Phidiax Tech Blog

Phidiax is often asked by our peers, partners, and clients:

“How do you do it?”

For Phidiax, this is a loaded question with a simple answer:

“Treat peers, clients, and vendors, as Partners.”
“Do the right thing for our Partners. The results will naturally be the best bet.”

In practicing what we preach, we have been blessed with the opportunity to create a model of delivery based upon these simple statements. 

When it comes to the basics, Phidiax provides some great benefits including:

• Generous performance and utilization bonus programs
• Health Insurance through United Healthcare (with employer contribution)
• Life Insurance (employer funded)
• Employee ownership certificates
• Unlimited vacation
• MSDN subscription
• Company credit card
• Education, conference, and community contribution support

When it comes to the culture, please read on, I will attempt to depict our approach.

Our commitment to our people

Planning to do the “right thing,” is far different from implementing the “right thing.” Phidiax personnel are our most valuable asset, we commit to evolving our policy fairly. This is what separates Phidiax from its peers, our firm sets critical goals, and remains agile enough to make change, implement, and flourish. This process includes sitting at the Phidiax round-table, and contributing to the team as an equal, rather than employees of the proverbial “machine.” The “machine” is where many providers get hung up. We avoid the red-tape, political molasses, and hierarchical silliness, by replacing with commitment to professionalism, respect for our peers, and executing as a fellow member, owner, and investor.

Decisions are made by our members at a round-table, thus ensuring the chosen direction is best for our culture, our everyday work-life balance, and our best interests. This reflexive approach avoids the poison which plagues many organizations, where employees become numbers riding the ship which takes monumental efforts to course correct.

Our culture

Phidiax perceives culture as the resulting factor of the following concepts: “Ability”, “Empowerment”, and “Ownership.”

Phidiax personnel are industry leaders and expert technologists. Our passion is for solution implementation as we are technology evangelists. This “Ability” creates an incredibly powerful force of knowledge and drive which is observed as an extension to our Partner teams and stakeholders.

Phidiax is the vehicle which we use to “Empower” our personnel and to ensure that our efforts are contributing to a greater cause. This can be observed as a continuous feedback loop where our lessons learned from all facets of our implementations are factored into a more efficient offering. This directly translates to our evolving stream of services and is integral to our total quality of service.

“Ownership” is our way of ensuring that our efforts are well thought-out and in line with the organizations vision while minimizing Partner stress. This also fosters a relationship that is both successful at levels of technology and social team cohesiveness.

The overall approach is substantiated by all Phidiax personnel holding ownership interests within Phidiax.

We are an employee owned company.

Our organizational structure

Phidiax views the traditional organizational format, which includes bands of leadership and operations, as overhead. Phidiax then views overhead as a target for obliteration, as this encroaches on margins. Phidiax utilizes margins to create culture, benefits, and handsome payment programs. It becomes clear to see, these cyclical elements must be fine-tuned. We must stay agile. We must stay lean. We must manage the bands.

So how do you manage the bands? We delete them by turning them into button-clicks. Naturally, as a group of integration engineers, we must “eat our own dog food.” We designed the heck out of our infrastructure so that the bands simply need to be monitored and all operations flow given a couple button-clicks.

Then there is the Cloud. We are a Cloud provider and have been implementing cloud solutions in some format for over a decade. So again, we stick to what we know, and do what we do best, implement the Cloud to support Phidiax. We run our more complex operational activities in the cloud, which avoids tangible assets, like brick and mortar store fronts, or racks of servers. This reduces management and administration to simple button-clicks.

We streamlined, we remain lean.

Our people are the best

With the Phidiax framework in place, it enables the ability to focus on our culture. Our people get the most out of the “work-life” conundrum. It is very simple, we to work as desired: How, When, and Where. It really reduces down to productivity. If the “How, When, and Where” make sense, productivity and velocity of delivery exponentially increase.

So the rules are as follows:

1. Work in the cloud, work from home, or work from your client site. As a professional, juggle these, and make it work. Never lose sight of your personal and family needs, but put Partners at the forefront. We can put north of 5 hours back in our day by deleting morning preparation time, drive time, traffic time, lunch challenges, wind-down time. That is a minimum of 5 hours of dedicated time to serve our Partners, daily. It also is north of 1000 hours of life preserved, yearly.
2. Deliver solutions in accordance with your technical interests. By remaining focused on our core competencies, we remain selective on our partnerships and deliveries. This keeps us engaged, educated and confident.
3. Work responsibly and flexibly. By maintaining availability to our Partners, we are able to time-box our cycles throughout the day and remain present. Forcing extensive focus from 9 to 5 is an improper use of time. Enabling focus on our own accord, and during our individual creative time periods, we enhance our velocity and breed more productive cycles. This compels us to contribute more readily.

Of course the only way this works is by having peers who are the best-of-breed. Our members must be senior and seasoned professionals. Phidiax’s highly decorated credentials including being a Microsoft Managed Gold Partner in the top 1%, is testament of our teams dedication to excellence. We hand select our team, and take an organic approach towards expansion, growth, and Partner selection.

So there it is… it’s pretty straight forward, it’s inverted, and it’s for the people by the people.

The Phidiax vehicle allows us to wake-up with smiles on our faces. It allows us to be respected as technologists, owners, investors, and contributors.

Finally, and most importantly, it allows our Partners to rest assured that they are engaging with one of the best and most committed Microsoft partners on the block.

Jason Sauers

Founder, CEO, Sr Integration and Cloud Architect

JasonSauers@phidiax.com