end product. Meaning that at any point in time, that vendor can take away the software on which the customer is now dependent!”
“The second scenario involves a ‘proprietary platform’- this is often sold as a value-add that reduces time to the solution. But what it creates is a situation where the client becomes absolutely dependent on an ever-changing product.”
“We would never practice any of these unethical scenarios, and in fact have written and blogged about how to best notice and avoid companies who do these things, in the hopes that those needing software become aware of these scams.”
Bettering Our Community:
“We run 5 and 10k’s as a company that raise money and awareness for cancer. In fact, this February we are participating in the Rodeo Run, and some of our staff is even involved in raising money for leukemia research by running the Houston Marathon with a team.”
“Nate Richards, our CEO, is on the board of directors of LifeHouse, a charitable organization providing a supportive maternity home to women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant.”
“Veronica Herrera offers career development counseling to underprivileged high school students, hoping to guide them to better choices for universities and then careers.”