2 min read
Ted Clark is the Founder of Adventag, based in Seattle, USA. Ted has worked with data for more than 14 years.
Initially a student of Chemical Engineering, he decided to jump board and start doing something different. 
"I was a chemical engineer by trade, and about three years into it, I go,' wow, I don't want to watch the water run through pipes' Maybe one day I'll start a brewery because that's chemical engineering in its raw form. Still, after three years in (college), I said,' this isn't for me. I gotta figure out what I really wanna do.
I took the computer science route and, just by chance, did a data analytics project about three years out of school, and I said," yup, this is for me".
After that, Ted had a super clear vision of what would happen with the evolution of the data volumes, making his transition from one field to the other quite natural.
"Everybody has data, and everybody wants to understand it, and that doesn't always happen. That's what I wanted to go, to figure it all out, and I don't think I've done a non-data centric project since the early 2000s."
Ted has accumulated many projects in his portfolio. These customer success stories are the best marketing for him and for Adventag, generating referrals and word of mouth, which is how he has been growing his business since he started.
What is interesting to me is that Ted actually says no to large projects, breaking down the requests from his customers into small and tangible deliverables that set the foundation for the most significant conversations. Here is how he explains it.
"The clients typically got a list of 10 things and ask, 'Hey, can you go do these 10 things?' And this is contrarian, and I have to say, ' no, I can't do those 10 things because that will send you down a rabbit hole that you don't want you to be in.
You get some funny looks, but when I work with a client, I want to tell them 'Look, you have 10 things. I'm only going to commit to doing two or three of them; we need to pick the two or three most important because my bet is once we do those two or three, your four through 10 is going to completely change. We're not gonna waste your money. ' "
Ted has been a long time TimeXtender partner. In fact, he did consulting work for TimeXtender for some time, so he knows a thing or two about our partner program.
"TimeXtender says, this partner must own this customer, and TimeXtender truly lets you own the customer, whereas there are other partnerships where you're just a partner because you're a name on a piece of paper somewhere.
TimeXtender's partnership, it's certainly more than a sheet of paper or a logo that gets tossed on a website. It's like you are the customer, you, the partner, and TimeXtender will support you in every way they can to help you and YOUR customers."
While listening to Ted, I could feel how incredibly passionate about data he is. You can clearly see this coming through the conversation throughout the interview.
One of my main takeaways from this conversation is that Ted believes data can lead to a fairer world.
"If your business does five things, inevitably two or three of those are going to be the wins and the others are going to dwindle. We need to highlight that in the world, not everything is going to move along at the same pace, and whether that's right or fair or not, we have to use the data to actually make it fair."
Without further ado, Ted Clark, ladies and gentlemen.
To know more about the TimeXtender Program visit our partner section. As Ted says, you are not a logo on our website. We are Human to Human.