Ask the people who have worked with me.

Two finalists. Randy met no one else.

“In a previous role, I was the IT Director at a fintech company, running mission-critical, revenue-generating platforms where downtime wasn’t an option. Our public cloud setup had become both expensive and rigid, a one-size-fits-all model that didn’t match what a financial platform at our scale actually needed: deep visibility into the environment, real control, carrier-agnostic connectivity, and airtight uptime guarantees.

We went to market for a replacement and brought Mike in to run the search. Vendor selection at this level normally means weeks of research, introductory calls, and sales meetings just to find out who’s even worth talking to seriously. Mike took that off my plate entirely. He pre-vetted every candidate before I spoke to one of them, then brought me two finalists who could actually meet our requirements, not just claim to. From there he coordinated every meeting and ran the entire proof of concept process, so my time went into evaluating results instead of chasing schedules and sitting through pitches. What would have been hours and hours of my own time went to him instead.

The result: just over $50,000 saved in year one, and just over $106,000 in year two, backed by our own financial analysis. But the bigger win was getting a vendor that actually met our exact requirements, which meant better uptime and performance for our own clients, not just cost savings on our end.”

A 30-day install on a 90-day industry timeline.

“I was in a tough spot on a complex project with a hard deadline. We needed to connect two data centers with dual diverse paths, needed it installed in 30 days, needed it within a budget, and on a 12 month contract. The issue is that most carriers would take at least 90 days to complete a project like this, and since it was a short term contract, pricing would normally be astronomical. To make it worse, my company would have been on the hook for millions in renewal costs if we missed the install window.

Mike didn’t take the request and disappear for a few weeks. Within the first week he came back with the sole provider that could deliver exactly what we needed. He handled every conversation, so I wasn’t chasing vendors myself. When the provider’s pricing came back too high for our budget, he went back and renegotiated instead of making us settle or start over. Once we executed the order, he stayed on top of the installation schedule and flagged two potential delays before they became real problems, which is the only reason we hit the date.

A year later, he also caught an unnecessary contract renewal we’d completely forgotten about and got us out of it, saving us another $50,000 to $75,000.”

Better pricing and better diversity. The paths were checked.

The director

Jim Hutchinson

Director, Cloud Platform Department, Europe and the Americas

“The thing that stuck with me is how many options Mike found that we just didn’t know were out there. We’d tell him we needed bandwidth between a couple of sites, and he’d come back with carriers we’d never heard of and routes we wouldn’t have thought to ask about, and somehow he’d land on better pricing and better diversity at the same time.

I never had to think too hard about it either, he’d lay out two or three real options, tell me which one he’d pick and why, and I’d just say go. To date he’s saved us something like $350,000.

But honestly the bigger thing for me is that I wasn’t dealing with ten different vendors anymore. It was one guy, and whatever came up, even after the circuit was live, he fixed it.”

The engineer

Jim Schultz

Senior Network Engineer

“Mike and I worked together at a past company, and we used him to manage all of our global connectivity. What I appreciated is he’d actually dig into whether a route was diverse instead of just taking the carrier’s word for it. A lot of what gets sold as diverse isn’t, once you actually look at the subsea paths, and Mike would go verify that before we ever signed anything.

He also took a headache off my plate that I didn’t realize how much I hated dealing with. Getting a carrier and a data center to actually coordinate with each other is its own project sometimes, and instead of that landing on me, he’d get everyone on the phone and push it through himself. After install, if billing was wrong or something needed a support ticket chased down, I didn’t touch it, he was already on it.

That’s really the win for me, less stuff on my desk that has nothing to do with actual engineering.”

He chased it daily. Then went around them to the COO.

“We had an on-prem phone system that the company had outgrown. Mike found the replacement and handled the contract. That part went fine. Moving onto it was where we ran into problems.

Porting our numbers off the old carrier took a lot longer than it should have. Mike was chasing them every day and kept coming back with the same thing, that they weren’t moving. He’d tell me each time where it stood and what our options were, so I always knew. He came out and sat in our offices working on it. Then he showed me he’d gone around the account team and got hold of the carrier’s COO. It was fixed the next day.

There were a few hiccups getting the new system set up. Mike stayed on that one too rather than handing it back to me. He kept pushing the vendor, and it didn’t matter what time or day I heard from him.

He also took over the internet circuits for four offices. That’s four providers I’d have been dealing with myself. I didn’t have to think about it.”