A COO runs two IT companies with opposite markets: one serves metro areas with staffing, the other serves rural communities with managed services. They operate differently but share a mission to support their regions, which lets them co-sell and align client work as the brands grow closer together.
So, if you look at the organization with the 2 different brands and you are the COO overseeing both of them, I'm sure at some time, at some point it can feel like a juggling act. How do you handle prioritizing not just inside of an organization, but between brands on a daily basis? That's a great question.
You know, it, it is, you know, both brands functionally, they're very different where our, our Optum brand operates with contract IT staffing and other talent-based solutions, but they operate in major metro areas. And we've got offices, primary offices in 3 major metro areas and a couple smaller offices as well. And then we've got the rural side, which is all in rural America. So culturally there's differences from a business standpoint, there's differences, but at the absolute core, the mission spans both. We are hyper-focused on supporting our communities, the communities here, look a little different than they might in rural America, but at their core, they're one and the same, which helps as we build the company and we bridge these bands closer and closer together. There are many more commonalities that exist between the two than there may appear from the surface. We're reaching to similar clients, we're reaching to similar levels of buyers, we're co-selling together if you need the totality of a managed service with some staff augmentation alongside of it. And so It, it is difficult to balance between the two, but as we grow as an organization, they're moving closer together than further apart, which ironically enough actually makes my job easier.
Absolutely. I love that the mission is the same. I really didn't consider that because most businesses think their mission is, I'm gonna provide the best IT services or the best staffing services. But when the mission is to support the communities, the product almost doesn't matter because you're going to operate That's right.
And, you know, for us on both sides, it becomes a very easy concept to relate to because for us, we think about community in a number of different ways. You have your physical community that you reside in. You've got your work community of peers. You've got your familial community. You may have your church community. You may have your, you know, local giveback community, what have you. There's a number of different ways that someone can apply the community concept to their life. to their jobs. And they do. We are ultimately in the employment business. Our contractors that we deploy on the staffing side are on our payroll. And so we're giving them jobs and opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have found or they wouldn't have had. And so on the managed services side, we're taking these careers and opportunities to rural America where they never existed. And so for us, it's very easy to get behind that. We are quite literally putting people to work across the span of everything that we do.
