By T.J. Prieur
This year, Zenetex, a small business specializing in IT service management, will celebrate two anniversaries: its 10th as a company and its second under new management.
It’s a small world for Zenetex’s IT specialists.
Mark Gerasch, who joined the company last September as vice president of integrated training systems, says that during his 20 years in the industry, he’s never worked for anyone other than the executive management currently running Zenetex.
SOLID FOUNDATION | The team at Zenetex credits its success to successful new management. Photo by Paul Chin, Jr.
“There’s a lineage there,” Gerasch says.
Fresh out of college, he worked for Zenetex CEO Mark Green and later, Zenetex president and COO Dennis England. They’ve sold companies together and switched companies together. In fact, that’s how Zenetex’s new management took over this company in particular.
In the preceding years, there had been discussion among a number of IT professionals about starting a new company. While working for big businesses, they realized that they missed the small business atmosphere in which they had started their careers.
“The constant connection to our customer,” Gerasch explains, “the constant connection to the people you work with, the family oriented environment, the ability to be flexible and agile, the ability to do some things that you hadn’t been able to do at a big company—we all missed that.”
On Sept. 10, 2008, Mark Green put up the money for a group of executives to take over Zenetex, which was already established and profitable.
We came in to give the company a different drive and perspective, Gerasch says. They wanted to diversify an already successful and well-respected company.
“You’ve seen companies that are an inch deep and a mile wide,” he explains, “and you see companies that are a mile deep and an inch wide. And that’s a struggle for any small company.
“If you’re only this wide but you’re this deep”—he uses his hands to illustrate his point—“then you’re pretty well steeped in a niche. But if you’re this wide and this deep, then you don’t really have any core capability that you can really create success from.”
Some small businesses, Gerasch explains, choose their capability like a tumbleweed, going wherever the wind takes them. And that’s fine, he says, because you’ll find success that way, but it won’t necessarily endure as the markets change.
“We are trying to be as wide as we are deep,” Gerasch says, “and in order to do that, we have to pick certain, what we call strategic and/or tactical opportunities to go after. We’ve been fairly successful doing that.”
Before the new group of owners came in, Zenetex’s focus was on IT infrastructure, information and transformation, he says. They got their start with a Citicorp account and the renovation of the Pentagon following 9/11.
What the new owners have since done, he explains, is bring in additional capabilities, like training, foreign military sales, program management and engineering services.
“Our goal is, for the end of next year, that we have a good foundation in all of those core capabilities,” he says.
Gerasch is wary of relying on any one capability to support the company’s business, and rightly so.
“If that core capability goes out of favor in that particular marketplace, then the small business is going to fail. And that traditionally happens with some small businesses. They get a great niche and they do really well, and then all of a sudden, technology changes or there’s some sort of turnover, and something happens and then they don’t have some sort of future plan,” he says.
Zenetex’s corporate cultural philosophy is one that nurtures organic growth by putting people, employees and customers, first. It’s about taking the best of big business—diversity—and the best of small business—service—and putting them together.
It seems to be working. Zenetex has grown significantly, according to Gerasch, from roughly 40 employees and 1099 consultants to nearly 150 in less than nine months. Though the company is based in Virginia Beach, it has two other main offices in Herndon, Va., and California, Md., as well as field offices across the United States.
