Charleston Should Harness Its Livability And Embrace The Digital Economy

Never waste a crisis.

We don't have an MIT or a Stanford, both innovation factories, but in the contest to attract high technology, Charleston does have a competitive edge that increasingly matters: It's one incredibly livable city.

The same things that have made Charleston No. 1 as a place to visit –- the beaches, the scale and charm, the weather, the food and the arts –- are the same things that make Charleston attractive for the work-hard, play-hard tech bunch.

And now could be Charleston's moment. For the first time in years, thanks in part to the pandemic, the balance between employee and employer is shifting, giving workers leverage. More and more people are working remotely, and Charleston is already teeming with young professionals and students who are living here temporarily working and studying.

If the talent wants to be here, the companies will follow. Take Will Gregg.

He is 38 and the vice president of solutions for Workiva Inc., a fast-growing cloud-based software company. Four years ago, Gregg, a Columbia native and Clemson graduate, told his bosses back in Ames, Iowa, that he wanted to come home to South Carolina. They wanted to keep him, and so it began.

Since starting alone in a tiny space in the Charleston Digital Corridor's old cinder block building on East Bay –- he had a porthole for a window –- Gregg has expanded Workiva's operation here to 25 people and is looking to add more. In May, he moved into the Digital Corridor's handsome new building on Morrison Drive. He'll be "graduating" from the Corridor's second floor to the fifth as soon as that space is built out.

Charleston's livability was a big attraction in coming home, and the changing nature of work has made it much more feasible for him and others. "The pandemic has made it possible for a lot of high-skilled and talented people to live where they want," Gregg says.

The Charleston area is a bit player in the technology world –- we are 49th of 51 U.S. metro areas ranked by employment by CompTIA, an industry trade association. But if Charleston is going to rebalance its tourism-heavy economy, technology will have to be an important part of the solution, along with health care.

The Digital Corridor's new home is more than just another six-story building. It is a stake in the ground, a symbol of the city's strategy and commitment to compete for the jobs of the future. We should be thinking not about a single technology building but a technology campus on the peninsula's exploding Neck Area.

Where once there was the Auto Mile, the building is yet another Rileyism in a city full of them. Under Mayor Joe Riley, the city paid $1.8 million for 1.8 acres on Morrison and leased it for $1 a year to private investors who have spent $54 million so far developing it. Ernest Andrade, a longtime aide who helped Riley expand the city through annexation, has spent two decades guiding the Digital Corridor.

"The communities that are winning are the communities that aren't going after the companies, but going after the employees," says Andrade, who came to town from Kuwait as an 18-year-old to go to the College of Charleston and never left. "The companies will go where the talent is."

Nine months after the building opened, almost all the space is occupied except for the ground-floor retail, which is empty. There are 51 companies, ranging from lone rangers at a single workstation on the second floor to dozens of employees in bigger, growing companies upstairs. There are Zoom rooms, lots of collaborative spaces and all the other bells and whistles techies crave.

Already, Andrade, 58, is planning an eight-story 2.0 building next door, with construction at least a year away.

The Charleston area has Blackbaud and more than 500 tech companies, employing 28,000 people. These are excellent jobs: The average wage is $101,710, a 12% increase from a year earlier, a new Digital Corridor survey shows. That's double the area's average.

What the state and the region lack is a sustained commitment to education at every level that can churn out the engineers and other skilled workers these companies need. Innovation thrives in an ecosystem that allows one company to spin out of another, one company to poach talent from another. We're still not there.

In every crisis there's an opportunity. The pandemic has been a terrible thing. But it has shown that you don't have to be in an office 9 to 5, that you don't have to live in a rat hole somewhere to do creative work and get paid well for it.

It shows, too, that places like Charleston are an alternative in a way they never were before. We should seize the moment.

