Why Ric Wallace and I bought out Circle Square’s early investors, and how owning the company outright lets us make the 20-year decision.
A while back, my co-founder Ric Wallace and I bought out Circle Square’s early investors. It was not a small decision. It took money, time and a lot of late conversations. I’d make it again tomorrow.
Here’s why we did it, and what it changed.
Why we started in the first place
We started Circle Square almost six years ago because we saw problems in the managed IT industry and could see where it was heading. More consolidation. Private equity buying up providers and combining them. Bigger portfolios, more pressure on margin, and fewer people who actually know each client’s environment. That trend has only picked up since.
There are good people working inside all kinds of companies, and I don’t think anyone sets out to give worse service. But a business model pulls in a direction. We wanted ours to pull toward the client.
What we learned about investors
Our early outside shareholders were investors, and they were good at it. What they didn’t have was a background in managed IT. They didn’t see it as a service business, and they didn’t see that in this business the client is the only thing that matters.
You could hear it in the questions. They were always about profitability, and the path there usually meant trading away some quality. Thinner coverage. Faster growth than the team could support. We weren’t willing to make that trade. It would have turned us into the thing we started the company to fix.
So we bought them out. It was a respectful parting, and it was the right one.
The 20-year question
When you’re measured by the quarter, every hard decision comes with a short-term argument attached. Cut the cost. Hit the number. Worry about the consequences next year.
When you own the company and plan to be around, a lot of those arguments fall away. Most decisions come down to one question: will this still be right in 20 years?
I want Circle Square to be something worth handing to the next generation of our team, and thinking that way changes how you make decisions today. It should be in better shape every year than the year before, for the clients and for the team.
What it looks like day to day
Owning the company outright lets us make the long-term call without anyone pushing back on it.
Every client has a primary engineer who owns the account and knows the environment. We match engineers by industry experience and by how much they’re already carrying, because an overloaded engineer can’t give anyone their best work.
Backups are verified daily. Every client has a written continuity plan. We sit down with clients regularly to review risk, continuity, spend and what’s next. Security is mapped to NIST CSF 2.0 and CIS Controls v8.1, so it holds up when an auditor or insurer asks.
None of that shows up as a quick win on a quarterly report. All of it shows up the day something goes wrong. When one of our law firm clients had a security incident, downtime was held to an hour or two. That’s the payoff of a lot of quiet, unglamorous work done ahead of time.
Where we’re going
We’re growing, and we’re proud of it. But we’re growing at the pace the team can support, with the same standard for every client.
We’re also clear about price. We’re not the cheapest option, and we’ll say so up front. What we promise is the same care for every client, for as long as they’re with us.
The clients who were with us on day one are still with us. We’ve never lost a client. That’s the number I watch most closely, and it’s the one I plan to keep watching for a very long time.
One standard. Every client. The door is always open.
Read more about who we are, where we came from and how we work with clients. circlesquareconsulting.com/about-us