Clover Communications

CF: You bought Clover Communications more than a year ago. What were you looking for then? Would you say you’re looking for similar things now? What kind of company fits the profile?

SE: First off, Clover was a perfect fit, and a little over a year later, I can still say they are a perfect fit across the board. First, from a culture perspective. Customer-facing, experts in the space, great IT strategists and business people, and people that you would want to be with. Culturally, they fit in great. The second thing is, at the time we were heavily concentrated in California and on the West Coast. [Clover] gave us a fantastic footprint in the Northeast. It’s been an amazing partnership, because we brought on a number of new strategists, and the thesis has worked. Meaning, they’re focusing predominantly on sales and some operations at the field level but we’ve taken all the back office – marketing, accounting, finance, HR, legal, supplier management – off their plate. They’re doing phenomenally well on the sales side. That’s really what we’re looking for: a culture fit as well as geographic dispersion outside of our current areas and people that want to grow. We’re very interested in growing, and we’re interested in customer-facing companies that have gas in the tank and want to continue growing in the mid-enterprise and large enterprise space.