Blackbaud Transitions to a Remote-First Workforce Approach

Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB), the world's leading cloud software company powering social good, has officially transitioned to a remote-first workforce approach. Operating remotely since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Blackbaud has seen proven success with this approach and the company has committed to remaining remote-first moving forward. Read more:

HelpSystems Acquires PhishLabs to Continue Expansion of Cybersecurity Portfolio

HelpSystems announced today the acquisition of PhishLabs, a leading cyber threat intelligence company that protects organizations from attacks on their brands, employees, and digital assets. PhishLabs sources intelligence across the internet to find and mitigate digital risks. The team and solutions from PhishLabs will join HelpSystems' growing cybersecurity portfolio and pair well with HelpSystems' email security, vulnerability management, and data protection solutions.

"Digital transformation has made it critical for security teams to have visibility across the digital landscape and to quickly respond to both internal and external threats," said Kate Bolseth, CEO, HelpSystems. "PhishLabs' ongoing intelligence collection, curation, and threat mitigation safeguards organizations' critical digital assets and provides peace of mind for customers across the globe. We are thrilled to be welcoming the PhishLabs team and their expertise into the HelpSystems family."

Most security teams are stretched thin, and the volume of activity and data across digital channels makes it difficult to discern what needs immediate action. PhishLabs minimizes the noise and takes action to stop threats, providing more complete risk mitigation while reducing security team workload.

"We've improved our platform over a decade in collaboration with many of the world's most targeted brands, and we are excited to continue our growth as part of the HelpSystems family," said Tony Prince, CEO, PhishLabs. "Our combined resources and expertise put us in a strong position to partner more strategically with our clients and help their security teams thrive as the threat landscape evolves."

Phillip D'Orazio: PDMG Found Success by Making The Pivot

When Phillip D'Orazio started Palmetto Digital Marketing Group in the spare bedroom of his condo, he hardly imagined his idea reaching the heights it has, and in just five years. With a background in generalized ecommerce, D'Orazio saw that carrying his skillset away from the corporate world would require more than a little overhaul. He did not, however, anticipate the jarring shift he would have to make to acclimate himself to all the nuances of Amazon selling, as a globally centralized entity for ecommerce.

D'Orazio did not allow these hurdles to hinder his drive and his continued persistence has resulted in PDMG's unquestionable success. What began with an idea has manifested into a sustained 50 clients with their agency who receive full support through selling account setup and support, advertising, inventory oversight and SEO polishing for products. Through telling his story, D'Orazio expresses the dire need for flexibility, endurance and sufficient enthusiasm when nurturing one's business.

This series is brought to you by Charleston County Economic Development.

Would you like to tell me a little bit about your background? Where you grew up, went to college, what you studied, any memorable first jobs?

I grew up in upstate New York, came down to North Carolina to attend the University of North Carolina in Asheville. After that, I briefly moved to Utah before relocating to Boston where I spent much of my professional career. There, I spent most of my time in ecommerce, which is how I got the idea to formulate my agency.

How did you end up in Charleston?

A lot of things brought me to Charleston: we used to vacation in Pawleys Island, so I was familiar with the Lowcountry and wanted to try and get back down here. We narrowed it down to two locations: Austin or Charleston, and we chose Charleston.

I know that you began in ecommerce; what drew you to Amazon in particular?

Typically, my focus on ecommerce was directing consumer websites; so, managing on the corporate side. I sort of stumbled into Amazon by accident. We moved down here and I had started the agency just to focus on digital [commerce] and that turned out to be a little harder than I expected. The pivot to Amazon and the focus on Amazon was basically a point of sink or swim - so I had to figure it out. So, I attended a big conference; I walked the whole conference trying to solicit some business on the digital side. A majority of the people I spoke with said that they didn't need help with digital, but they needed help with Amazon - and that's when the lightbulb turned on. That's when I knew I sort of had to recalibrate and shift my focus to Amazon and marketplaces, versus digital marketing.

How was that shift for you? What difficulties accompanied it?

This was about five and a half years ago, there weren't many Amazon-focused agencies at the time, and it was much easier to get business then, than it is now. It was an enormous learning curve. I spent most of my time on the phone with Amazon Support, trying to figure things out.

To be as transparent as possible, I've always been one of those who subscribes to the 'fake it 'til you make it' [mindset].

