Having reached the glass ceiling in the public sector, Mike Campigotto took a leap of faith four years ago and entered into entrepreneurship with one particular objective in mind - to curb youth out-migration by creating jobs in the IT sector.
Only two years into his operation, having reached a healthy complement of about 50 employees, Campigotto admits he recognized he had "given birth, to a certain degree, to something that had developed its own will."
Although his intention was to create a small consulting company made up of only a handful of employees, his business exploded beyond its initial conceptual model and now boasts of 68 employees.
Campigotto, founder of Collective Minds in North Bay, created the company in 1999 after spending 19 years in the IT industry, both in the public and private sector. His company helps customers maximize their investment in information technology.
"One of the core visions of the company was to create jobs in the North in information technology," Campigotto says. "A lot of that comes from my own frustrations as a youth not being able to work here in town, (despite having a degree in computer science), and when I did, I was a janitor or a bus boy or a painter."
Building on his experience and the business connections he had developed during an 11-year career working as a client advocate for information technology in the Ministry of Public Safety and Security, Campigotto successfully pitched a concept to four provincial government agencies to provide bridging technology.
Dubbed an "electronic bridge," the technology is similar to an Internet connector that allows business applications to communicate with each other, Campigotto explains. For example, a business can have a financial application that manages its inventory and sales and they may have a distributor that has a different financial application that does not permit the exchange of information. The electronic bridge provides a solution for the exchange of information.
"We created a utility that sits between the two of them and they behave like one solution," Campigotto says.
The specific strategic work the company provides is the equivalent of ISO 9000 quality management standards approach to information technology, he explains.
In the provision of service, the company recognized the need to develop new departments to address needs of clients, which led to incremental growth over a four-year period, he says.
"Customers would say to us 'You did a great job with the strategy and recommendation, but now put them on the ground for us,'" Campigotto says. "We would kind of say 'We don't have a division that does that,' and then the customers would say to us 'Well you made the recommendations, we want you to make it happen.'
"So Collective Minds created a division in response to the needs that we saw."
Recognizing the company was small in scale, but had capabilities to provide services globally, Collective Minds developed both formal and informal partnerships with large conglomerates. Today, the company provides niche value-added services to global IT giants like Microsoft and Hewlitt Packard, and Collective Minds is able to broker in the services of some of these IT giants in order to provide their customers with a one-stop shopping experience.
"I'm a big believer in working channels and developing partnerships," Campigotto says. "We looked at these companies and said "Here's what we can do to add value." They then bring us into all of their markets."
The company is now in the process of broadening its markets, realizing the untapped potential markets in the United States, and Campigotto plans to partake in an upcoming trade mission to Detroit.
From a growth perspective, Collective Minds has only scratched the potential of what is in the market by basically doing work that is in their own backyard, he says.
In three years, Campigotto predicts the company will witness growth at a rate of about 20 per cent annually to bring its employee base to about 100.
"I'm a big believer that to not live up to your full potential is almost sinful," Campigotto says.
