07/08/2005

Source: Boulder County Business Report

Author: Caron Schwartz Ellis

LONGMONT — Unlike the consultants on the old TV commercial who talk a good game but can’t actually do what they recommend, the consultants of The Spitfire Group are short on talk and long on performance.

Founded by two professional services consulting veterans, Longmont-based The Spitfire Group provides technology strategy, e-commerce, business intelligence and application integration to Front Range mid-market companies in the $10 million to $1 billion range.

In the 1990s President and Chief Executive Mark Richtermeyer was an executive with Denver-based consulting company CCG, which was sold to iXL in 1997. At its high point, Richtermeyer ran CCG’s Western U.S. and Asia Pacific offices. When iXL folded during the dot-com bust, he joined Tactica, which was sold to Hitachi Consulting in 2001.

Richtermeyer and Spitfire Senior Vice President Kimberly Lucas met at iXL, continued their working relationship at Hitachi and co-founded Spitfire last year.

“We started with small consulting companies and either grew or sold them to large consulting companies,” Richtermeyer said. Once the companies got big, “That was less fun for me.”

Also, neither was a majority owner, and they felt that these big consulting companies “weren’t doing it the way we felt it should be done for a mid-market city like Denver,” he said. “We think they buy consulting services a very specific way.”

According to Richtermeyer, mid-market companies want “hand-holding, senior people, good processes, a business approach and somebody that understands their business. They also don’t want to pay the highest rates.”

Spitfire projects tend to be in the $150,000 to $250,000 range, lasting two to three months using three or four people per project, he said.

He projects $3 million in revenues in 2005, more than four times 2004’s $700,000.

The two invested about $50,000 to launch the company, and, “We’re still experiencing startup costs,” Richtermeyer said. Those costs include computers and software along with general office equipment including, phones, copiers and desks.

The name Spitfire came about because it means, “We’re straightforward and really spunky about our opinions,” Richtermeyer said.

The name also came up when he was at CCG. A few of the consultants were sitting around talking about how boring the company’s name was. Someone suggested “Spitfire.” Richtermeyer liked it so much he reserved the domain name on the spot.

All 25 Spitfire consultants have more than 10 years experience. We have “small teams of smart people doing technology projects with a high success rate,” Richtermeyer said.

The business is profitable already because there’s low overhead and everyone is billable, he said.

The other part of the success, Richtermeyer said, is the company’s strong focus on developing intellectual capital that can be spun off. “We own some software that we identified as intellectual capital early on, and we’ve created a network of investors and friends to review it to see if it’s something they want to invest in.”

This doesn’t work for every project, however. Most projects are “work for hire,” where the client will own all the deliverables. In other cases, the client partners with Spitfire to develop reusable intellectual capital to spin off. At other times, Spitfire creates its own intellectual property. “We can spend a little bit of time investing in it,” Richtermeyer said.

The company has clients up and down the Front Range from the Wyoming border to Colorado Springs. Richtermeyer and Lucas chose to locate in Longmont because the central location “gives us access to everything within about 40 minutes,” Lucas said.

Spitfire signs nondisclosure agreements with its clients so it can’t name them. “Our clients are all local, but they are well-known names,” Lucas said.

The founders’ intent with Spitfire is to grow the office to about 100 people, then replicate this model in other mid-market geographies like Dallas, Chicago and Minneapolis, Richtermeyer said.

“We have no plans to sell,” he said. “Our goal is to create an excellent consulting company.”

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at (303) 440-4950 or csellis@bcbr.com.

The Spitfire Group Inc.
3561 Stagecoach Road, Suite 201
Longmont, CO 80504
(303) 485-1880
www.spitfiregroup.com