I started with one client; it was a retained client over six months that gave me enough of a timeline to gather more clients. Now we're at a point where we have about forty-five to fifty managed clients, and the business started off in a second bedroom in a small, small condo. Now we're here at the Charleston Tech Center, so it's been quite a ride for five years.

Did you ever imagine reaching this level of success?

You really can't imagine it, until you discover what it's like to be successful. Five years ago, I didn't even think this was possible. Once you get a taste of success, you just want to continue to hone in, fine-tune your craft, grow your business and still learn, and that's what we continue to do at PDMG.

What would you say was your biggest obstacle as you were building this?

It's always [human] resources. I can land clients, we can service clients, it's really finding people with [the ideal] skill sets, which is very hard because not many people know much about Amazon. Also, the learning curve for new employees; it is quite dramatic, it typically takes months - not weeks - to become fluent in Amazon terminology.

Where do you see this going in the future?

I'd like to get to a point where I can scale further; I think a perfect place would be a hundred managed clients. The anticipation is that I can potentially sell the agency or find a very strong executive to run the agency for me, and I can step aside.

Do your clients have varying levels of management?

Our primary focus is full service. It's typically a 360° engagement. We manage every component of their business. We do have a handful of clients for whom we do à la carte services. Additionally, there are clients that engage us who don't need full service one-time reboots, optimization or creative assets development, so those are typically one-off engagements.

We saw the impacts of COVID-19 on all businesses, including Amazon; how has your agency been impacted?

We certainly saw a bump in our revenues just because of the move to ecommerce. As soon as COVID hit, Amazon basically shut down, they just went to selling only essential items. I think our biggest challenge post-COVID is navigating all the changes that Amazon has implemented. Our biggest challenge now is warehouse space. What that means is: with everyone moving to ecommerce and Amazon, they have run out of warehouses [to hold inventory]. In an effort to make sure they can continue to operate, they have limited what people can send and that has affected our clients. Whereas before COVID, you could send what you wanted.

I would assume that it takes years to build a warehouse, and COVID just started a year and a half ago. I'm sure that before the pandemic, they had warehouses planned as part of their development plans; but they need probably another forty or fifty more to handle all the inventory and COVID threw a wrench in that expansion. That's been a huge hurdle that Amazon has had to navigate.

What has it been like building your team in Charleston?

Most of our competition outsources their work, and many of our competing agencies have a majority of their staff working remote; this is most likely because it's hard to find people who have the skills set, so workers will be hired whether they can be physically present or not. At PDMG, we are very team-oriented, so I prefer to have most of the staff working here so we can better collaborate. Additionally, I like to mentor my staff. It's more difficult to do that when team members are working remote. I've always told my team that I grew up playing team sports, so I try to bring that same team focus to my business.

What are your thoughts on how Charleston's technical landscape has grown?

It's interesting; I see more jobs posted on local job boards and pages that are more heavily focused on technology; what we've seen with the CDC is that they're very busy and there's a lot more interest in tech. I see it only growing further, especially with the migration of people from the North or higher-cost cities in the west to Charleston; they're looking for different locations, high-livability and a better cost-of-living. Charleston definitely fits that bill.

Do you see that 'migration' helping your agency at all?

I'm not sure. What helps our business is more manufacturers. Our clients are manufacturers, so more technology doesn't really help us; but more entrepreneurs coming here does: more people who are starting ecommerce businesses, more manufacturing businesses, lifestyle/wellness brands - that's where we're really going to see growth come to our agency.

A majority of our clients are out of state, a handful of local and a few international. Rather than any demographic concentrations, we have a criteria for selecting our clients: we won't work with any seller, we want the product to be strong - if it doesn't have four or four and a half star reviews, we won't take the client. It's also very expensive to sell on Amazon, so if a client doesn't have the financial backing that we think is needed to be successful on Amazon, we wouldn't take on that client. So, we don't have a particular discipline or niche among our clients, but we do really like products that fit what we're looking for. Another criteria is whether the manufacturer offers a unique product, where there's not a lot of competition but has a high practicality demand.

