MSP 501 Flashback: Catching Up with 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Iuvo Technologies

Bryon Beilman won the MSP 501 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award. And the co-founder and CEO of Iuvo Technologies says he “was completely shocked” to receive the honor.

Iuvo Technologies’ Bryon Beilman

“I didn’t even know that I was submitted for it,” he said.

The Lifetime Achievement Award goes to an executive who has demonstrated commitment, perseverance, creativity and ingenuity over an entire career. And Beilman certainly has all those qualities in spades. He and Jeff Ouellette founded Iuvo in 2007. Their goal was to empower businesses and help them increase profitability through technology. The company thrived. From 2015-2017, they were one of Inc. 5000’s fastest growing companies. From 2016-2018, the Boston Business Journal named Iuvo to its list of 50 Fastest-Growing Companies. And in 2016, it got a SmartCEO Future 50 Award for the Boston area.

At the heart of their success, according to Beilman, is the ability to couple IT expertise with a real, person-to-person connection with their customers.

“I think the success really is relationships and finding the right people who share the same values, same core values,” he said. “For the last 13 years at this company, that’s what I’ve been focusing on. I try to find people who are better than me in various aspects and that fit the criteria of being good people and collaborators, and building a good team.”

“It comes down to the ability to relate to people,” he said. “IT is all about bits and bytes, but behind that is these tools that we’re using every day to help people do great things.”

“It’s all about people.”

A People-Centric Culture

Beilman sees the people-centric business model he has helped develop at Iuvo as being central to the company’s ability to hold steady during the pandemic and help their customers do the same. Most clients were slow to respond to the shift to employees working from home. But they soon realized how ill-prepared they were to deal with a remote workforce and asked for help — the sooner, the better.

“We were in the right place at the right time for that,” he said. “We were able to buckle down and do what we needed to do.”

“Our culture is one of pushing out leadership toward the edges,” he said. “Our team is empowered to take care of their customers however they want. They have a framework. They have the tools.”

While 2020’s been a rough year, Beilman says he feels “super confident” about Iuvo’s future.

“It’s not going to be a banner year from a revenue point of view,” he said. “As a matter of fact, we’ve had to make some adjustments. But we’re not getting rid of any people. We’ve got a great team and we’ve been able to build on some things.”

He also supports the widely held view that telecommuting will become a permanent option in many companies.

“I think people are going to work remotely,” he said. “They’re realizing, ‘Hey, we can still be very productive. We’re still getting a lot done.’ Maybe people are getting a little sick of Zoom and Teams at times, but I think that option to work from home is going to continue.

“What’s going to happen in the future? I think there’s still going to be some pressure on businesses to figure out how they’re going to do things — especially in the consumer space. We’re not in the consumer space, we’re B2B. But there may be some trickle down that happens to all of us. We’re resilient and we’re trying to keep our ear to the ground and offer the best quality we can,” said Beilman.