Thank you for reading this month’s Inside Tigunia. Tigunia is comprised of industry-leading experts. Inside Tigunia features full-length, candid conversations to introduce the team to our friends and clients.
This month’s spotlight is on Marc Stocker, Tigunia’s Founder and a Managing Partner.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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Tigunia
Marc, thanks for joining me today. Let’s get right into it. You have, in my opinion, the most diverse and intriguing background of anyone I’ve yet interviewed as part of this series so far. So, if you’d kindly, get into the early days of your career and explain how you ended up finding yourself in the IT and BC consulting fields.
Marc Stocker
My background and my education is actually in music. My training was as a professional flutist. I received a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Juilliard, which is a music school in New York City.
Tigunia
A very prestigious musical school, at that.
Marc Stocker
Ha, yes. I spent about eight years in professional symphony orchestras, starting with principal flute in Edmonton, which is the capital of Alberta up in Western Canada. From there, I went to assistant principal flute in the Baltimore Symphony, which is what one would call a second-tier major orchestra. And then, from there, I went to principal flute in Phoenix, which is where I live now. It was at that time that I started to experience hand trouble when I turned 30, which is when you chemically become an adult.
It turned out that I have a rare genetic brain disorder called focal dystonia. It makes your muscles involuntarily contract, so I started to lose my fine motor control in my hands. Probably 3 years prior to that, I started to get very interested in working with personal computers. This was in the late 80s when PCs were in their infancy. And in fact, back in 1988, I had left the Baltimore Symphony and was just doing smaller, freelance orchestra work at places like Lansing Symphony in Michigan, Baltimore Opera Orchestra, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, stuff like that.
During that time, I started studying computers and, at the time we’re talking, DOS level WordPerfect 5.0. I was doing side work like simple word processing stuff. I worked for Johns Hopkins Hospital and University of Maryland in Baltimore and that was all before I went to work for the Phoenix Symphony. I got an interest in it pretty early. When my hands started failing on me, I decided I would just convert to that industry.
I had an adult flute student whose husband was a partner and vice president at Accenture, which at the time was called Anderson Consulting. They were the outsourced Information Systems Department for the Dial Corp, which was a large soap company that was based in Phoenix at the time. That was my introduction to help desk work. I interviewed with that vice president. One day I’m the star of the Phoenix Symphony and the next day I’m slinging PCs for Dial.
That happened in about 1992 and I wasn’t able to go back to music because of the problems with my hands. I’ve been in the IT industry since, starting out at the help desk at Dial and then from there went to other positions that were higher up, typically network engineering type positions. I started to learn how to program while at Dial and working in the Standards and Architecture department. It involved a lot of documentation and programming, so I pretty much learned the infrastructure at the same time as the programming, and just took it from there.
After that, I made my way into consulting positions and eventually found my way into executive positions, as a director of IT. That was about a six-year process, from help desk representative to director. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but apparently the critical thinking that you need as a musician, the discipline and stick-to-itiveness you need to sit in a practice room for five hours working on a particular music passage until you get it perfect, it transfers well into the corporate world. That, and the leadership of having been a lead player in the orchestra, led me into IT and made it so I could advance pretty quickly.
Tigunia
Yeah, that makes perfect sense when you say it like that. I remember looking at your LinkedIn and seeing your journey from music into IT on paper. It’s a curious and unexpected journey.
Marc Stocker
Yeah it is. It was not on purpose, but I tell people it was a blessing in disguise. The music industry is not very lucrative. I felt that was my calling. It was my first love, and I would still love to be able to do it. But it’s the way things worked out, and in the end, it ended up working out not only for myself and my family, but for a lot of people here at Tigunia. Tigunia would not have been started had that not happened, and now we’ve got nearly 90 employees. And taking care of this many families is a pretty nice calling.
Tigunia
Totally. It’s fair to say Tigunia would not exist without you, so please describe the process of taking this business from where it started back when it was a small startup consulting business of 1 to where it is now with nearly 100 employees.
Marc Stocker
I started Tigunia in 2007 and it was originally as just a personal venue from my own consulting. At the time, I was working for a company that was not treating me particularly well. I wanted to go into the contracting field, specifically the contracting part of it. So, I started working with Jeff Stokes Du Bose, who still works with Tigunia. He and I have worked together for 22 years across 12 different companies now.
We were working on a development project for a trash company in California, so that was how I was able to get into the contracting world. From 2007 to 2008, I think I had seven or eight clients and it was going quite well. It was a good year, right until the recession hit. At that point, all the work dried up and Tigunia went on hiatus.
