Hagerman qualifies for Inc 5000 Award for Third
Consecutive Year
Again this year, for the third consecutive year, Hagerman
& Company, Inc. has qualified for the Inc. 5000, the top
5,000 growth companies in America. The 2009 award is based
on a comparison of revenues for 2008 with revenues for 2005.
In our case, the revenue growth over that three year period
was 91.45%, which was sufficient to win this award once
again.
The year 2008 did witness slowing growth toward the end
of the year, as the Great Recession began to sink in.
Nonetheless we were able to grow significantly over 2007,
which was itself a boom year.
Growth requires both a management that is willing to
accept the additional demands placed upon it, and an
effective, scalable foundation to build upon. The foundation
is the organization itself, its capital, people, customer
relationships, and internal business systems. Regarding the
latter requirement, we have found that the investment we
made in CRM ten years ago has paid off in ways we never
expected. It has enabled us to systemize our operations so
that adding a new location, from a systems perspective, is
simply a matter of replicating the system in use everywhere
else in the company.
At the time we invested in Pivotal Software as our CRM
system in 1999, we were the smallest company that had ever
purchased a Pivotal system. So it was definitely something
we could grow with. The old database that we used prior to
that was inadequate even to support the four offices we had
then. Now there are 19 locations, all using the Pivotal
system connected by the Internet to a server at our Illinois
headquarters.
The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the
90?s made possible the widespread use of CRM and was the
underlying factor enabling growth. There is no way we could
conduct our dispersed business today without that
technology. Its effect on business and society is, I
believe, as significant as the Industrial Revolution itself
was in the 18th century.
One thing that has remained the same throughout our 25
year history is that the essential fabric of the business is
the customer relationships that are developed. We believe
that any expansion that is not based on developing long-term
customer relationships is bound to fail. So we seek to be a
trusted advisor to our customers, and to nurture those
relationships as the foundation of success.
Although we?re an intermediary between software
developers and our customers, and we cannot control the
products or policies of our suppliers, we do act as a
sounding board, relaying customer concerns to suppliers, and
advising customers of opportunities that exist for improving
their productivity. We intend to continue this activity and
resume growing the company as the economy returns to normal.
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