Jim Pantelas was employee No. 3 when he hired into RIIS (Research Into Internet Systems) in August 2006, but he was one of the first additions in what turned into a hiring spree for the Royal Oak-based consulting and services firm. The 11-year-old company's staff stands at 24 people, one intern and 3-4 independent contractors today.
"In the last two years we have grown 400 percent," says Pantelas, the vice president and general manager for RIIS. "We were pretty small two years ago."
Not anymore and not any time in the future, apparently. RIIS plans to triple its staff to 75-80 people by the end of 2011, in a growth pattern Pantelas calls "reasonably aggressive."
RIIS has achieved this by investing in new tools that have allowed it to become more efficient and more effective. In essence the firm can design software and use its new program to run a simulation on it before getting into any nuts and bolts coding. This allows RIIS to produce a cleaner end product that doesn't require many back-end fixes. Pantellas credits this new way of doing business and timing for the company's success.
"It's a combination of having the right technology and having the right skills of people available," Pantelas says. "We happened to be in the right place at the right time. Half of it was luck and half of it was being good."
Source: Jim Pantelas, vice president and general manager for RIIS
Writer: Jon Zemke
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