To A Finish LLC

CEOCFO-Members Login

May 12, 2014 Issue

The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information

INDEX  |  CONTACT  |   SERVICES  | HOME

Implementation and Integration Services for Salesforce.com

About To A Finish LLC

www.toafinish.com

Focused on Salesforce.com implementations and integrations, and branching off into app development, To A Finish seeks to do consulting a different way. From the initial design and needs analysis, through testing, training and go live, the goal is excellence. Attention to detail and thoroughness, putting our signature on everything we do, is the hallmark of To A Finish LLC.

Joseph Dindinger
CEO


After almost 15 years of development and consulting in the CRM arena, Joseph Dindinger started his own consulting company in late 2011. Today he leads a team of talented developers and consultants, doing business the To A Finish™ way. Joseph lives with his wife and two children in Austin, Texas.

“At the end of the day, the client has an expectation that is met. Many times they do not even realize all the work that goes into it but they know it was a good job that met their expectations.” - Joseph Dindinger


To A Finish LLC
12407 Mopac Expwy N, #250
Austin, TX 78758
512-436-3464

www.toafinish.com


 

 

 

Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – May 12, 2014

 

CEOCFO: Mr. Dindinger, what is the concept at To A Finish?

Mr. Dindinger: We provide services for Salesforce.com, both implementation of Salesforce.com and servicing existing Salesforce.com customers. We also build apps for Salesforce.com as well as integrate with backend systems, and provide all kinds of data services and things like that. Pretty much a one-stop-shop for Salesforce.com.

 

CEOCFO: What do you like about Salesforce.com and where are the challenges that you are able to help your clients overcome?

Mr. Dindinger: Salesforce.com is a huge, very successful company and they do about a billion dollars a quarter. They are large because they are doing things very well. Now, some small companies are able to buy Salesforce.com and just implement it themselves. Where we come in is when it goes beyond simple implementations to things that are more complicated, such as larger organizations that have a ton of moving parts or organizations that want to do things like connect their CRM on the frontend to their accounting software on the backend. We are able to provide services to companies where the typical administrator would not be able to handle the tasks associated with what they need for their CRM.

 

CEOCFO: Do most of your companies realize that before they have tried themselves?

Mr. Dindinger: I do not have a handle on how many of them. We have definitely run into some that did not realize that thought it was going to be easier to implement Salesforce.com but I would not say most.

 

CEOCFO: Your site indicates To A Finish has a different way of consulting and an approach that is different. How do you do it and why is your method so effective?

Mr. Dindinger: This goes beyond the Salesforce.com consulting world per se to consulting in general. I have been in consulting for over fifteen years and what I have come to see with many of the different people that I have run into is that consulting in general seems to have a bad connotation and a bad reputation where consultants are looked at as people who come in as opportunists to grab business. What happens is that people will hire consultants and then the expectation is that the consultants are knowledgeable and they are able to come in and quickly do a job and stay within budget and timeline. Some consultants are very good at that but the consulting industry in general is has a reputation of just always being over budget and over promising and under delivering. After consulting for a long time, two years ago I had an opportunity to break off on my own and I founded To A Finish based on the principles of doing work that was excellent and doing it to a finish. The title comes from a book called Pushing To The Front from the late 1800s. The whole idea is just basically putting your signature to all of your work and being able to stand behind all you do and not just doing a slip shod job and then leaving and potentially having to go back to a client and ask for more money because you were not able to do it in the time you said. What we want to do is put our signature to our work every time and the difference is that we go in and sometimes the client does not always know what they want. Sometimes we do have to go back for more budget because if they ask us for a Pinto and it turns out they need a Mercedes, then we are going to have to ask them for more. If we quote them a particular amount of budget for a project and go in and because of our failings, we fail to meet the budget then what we do is we bite the bullet and we have in many cases not gone back and charged the client for that. We provide the client a good job so all the people we work with we always have ways of checking the work and ways of making sure that everything we deliver is a good quality. At the end of the day, the client has an expectation that is met. Many times they do not even realize all the work that goes into it but they know it was a good job that met their expectations.

 

CEOCFO: When you are adding people to your company, how do you know that they understand that concept?

Mr. Dindinger: We do not know. We require anybody that works on things at least on any large basis to read some materials that have our core values in them. We are a small shop, so we are able to do that. The reality is that we do not know initially going in and I have not found a way to really know if a person is going to be excellent at what they do or not. If they prove not to be what we thought well then we move on and find better people.