After that, I went to work for other Microsoft partners for Dynamics NAV and did that until about 2011, at which point I took a job with an end user as a chief technology officer. That company was in New Jersey, so I flew back and forth between New Jersey and Colorado where I was living at the time, which was a little on the tough side. At the end of that experience, I decided to go back to consulting as an individual contributor. That’s when I fired up Tigunia again and, in October of 2013, I started doing one contract position at a time. Then I took a contract with a company based in Denver called Canary. They are a leading supplier of wellhead equipment – sales and rentals and other services for the oil and gas industry.
Bret Weber, at the time, had just come off the position of controller for Canary Wellhead, which had just been purchased by Frontier Energy. Frontier energy took on the name Canary, LLC. Bret became the lead ERP internal resource and we were put together to rescue their internal NAV 2009 implementation. It was in bad shape. Together, we upgraded to get them current at the time, which would have been NAV 2013. We traveled together for about a month solid visiting all 18 locations of Canary in order to assess what was necessary for an inventory and warehouse management system.
That’s when we hatched the idea of putting together a company that would start consulting. Bret came in as my partner, and it was really a lot of his ideas that led to the growth of Tigunia, such as taking on more than one customer at a time, bringing in project managers and additional resources, starting a managed services division with James Nicholas, whom we met in Milwaukee for one of the contracts, and it just kind of grew from there. I would say a lot of the growth was really driven by Bret having joined. I don’t think I would have done it on my own.
Tigunia
Alright, so since 2007 when you originally started Tigunia, how would you say the overall industry has evolved and where do you think it might be heading in the next few years?
Marc Stocker
A very good question. I would say that IT in general has gotten more complex over the years despite manufacturers’ efforts to simplify software. It’s actually become far more complex. The business we ended up getting into started out as a Microsoft partnership. We were kind of on the fringe at the time. We were not an official partner but we did work in conjunction with a partner. In order to make it so our clients were fully compliant with licensing, we had to become a partner, so we did that in about late 2014. My experience up to that point was with other partners.
Bret had not worked with other partners, he came from the finance area where he was a controller. He had skills that I did not have at the time, and so we complemented each other pretty well. The industry that I had experience with was such that it was pretty much focused entirely on NAV and didn’t really expand into other areas such as infrastructure support, business intelligence, et cetera. Those areas pretty much didn’t exist back in those earlier days of the Microsoft partnerships.
We were all encouraged to just stick to our solutions surrounding NAV. I kind of railed against that because I came from the internal IT world where I was working heavily in and responsible for infrastructure as well as business intelligence as well as application development. I would often get pulled into situations with my clients where I had to troubleshoot their networks or I had to build systems that were outside of NAV which didn’t always align with the companies that I was working for at the time. We’re starting to see an evolution of the average Microsoft partnership not being limited just to working inside code for NAV or Business Central. Business Central has evolved significantly; its architecture has changed a couple of times to the point where it’s centralized, web based, three tiers compared to the old days when it was just client server.
Also, whether we were the impetus for this or it was just something that was evolving on its own, most of our competitors now also offer some type of IT services, or they partner with other companies that offer those types of services. As far as I know, we’re the only NAV and Business Central partner that is also a full-blown managed services provider with a significant presence in business intelligence. Most of our competitors, from what we know, don’t have that capability.
A lot of them do develop applications for Business Central because that’s the direction Microsoft is pushing everybody, to build intellectual property and to make it available on App Source. We do that, as well. That part of our business is starting to grow and we hope it will be a significant portion of our revenue in the future. At this point, our managed Services department is growing faster than any other area of the company other than Business Intelligence.
We’ve expanded our service offerings dramatically to the point where we can offer pretty much anything in IT from a support perspective. Hence our messaging of being a sort of a one-stop-shop, which has always been our goal. I see that as being divergent from what most of our competitors have done. I think we are unique in that space that we can do pretty much everything, in addition to having our own data centers with significant investments in very high-end server infrastructure in order to host for our customers as well. That’s something that I don’t believe most of our competitors can do, and if they do, it’s usually in partnership with another company. In our case, it’s all in house.
Tigunia
Right. Pivoting to another question, the choice to host remote workforce was made before the pandemic and before remote work was as mainstream as it currently is. How did you come to that decision? And now, having made that decision, how do you create motivation for yourself and for your team?
Marc Stocker
I’ve been working remote for about 15 years now. And I never really considered having an actual office for Tigunia. The main reason for that is that the talent is spread out throughout the country and the talent is difficult to find. Resources for NAV and Business Central are fairly rare and pretty difficult to find. You’re not going to get somebody to move to your little city in order to have a job, it’s just impractical. Nobody is going to do that, especially not these days. And with the advent of better and better internet connections, remote access tools, virtual desktop infrastructure, remote desktop services, and so on, all of these services have gotten so good now that you can be in an office pretty much anywhere in North America and nobody is going to care where you are.
