Since August of 2008, I have been working on a start up initiative outside of my traditional Vann Group duties. The original focus was simply to leverage our unique in-house capabilities and launch a recruiting offering for the vastly under served Reliability Engineering and Predictive Maintenance industry.

As I began to dive into the project I was amazed to find that not only was our use of organizational development best practices rather unique, the market for recruitment services was incredibly fragmented and the delivery model broken. The effort grew and evolved into something exciting and what we believe will be a disruptive and scalable solution. Of course, building something new is never easy, and along the way our team has learned our share of lessons in bringing the idea to market.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be posting about those lessons learned. Some of them will no doubt be familiar, which in hindsight makes them frustrating. At the same time, there are some unique insights that I hope will help other entrepreneurs on their start up path.

As I post, I welcome any feedback and insights about your own experiences.

As all my faithful readers know, this blog has essentially been on hiatus since late August where I promised all sorts of wonderful things would be occurring with this site and the Vann Group world. Needless to say, we’ve been extremely slow in finalizing our activities and initiatives. While many are not yet complete, we are at the point where I feel comfortable informally announcing them publicly.

To begin, I am pleased to announce that NextUp Careers, our career portal for reliability engineers and predictive maintenance professionals has finally launched. It took a year plus to finally get to launch and was extremely painful and stressful but also an exhilarating and fun experience. NextUp will prove to be an interesting case study because its an entirely different approach to the traditional job board. There have been some incredible lessons learned throughout this that I will share in the coming weeks.

I am also pleased to formally announce the launch of Hire EQ. Hire EQ is an outsourced recruiting solution designed to meet the unique hiring needs of small/mid-size businesses. We believe that Hire EQ is the first model of its kind as recruitment process outsourcing has always been a service that only corporate America could take advantage of. There are a lot of exciting elements to Hire EQ but the part that I’m really excited about is the addition of David Pollard to our team. Dave is a long-time friend and client. He is also the owner of Talent Fusion, one of the top RPO companies in the country and an innovator in the recruitment space. Having Dave drive Hire EQ is a huge benefit for us and it speaks to how disruptive we believe Hire EQ will be.

I am also pleased to announce that within the next couple of weeks we will be announcing the formal launch of Joe Strategy. Joe Strategy is a strategy focused blog that will provide insights on best practices, planning tools and general insights and analysis. The site will be geared towards small/mid-size businesses and professional service providers. The latter is a different audience for us, but we are focusing on them because the vast majority of professional service providers are small/mid-size businesses and as we can attest from first hand knowledge, the world of professional service providers is changing drastically and the disruptions will continue.

When we formally launch Joe Strategy, we will be releasing our white paper entitled “The Crowd, the Cloud and the Demise of Professional Services as We Know It”. We’ve received some great feedback from our reviewers on it, and I hope that it will make many think about the impact of technology on professional knowledge advisers/providers.

This blog will also be active. Whereas Joe Strategy posts will be focused on strategy, this blog will continue to revolve around general business topics and insight. Over the next couple of weeks, I will be blogging about my start up lessons learned.