Minnesota Technology Magazine - Winter 2007
Lasting Impact
Kimberly M. Roden, Chair, MTI Board of Directors
The pages of Minnesota Technology® regularly feature success stories of Minnesota businesses and entrepreneurs, many of whose accomplishments were enhanced and enabled by the efforts of the capable team of consultants who work for MTI. But, if you’ll indulge a little pride from this organization’s board chair, I think this marks a good juncture to crow bit about MTI’s own remarkable business transformation.
Not long ago, MTI’s funding from the Minnesota state government came to an end when the legislature, facing tight budgets, decreed that MTI should forego its public funding and go out on its own. I won’t deny that this decision was initially met with a little discrete kicking and screaming from within the MTI offices. After all, transitioning from a model in which services that had long been provided for free to one in which they would now carry a price tag…well, “free” is a fairly intimidating price point.
Most observers expected MTI to leave the market quietly. But we didn’t, based on two unexpected lessons. First, we quickly learned that MTI’s clients are MTI’s friends. Our clients bombarded the legislative funding debate with scores of localized businesses that credited their job-creating growth and success at least in part to the advice and expertise they got from MTI. Adversity is a great time to discover who your friends are—and MTI discovered that it has lots of great friends.
The second lesson is related, but its gestation took a little longer: MTI could transform its products and its customer relationships into a fee-for-service structure. That process required a ground-up internal reorientation of our culture and our products. Like any business that faces a change in supply or demand, we had to reassess. We analyzed every part of our operation. We sorted out what we did best and what provided the most good. We cut the activities we had to and bolstered what was left.
What emerged was a lean, focused, and successfully cash-flowing enterprise. I can’t think of a single other organization that has made such a transformation.
In the last few years alone, MTI has assisted more than 1,100 Minnesota businesses. These companies realized a positive economic impact of $27.5 million toward their bottom lines in increased sales, reduced production costs, and improved employee utilization. Along the way, more than 1,430 jobs were created and/or retained.
The story of this impressive conversion becomes relevant today as a setting for me to recognize the work of Dr. Wayne Pletcher, whose three-year tenure as MTI’s president and CEO coincided with this transformation, and who recently stepped down from that position. Wayne used his 32 years of business experience as an executive at 3M to bring to MTI a welcome blend of internal calm and organizational discipline for this important transition.
Wayne is a solid professional and a good guy. All of us who worked with and for him during this critical junction in MTI’s history offer our thanks and best wishes.
Sincerely,
Kimberly M. Roden Chair,
MTI Board of Directors
Photograph by Dan Marshall.
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