I have been traveling lately, and it gives me time to reflect on our business, our customers, and why we do what we do. One of the persistent questions I have is why do our customers choose us?
Why do our customers remain loyal to us?
The answer in our case is not unique to any other business. It is that our customers value what we do for them. This profound statement is what keeps our employees paid and our calendars booked.
The value that we most want our customers to find is in our advice. For over 40 years, Systems Services has been in the business of consulting. Sure, we do programming, system integration, and sell a few computers. However, not a day goes by that we do not find ourselves in a long conversation with customers about their business processes, and their strategies. I venture to say that I know more about some of my customer's businesses than most of their employee's.
I think that if we only provided programming, or software we would be out of business like every other pop-up IT company that we see. Our value is listening to problems and finding solutions. Sometimes, we are not capable of delivering the solutions, often we are.
When I was in graduate school one of the themes that we often discussed was the "value proposition." The value proposition is basically the intersection between the customer's perceived value of doing business, and our company's promise of delivered value. In a world full of fly by night businesses and one stop shops, I find it refreshing to work for a company that knows their strengths, weaknesses, and limitations.
Our value proposition is simple:
We will, to the best of our ability, help your company to develop and implement an IT strategy that you can afford and manage yourself.
