Exit Strategy: Jamison West Leaves Aldridge, Launches SaaS Play
For the first time in more than two decades, Jamison West showed up to work this week to do something other than provide managed IT services.
West spent 21 years at the helm of Seattle managed services provider (MSP) Arterian. When he sold the company to Aldridge a couple years ago, West stayed on to turn Arterian into a cloud services arm of the Texas-based regional MSP.
In January, he and Aldridge CEO Patrick Wiley discussed fully rolling up Arterian into Aldridge.
West would take on a new role.
“I decided it was a role I wouldn’t be passionate about,” he told MSPmentor this week. “It just kind of became an opening for me to go out and try a new a thing.”
Things were good at Aldridge, West explained.
But the entrepreneur built his career on bold business moves, acquiring three separate MSPs into Arterian before Aldridge came along.
West wanted to captain his own ship again.
Right around the time of the roll-up discussions at Aldridge, an old acquaintance, Duane Edwards, called up West, out of the blue.
“He had this idea for a company that would really help manage people – teams,” West said. “He’d been working on the science and the software behind it.”
The idea felt right.
West stayed at Aldridge six more weeks and worked his last day on Feb. 28.
Two weeks later, he and his wife packed up from the Pacific Northwest and moved to Las Vegas.
This week, West, Edwards and co-founder Maria Terekhina launched Teamatics, designed to be a one-of-a-kind digital platform that gives organizations a scientific approach to building and managing effective teams.
The technology is founded on academic research in sociology, psychology, business management, mathematics and statistics.
The underlying algorithms help leaders to identify and bring together the optimal mix of people for a particular mission, and measure the results.
“We assess and create profiles around everybody in the organizations,” said West, the startup’s CEO. “Their personalities, their talents, their values and interests; we look at those four things and we help align a team so that they can perform at their maximum potential.”
The key is teaming individuals who have the right skills for a task and the right temperaments to work well together.
“These people like to compete and these people like to collaborate; they’re diametrically opposed,” West explained. “We need this team that is going to perform against their objectives and also people who are working at a very high level as a team.”
Pricing for the SaaS-delivered product includes three tiers: the “Free” option with quick insights; a $49 per month “Team” option that allows for unlimited employees; and the “Organization” tier, an enterprise-grade service which costs $9 per employee, per month.
The pay packages come with a free 30-day trial.
As he dug into his first week in a new business and industry, West seemed downright giddy.
“It feels great,” he said. “While I loved becoming an expert in something and helping my (MSP) clients achieve more; as we grew, it became more of an operational role.”
“I am an entrepreneur,” West continued. “To leverage my skills to do something with renewed passion and affect more people is very exciting.”
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