What level of engagement do you have with Charleston's tech community?

Well, the reason why we participate with the Digital Corridor is to stay connected with Charleston's tech community. We've been with Ernest for years, at multiple locations. We sort of followed him to this building, which has been a good steppingstone for our business to jump from that early startup with a smaller space into this later-stage startup presence with a larger office.

The CDC has been very helpful to us: we've received PR exposure; we've given back by hosting a workshop about selling on Amazon and we've participated in some of the new CDCu classes. Plus, we've been able to mingle with other entrepreneurs and tech startups and we've been encouraged to share information and that's always good for learning. I'm still sort of faking it as I make it - I don't have all the answers about entrepreneurship, so I get to learn from other people in the industry and others in the community.

What were your misconceptions about being an entrepreneur?

It's hard. It's a lot of work. Going from the corporate environment, where there are specialists in every area available, was a major adjustment. As an entrepreneur, everyone in this office has at least two hats; I wear many more than two hats. But I don't think I was mentally prepared for how difficult it would be or the different roles I had to play.

What do you look for in people you hire?

I don't look for skill sets, I look for a mindset. I'm looking for people with the right attitude, I'm looking for people for whom average is not good enough, I look for people who have innate problem-solving skills - because that's what we typically do here, is solve problems. While hard skill sets are certainly important, it's really that mindset and team collaboration skills or ability to function as part of a larger group that I look for.

At the end of the day, if I could be surrounded by overachievers, then I would feel that I was in a good spot. That's really what I look for when I hire: who's the overachiever versus the average person or the underachiever.

What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs or new graduates seeking to work in the tech industry?

Don't give up. It's hard and inconvenient things can happen quickly, but success can happen quickly, too. For me, it was right around the corner, and I didn't know it. Secondly, not everyone is meant to work a nine-to-five job. Working has never been as fulfilling to me as it is now that I've shifted my focus away from corporate environments - I feel like I don't have a job.

What keeps you busy outside of work?

I like to keep active, whether that's at work or around the house. I do yard work, I play tennis, I ski, I run. If I'm not working, then I'm being active, or I'm with my wife on the porch.

Rapid Fire

• Mac or PC? PC
• Fave CHS beach? IOP
• Fave book or Podcast? On Point NPR

Evolute Capital, Along With Hunt Technology Ventures, Make Strategic And Substantial Investment In eGroup

eGroup is excited to announce that they have received a substantial investment from Evolute Capital, a Dallas, Texas-based middle-market private equity investment firm focused on building a best-in-class IT Services platform. Evolute made the investment in partnership with Hunt Technology Ventures, LP, the technology investment management arm of a large Dallas, Texas-based independent family focused on transforming the technology services sector through targeted investments in highly desirable IT services companies. eGroup, a services-led cloud and managed services firm headquartered in the Southeast United States, delivers "speed and certainty" with digital transformation initiatives for mid-market and enterprise clients across the nation. Founder and CEO Mike Carter will continue to lead eGroup.

A globally recognized cloud services provider, eGroup has seven Microsoft Gold competencies including Gold Cloud Platform (Microsoft Azure), Gold Cloud Productivity (Microsoft 365), and is an "Elite" Microsoft Security and Management Partner with an Advanced Specialization in Azure Virtual Desktops. Since 1999, eGroup has completed thousands of data center modernization and cloud migration engagements and is sought for its IT Managed Services based on deep market expertise and a proven ability to execute. eGroup is one of the few companies to make the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America for multiple back-to-back years and is the only IT management company in South Carolina to ever be recognized on Inc.'s "Best Places to Work" list. eGroup has appeared on the Managed Services Provider 500, Solution Provider 500, and Tech Elite 250 list every year for the past decade, and was most recently awarded the Nutanix 2021 Global Portfolio Champion of the Year award – which recognizes eGroup for enabling one of the most comprehensive and digitally transformative hybrid cloud journeys for customers.

