Gary Shottes - 2008. 30 years, 30 top business influencers.

2008 – Gary Shottes

America's Return Inc. turns 30 in 2017.  In the first 30 weeks I'll recognize each of the 30 most influential people in the history of my business

Gary reminds me of a great chef who, given a basket of surprise ingredients, creates a meal I can’t imagine let alone prepare. Gary has transformed dozens of individuals into cohesive teams that deliver astonishing results. I’ve worked with Gary on two projects covering about five years, in which he was accountable for leading organizations to desired outcomes: at Amherst Technologies, turning red ink to black, and at Ipswitch, turning good to great. 

Gary was part of Chris Swahn’s Amherst executive team charged with refashioning a formerly high-flying dot.com-era PC reseller into HP’s largest full-line, services-centric solution provider. While Chris was uniquely insightful in defining a strategic mix of technology solutions and target customer segments, Gary was masterful at constructing the internal organization to support the sales effort. He built a matrix team of subject matter experts for customers in healthcare, retail, education and SMB, and within those domains further developed staff to specialize in infrastructure (wireless networking, physical security) and business process optimization (virtualization, document management). Services we take for granted today, Amherst was pioneering at the time. During the break at an industry conference, Gary and I huddled together converting the technology innovations and marketing hype into simple, compelling messages for dozens of Amherst sales reps tasked with educating wary customers. His “At-a-Glance Guides” were born at that moment: simple one-pagers that answered the key questions, “What is it?” “Who cares about it?” “How do we sell it?” To this day, I base my assessment of sales battle cards on the standard of clarity and simplicity he so effectively set. More compelling in my view were his team members’ conviction and self-confidence; belief in themselves was Gary’s gift as their leader.

Some years later, Gary invited me to join him at Ipswitch where his Marketing challenge was to elevate a successful software business with 100,000,000 users to yet a higher level of performance. The software company had 3 successful divergent products, with different customer sets, occupying unique territories in need of a coherent sales organization. Together with Nicole Desmarais Lee, I supported Gary’s channel enablement efforts that included defining distinct identities for the products and reorganizing the company into three divisions, with separate sales channels, all of which took off worldwide following the change. Gary moved up as President of one of the divisions, enjoying his proudest achievement in shepherding an acquisition from idea to integration, elevating the division from a retail software supplier to an enterprise solution provider in secure networking. My take-away at Ipswitch was to validate a new S.A.L.E.S. program tailored to help sellers grow recurring revenue from software subscriptions.

From soup to nuts -- reseller, distributor, software vendor, manufacturer, or cloud services company – anyone with an appetite for business transformation need only turn to Gary to cook up something good.

The list so far.