David Schuette tried to leave his sales job at IBM on several occasions, but each time his manager refused to accept his resignation. His manager would tell him that the Dallas Cowboys would never trade their back-up quarterback, a role he felt Schuette fit perfectly. Then a funny thing happened. The Cowboys did trade their back-up quarterback and Schuette clipped the headline, fired it off to his manager along with his latest resignation letter, and left on a path that eventually took him to where he is today, chief strategy officer at BusinessEdge Solutions. East Brunswick, N.J.-based BusinessEdge Solutions touts Schuette as the leader of its stratical customer centricity competency center. "Stratical customer centricity," an awkward conglomeration of buzzwords, actually makes sense when Schuette explains it: "We apply the strategies that firms like Booz Allen and Bain & Company drop on their clients. We think of it as bridging strategic to tactical, which gives you 'stratical.'"
Although odd sounding, the stratical concept, which Schuette started two years ago with a financial services client, appears to have caught on, generating more the $33 million in revenue.
The customer centricity part refers to the firm's focus on customer data. "All business centers around the data. When you focus on the data, it opens a lot of doors for you," Schuette explains. By focusing on customer data, for instance, BusinessEdge gets to touch many different processes and business units at the client, which enables it to generate such high volumes of revenue.
At BusinessEdge, Schuette stands out as different. The firm generally takes a vertical focus, but Schuette brings a cross-industry view. He influences the vertical units but isn't necessarily a part of them. "The benefit of being an influencer is that you're not responsible for actually managing all those people," he says. The firm, growing at 20 percent a year, currently has about 800 people.
When Schuette is not working, he spends his time with his wife and daughter. He travels about 40 percent of his time, but the firm does work primarily on the East Coast, which reduces the length of his trips. Eventually, he may even be able to combine business and family time since his wife has earned her private pilot license, and his daughter also is well on her way. "She will have her pilot's license before she has a driver's license," he says.
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