JDB Celebrates 10th Year in Business!
By Jaime Engel, JDB Associates

Wow, it’s funny how time flies.  This is JDB’s 10th year in business!  When Dave Vernon and I founded this company way back in 1993, our long-term goals were to scratch out a living and hopefully have a little fun in the process.  Surviving the first month was about as far out as we dared to look.  After we had cash flow to cover our expenses and pay ourselves minimal salaries, we started looking further out into the future, and even started thinking about the next year.

Dave and I met while working for Andersen Consulting in the late 1980’s.  We worked on our first project together at the Port Authority of St. Paul.  We worked a lot of overtime in those first few months.  I remember eating pizza at the top of Landmark Tower on a Saturday evening watching the Winter Carnival Parade pass below during one of the many long weekends.  Working in the trenches with Dave for those long months helped us develop a friendship and bond that still endures today.  If it wasn’t for this mutual respect, I know that I wouldn’t have made it 10 years.

It was a few years after I had left Andersen that Dave and I started talking about what it would be like to start our own company.  In my new role as an IS Applications Manager, I had to deal with consultants that we had been using to help us with several large projects.  I was shocked at the low level of service that we were getting from many of the “consulting” firms that we had to choose from.  There seemed to be very few people who had any communication or business skills.  Instead of business consultants with technical backgrounds, we got techies who were unable to understand or adapt to our specific needs.  They knew every programming trick in the book and could rattle off every acronym known to man, but they were never really able to pull it all together to help solve our business problems.  With the wrong management or direction, they could do as much (or more) harm than good.  It was a full-time job to just manage these contract programmers.  The value just didn’t seem to be there to me as a buyer.  As Dave and I discussed this we recognized that small companies had smaller budgets but still needed solid business consulting assistance.  We spent months crafting a business plan, discussing sales and marketing strategies, and trying to figure out how we were going to be able to pay the mortgage if things didn’t work out.  Finally, in mid-1993, we announced our intentions and JDB Associates was up and running shortly afterwards.

Boy, did we learn a lot in a hurry; talk about trial by fire.  Within the first year, we had our first employees, employee manuals, medical plans, profit sharing and 401k plans.  We quickly realized that there was a lot more to running a business than we had ever imagined.  We were lucky enough to have surrounded ourselves with partners and advisors that allowed us to focus on the all-important task of finding the right people and developing the right solutions for our customers, at least until we could take over more of the day-to-day tasks ourselves.

As I look back on the past 10 years, I am reminded of some of my personal highlights.  I can’t forget the shock of finding out that my wife was pregnant with our first child the month after we started the business.  I was stressed out enough already!  I recall the endless work trying to build our reputation one customer at a time and the sense of accomplishment each time we successfully completed a project and the customer hired us for something new.  I can’t forget some of the great companies I have had the chance to work for over the years, or the people I have met along the way. 

I am very proud of where JDB is today.  We have learned a lot over the years, but I am sure the next 10 years will hold just as many lessons.  We have maintained our focus on quality and our customers appreciate the “whatever it takes to get the job done” attitude that we bring with us.  We have a great core of committed employees and are poised to deliver solutions to our customers for the next ten years and beyond.  For those of you who have been there and helped JDB over the years, whether it was as a client, employee or friend, I sincerely thank you. 

It’s been a great ride so far, and I look forward to celebrating our 20th anniversary in 2013!