In business today, things change so rapidly that what worked yesterday won’t necessarily work today. But tell that to an executive who is so enamored of his own past performance that he can’t see how the world has changed. For example, fifteen years ago, technical service companies could make handsome earnings by augmenting staffs to build custom business applications for clients. Today, however, those firms make a third of what they once did on the same deals. On top of that, clients expect that companies will outsource the technical services work to India and bear all the risk in the transaction.

It’s often tough to convince a CEO that what brought him success when Bill Clinton was president won’t fly today.  Being flexible and blending new ideas with the old helps avoid this pitfall.

Tenacity Solutions, a midmarket company in Virginia, has found a way to combine the old with the new. CEO Leo Fox says that Tenacity does business the old-fashioned way, and the company’s staff and customers will vouch for that. He believes that serving customers and staff never goes out of style. COO Matt Wilmoth and Fox have built a company that makes great use of the “software as a service” business model and outsources virtually everything in their business that is not core to their reason for being in business.