Spitfire growing revenues

LONGMONT – Although the services The Spitfire Group provides are pretty technical, the company’s success really is based on customer service.

So says Mark Richtermeyer, chief executive and president of the Longmont-based management and IT consulting and software-development company.

Staying with what Richtermeyer calls “outside-in” has helped garner the company a whopping revenue increase of 900 percent between 2004 and 2005, growing to $2.5 million from $250,000.

That growth landed The Spitfire Group the No. 1 spot on the Mercury 100 fastest-growing companies list with revenues more than $2 million.

Outside-in has a little bit of Golden Rule in it; as Richtermeyer says, it means being “externally focused, viewing ourselves as we think our clients would view us.”

Focus on the customer turns into “conscientious delivery of services,” he says.

That focus is apparent inside and outside the company, he says. Spitfire hired a marketing professional to help update its Web site. She talked with the founders – Richtermeyer and Senior Vice President Kimberly Lucas – along with employees and clients, to see how they viewed the company. She told him the message was the same no matter whom she spoke with. “We had done a pretty good job of aligning our sales message, marketing message, internal people, process and delivery. That’s something that helps success,” Richtermeyer says.

Other things that spell success include growing the client base about tenfold from 2004 to 2005 and getting add-on work from current clients, Lucas adds.

Spitfire projects involve technology strategy, e-commerce, business intelligence and application integration. Customers include Front Range second-tier, mid-market companies or large companies headquartered elsewhere with a second-tier presence in the area, all in the $10 million to $1 billion range.

Spitfire targets that audience because mid-market companies want “hand-holding, senior people, good processes, a business approach and somebody that understands their business,” Richtermeyer says. “They also don’t want to pay the highest rates.”

The company’s clients – which cannot be disclosed – are spread along the Front Range from the Wyoming border to Colorado Springs.

Spitfire prides itself on hiring the best people, Lucas and Richtermeyer say. All 35 Spitfire consultants have more than 10 years experience. We have “small teams of smart people doing technology projects with a high success rate,” Richtermeyer says.

Spitfire projects tend to be in the $150,000 to $250,000 range, lasting two to three months using three or four people per project, he said.

In an interview in July 2005, Richtermeyer told the Business Report that Spitfire was in the process of developing intellectual capital to spin off. “We own some software that we identified as intellectual capital early on, and we’ve created a network of investors and friends to review it to see if it’s something they want to invest in,” he said.

This strategy doesn’t work for every project, however. Most projects are “work for hire,” where the client will own all the deliverables. In other cases, the client partners with Spitfire to develop reusable intellectual capital to spin off. At other times, Spitfire creates its own intellectual property. “We can spend a little bit of time investing in it,” Richtermeyer said.

Richtermeyer and Lucas are both professional services consulting veterans. In the 1990s Richtermeyer was an executive with Denver-based consulting company CCG, which was sold to iXL in 1997. When iXL folded during the dot-com bust, he joined Tactica, which was sold to Hitachi Consulting in 2001.

The two met at iXL and continued their working relationship at Hitachi until they launched Spitfire.

The Spitfire Group
1700 Kylie Drive, Suite 140,
Longmont, CO 80501
(303) 485-1880
www.spitfiregroup.com
Mark Richtermeyer, president and chief executive; Kimberly Lucas, senior vice president
Employees: 35
Primary service:
management consulting
Founded: 2004

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