All the communications are now done over the Internet, whether it’s VoIP, Teams, Zoom, they have all gotten so good. There is really no reason to physically be in an office, especially if you’re in the IT space. Most people are working on their own, they don’t need to be in the same office as somebody else if they want to collaborate, they can get on Teams video chat. It’s really the maturity of the communication tools that has led to this, in addition to the necessity of having to do so because of the pandemic.
I never considered having a single office just because it would be nearly impossible to put together a team of top people in one place. There just isn’t that concentration of talent in any one city. It’s not like other industries where it’s extremely competitive and there are a lot of people, at least in the NAV and the Business Central world.
If you’ve got somebody really good, you might have one person in one city, and a handful of people in another country. It’s that rare, and our goal has always been to hire the best. Bret and I like to say that we collect unicorns. We market ourselves as such and we fully believe that we have the best of the best in the industry. You’re not going to find all those people in one place and you’re never going to get those type of people to move to any one place. So, it was never a question as to whether we were going to have an office. It was always just going to be working remotely. Frankly, I would never want to go to an office again, so that’s yet another reason.
And from the motivation aspect, it sounds like a joke or a trite idea, but my motivation is to avoid, at all costs, customer dissatisfaction. I do not want to hear complaints, and having been an executive for 18 of my nearly 32 years of experience and having run a help desk, part of it is pure self-preservation. The last thing you want to have to deal with is a complaint. That’s not the entire driving force. The primary driving force is to provide stellar service.
We all like to be appreciated for our contributions. I guess maybe a little bit of that stems from having been a musician and thriving on the feedback. In the IT world, no news is good news. If you don’t hear from somebody, everything is fine. Our goal is always to prevent any need for a customer to complain. After my many years of experience, I just sort of have a sixth sense when it comes to knowing when things are wrong or when things aren’t going well.
The desire to get out in front of it and provide a sense of urgency and that level of support without even having to be asked, it’s a higher standard than I think that any of our competitors provide. Surely, part of that comes from having been at the top levels of the symphonic music world. In order to be at that level, you have to be at the best of the best. There might be one or two positions open a year and there could be 300 to 500 applicants, and you have to beat all of them in order to get that type of job. I did that three times. I have a very high standard for myself and I learned that in the music world.
The results speak for themselves. We’ve grown extremely quickly, a pretty consistent growth of about 30% per year. We have never been not profitable. We have zero debt and we’re completely self-funded. These are all aspects of our business that I attribute to having that extremely high standard of performance. And this is something that I convey and try to impart on to all of our leaders in our company, to convey to their employees. And this is a philosophy and attitude that our customers see firsthand.
Tigunia
Absolutely, it’s self-evident. Normally, this is the point when I ask about a favorite book or movie, but given your background, I’m curious what is your favorite song, favorite album, favorite symphony, et cetera.
Marc Stocker
I would say, on the classical side, it’s more of a favorite composer. I’m a big fan of Gustav Mahler. Loved his symphonies. I listened to them so much that I actually got a little tired of them, so I haven’t done that in a while. I have to go back and listen to him again. I’m also a big fan of Shostakovich symphonies. He wrote like 15 of them, but they stopped being good around 12. I like more of the late 1800s, early 1900s tonal composers. I was never big into atonal music; nobody is, it sounds like nonsense. Early 20th century composers, mostly Russian or German.
On the jazz side, I was also a jazz bassist and really enjoyed, say, progressive jazz. I’m currently listening to real top pianists, such as Michel Camilo. Oscar Peterson, a very virtuosic technical pianist, he’s another favorite. I also love good orchestral music, such as from the great John Williams and Michael Giacchino, Alan Silvestri, Brian Tyler. These guys are all really good.
Tigunia
Some great choices. Next question, do you have a life motto or a like a quote or a mantra that you live by?
Marc Stocker
The one that stuck with me the most is, “The only time you fail is when you give up.” And that’s pretty much it. I don’t give up. I had one boss at one point who called me a terrier, because I just don’t give up on something until that something is fixed. At the time, I kind of took that as an insult, but I actually think of that as bit of a compliment now. Grab onto something and don’t let go until it’s fixed. That’s pretty much the way I operate.
Tigunia
Alright, let’s finish with this question. What do you do to make life count?
Marc Stocker
Good question. You have to do things that make you happy. I work most of the time, probably a ridiculous amount of time. But I also look at it as a bit of a calling. It sounds trite, but it’s not. I mean, we’ve got a lot of families that now rely on us to put food on their table. And to me, making sure Tigunia stays stable and stays profitable and stays around is pretty much what I do now.
For fun, I go mountain biking. I love mountain biking. The rest of the time, I spend with my wife and our little dog. It’s a pretty simple life.
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