 

CEOCFO: How do you reach potential clients?

Mr. Dindinger: It is interesting because only in the last few months that we even started trying to figure out our marketing. We have not had to market at all in the first two years. We had some clients that came to me personally from a prior job and that started us off and then after that it is either people just find us on the Internet or it is word of mouth mostly. We have not had to advertise at all and market at all. Sometimes we get a couple of email blasts but all of our clients have either come from recommendations or people that have just found us on the web without any effort on our end.

 

CEOCFO: Would you walk us through a typical engagement?

Mr. Dindinger: A typical engagement of a medium sized company is they first come into contact with us and we would have a call with them where we explore what they need. Then we would set up maybe a one or two-day meeting where we get into the details of their needs and what they want to do with CRM and what they want to do in their business. After that meeting, we provide them a timeline and a budget and a statement of work. Once they sign that, we start working with the team and make sure they have people on their end who are going to be responsible to meet deadlines and ensure that we get everything that we need from them. A typical engagement for us is about anywhere from one to two months. We deal with small to medium sized companies. After a couple of months, we will have implemented Salesforce.com for them and in some cases we will have integrated perhaps with a website that they have or with a backend with their accounting system like QuickBooks or something like that and then we bring everybody back together again. For these two months, we are having weekly meetings where we talk to about tasks and how everything is going. At the end, we will get together and have what we call a user acceptance testing for about a week and that is where some of the more power users are able to test it and tell us what they like and do not like. Depending upon what is found we typically do some training or equip the client to do training for themselves. Then we go live and service them after they go live to make sure that there are no hiccups or to fix the hiccups that are there.

 

CEOCFO: What are some of the areas in Salesforce.com that you anticipate a problem where others implementing Salesforce.com would not think to pay attention?

Mr. Dindinger: Much of the time, it is around data and the data structure and basically what we find is that by making sure that the initial data structure is correct we mitigate many problems. What we have found often is that data has been set up incorrectly; for example, sometimes with implementations there is as tendency to use an object that you should not use or perhaps you use a custom object when you should just be using a standard object and then you run into problems down the road. Those are probably the biggest things that we find around data. Other things that are more detailed that we find is that many times there is just attention to detail around fields and when someone does a search are they finding the right things or when they look at the screen do the fields make sense and are they organized in the right way. The only other thing I would say is that sometimes Salesforce.com requires more work than what some salespeople want to invest in. If sales managers or directors are requiring a ton of information from the salespeople, we often work with them just around the process to try to mitigate some of that and allow the salespeople to have as little interaction as they would want to make it easy to provide the information that their management or executive team needs so that there is much higher adoption of the CRM system.

 

CEOCFO: What is ahead for the company?

Mr. Dindinger: We are trying to productize what we do meaning to make it straightforward and document our processes to a point where we do not need as much oversight. Right now we basically have one implementation team and we would like to replicate that to have multiple implementation teams and the sky is the limit with how many we could do. Now that is our plan in the short term. In the long term we would like to add a few more apps on the Salesforce.com AppExchange and have our own product that meets the same criteria of being an excellent product.

 

CEOCFO: Why does To A Finish standout?

Mr. Dindinger: In the next four years or so we want to be the bearers and the standard of excellence for Salesforce.com consulting. That probably sounds crazy to many people because there are excellent consulting companies as well as excellent partners but we believe that being a small shop focused on quality we can carve a niche that will be appreciated. We want to become synonymous with excellent work so that in the Salesforce.com universe with all the thousands of companies that implement Salesforce.com we will become known for excellent work. We are hoping that our name will be thrown out there if you want solid work and if you are willing to pay for it.

disclaimers

Any reproduction or further distribution of this article without the express written consent of CEOCFOinterviews.com is prohibited.

 

 

 

Saesforce.com implementation and integration, To A Finish LLC, CEO Interviews 2014, Joseph Dindinger, Implementation and Integration Services for Salesforce.com, app development, Business Services Companies, Recent CEO Interviews, from the initial design and needs analysis, through testing, training and go live, backend systems, data services, one stop shop for Salesforce.com, To A Finish LLC Press Releases, News, Companies looking for venture capital, Angel Investors, private companies looking for investors, business services companies seeking investors, Salesforce implementation and integration companies needing investment capital

ceocfointerviews.com does not purchase or make
recommendation on stocks based on the interviews published.