-: My name is Robert Steele.
I'm CEO of a company Quadrant 4 System Corp
in Schaumburg, Illinois.
So we're an IT services company.
We provide both solutions, staffing,
staff augmentation, other design and support work.
We also build products,
both a health product and an education product.
So we built an exchange product for healthcare.
I actually, until I became CEO,
I was President of the healthcare division,
and if you think about the Affordable Care Act
also known as Obama Care, was designed to do both a
consumer market place as well as a small group shop exchange
and we ended up building the only product of it's kind
that truly served both the individual consumer market
as well as the small group employer market.
We also built the financial management components
which managed all the financial components
which is the consolidated billing, the billing
and collection receipt of all the money.
I'm on the phone from the moment I wake up
until the moment I go to bed.
And I am either in a meeting working with
either our employees, our senior staff, our clients,
vendors that want to partner with us
or you know, truly anybody else that
is looking for either
a way to sell us something
or have them sell them something or trying to find
the right talent, trying to find additional resources
to partner, kind of what I call the
partner, package and perform model.
We find partners that we work with
we figure out how to package all the technologies together
and then we realize that if both of the partners
or all three or four or five of the partners perform
revenue gets generated and clients get served so.
I love digital communication, however,
I have always, always, always
believed that a face to face
so that I can look in the eyes of the person
that I am gonna do business with, that is the
only way to have that connection so that that person knows
and having been in sales my whole life
when you try to sell a really, really big transaction
my largest transaction is $90 million, so I haven't
yet broken the $100 million barrier, but I'm working on it.
The fun part of that is you're not gonna get someone
to truly trust you for a big transaction like that
just doing that over the phone.
You can close a $50 transaction without
ever meeting somebody, and you should because
it's too expensive, but you can't close a
$500,000 or a $5 million or $50 million transaction
without having that personal touch.