Evolute Capital and Hunt Technology Ventures sought the partnership opportunity with eGroup based on the depth, knowledge, and impressive track record of eGroup's management team, coupled with eGroup's desire to bring on a financial and strategic partner. The investment from Evolute Capital provides eGroup with substantial resources to accelerate its strong industry position in the cloud and managed services sector, which includes the acquisition of other digitally transformative solution and services providers throughout the nation, while organically building upon its strong expertise and positioning within the Microsoft ecosystem. The investment further provides eGroup with the resources to acquisitively expand its cloud services and geographic presence across the nation. Specifically, eGroup plans to expand its sales, marketing, and service delivery teams while acquiring new capabilities that enhance the digital transformation journey for clients.

Mike Carter, Founder and CEO of eGroup, noted, "At eGroup we love working with smart people who know how to get things done. It's energizing to work with a team that has intentionally and successfully grown companies while fostering a culture that puts the customer first, rewards team performance, and encourages and recognizes individual success. As we turn our attention to expanding the world-class capabilities that keep our clients at the center of the outcomes we deliver, I'm thrilled to work alongside new team members who appreciate what it means to be 'part of the family' while creating growth opportunities for customers and team members."

Brendan Achariyakosol, Founder & Managing Member of Evolute Capital, commented, "eGroup is a true market leader in complex cloud transformation, managed services, and data center services, and has built a tremendous reputation of supporting their customers in whichever stage of IT modernization they are going through. Furthermore, we feel eGroup's most impressive achievement is the tremendous team they have built and we are proud to be their partner and to support them through the next phase of their journey."

Hunt Allred of Hunt Technology Ventures, noted, "Prioritizing the client and work quality, Mike Carter and eGroup define every quality that we look for in a business partner. We look forward to helping them grow their capabilities and product offerings to better serve their clients globally."

eGroup Awarded The 2021 Global Portfolio Champion Of The Year At Nutanix’s .Next Digital Experience

eGroup, a national IT services firm delivering speed and certainty with digital transformation, announced today that during the Partner Xchange keynote session at Nutanix's Global .NEXT Digital Experience conference, the eGroup team was awarded the 2021 Global Portfolio Champion of the Year Award.

Nutanix recognized eGroup as the sole recipient of the 2021 Global Portfolio Champion of the Year Award. eGroup was specifically recognized for elevating their customers' hybrid cloud journey with the use of Nutanix portfolio solutions including Frame, Flow, Files, and Calm as extensions to the core Nutanix platform. For more than seven years, eGroup has steadily expanded their focus, reach, and partnership with Nutanix as a Cloud Champion partner and has built a world-class digital transformation and hybrid cloud team that includes multiple Nutanix Technology Champions.

"We're thrilled to have honored eGroup at Partner Xchange this year for their continued success with our customers," said Christian Alvarez, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels at Nutanix. "As Nutanix continues to strengthen our hybrid multicloud product line, which nicely complements eGroup's strong on-premises and Microsoft Azure public cloud capabilities, we've been able to design and deliver meaningful solutions to their customers that rapidly advance the continued hybrid cloud journey as part of their digital transformation. As customers continue to migrate to and innovate with hybrid multicloud solutions, we're excited to recognize partners like eGroup for their outstanding efforts."

"By leveraging the full solutions portfolio from Nutanix, eGroup has been able to deliver operationally powerful solutions that enable our clients to achieve speed and certainty with digital transformation across their organizations. Our professional services teams, equally fluent in advanced data center and cloud solutions with Nutanix, enable organizations to accelerate groundbreaking transformations with relatively simple solutions – a critical need in today's volatile and uncertain business landscape – and especially across the challenges of the past 18 months. From cloud-first VDI with Frame, to database management with Era, and built-in microsegmentation with Flow, eGroup is proud to put the promise of the Nutanix invisible cloud into practice for our many mutual customers." said Mike Dent, Director of Datacenter Architecture, eGroup.

With Nutanix's continued investment in a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, especially around Microsoft Azure and critical Microservices platform architecture, eGroup will continue to deliver advanced solutions that secure, simplify, modernize, and transform organizations for future-proofed, digital-ready business.