Zimmerman Agency:
Transcending the Rat Race
But is it truly safe to consistently deploy the latest technology in a business where a moment’s interruption in client service can doom a relationship? “What we love about Mac OS X is that it’s very aggressive in terms of performance, but it’s also very reliable, thanks to its UNIX foundation,” says McHargue. “Reliability is also what moved us into the Xserve G5 generation of servers — the idea of very rapid, very capable back-up and recovery. We’ve never lost a shred of data. So there’s nothing frivolous about it — we use this technology because it fulfills a business need.”
Zimmerman, who spends much of his time with clients, agrees: “Clients always go back to the fact that no matter where we are, communication has never been an issue. We have a fantastic password-protected extranet for clients that’s never failed. A lot of that is because of the Apple tools we use — but clients don’t need to know that. They just need to know it’s there, 24/7.”
“Across the board,” says McHargue, “Mac OS X and Xserve have been an amazing success for us. I’m not worried about nitty details like printer connectivity and PDF creation, or huge issues like servers crashing. I’m sleeping peacefully at night — and dreaming about our long-term strategy.”
Road Work
As the agency’s client roster has grown, so has Curtis Zimmerman’s travel schedule. “Client projects have taken me to Beijing, Hong Kong, Moscow, Frankfurt, London,” Zimmerman says, “but somehow Mike always keeps me connected to home base.”
“The truth is,” he says with a grin, “we’re still laid back. But somehow, our Macs keep propelling us forward.”
Says McHargue, “With a PowerBook, if they’re on dial-up, broadband, networking through their cell phone, whatever, our folks have access to 100 percent of our services, safely and securely. That sort of mobility and connectivity is standard operating procedure for us. We have one employee whose husband got transferred, but she was critical to our business. So now she works remotely — yet thanks to iSight cameras and iChat AV, she’s still feels intimately connected to what we do here. And she literally does not miss a beat any day.
“By every standard metric, our 100-person organization should need three people to handle basic IT needs. With Apple Remote Desktop, we only need one — me. And I still find plenty of time to contemplate big-picture issues that keep the agency nimble.”
“That’s just one of many reasons why we’re willing to explore and investigate and adopt Mac technology as fast as we do. We do it because we believe. And we believe because it’s been a proven strategy since the day we started our business.”
Family Time
But wait — isn’t the agency’s rapid growth at odds with the anti-entrepreneurial instincts that first brought Zimmerman to this balmy backwater?
“As big as we’ve grown, I’m still making time for my family. I’ve now got a nine-year-old, a 20-year-old, and a 22-year-old,” Zimmerman says. “My two older boys played both baseball and soccer, and I rarely missed a game. But I can tell you, leading up to the game I was sitting in my car on my laptop making sure I was doing what I needed to do, and Mike had made sure I could zap things from my PDA and operate as seamlessly as I possibly could.
“It’s great that clients might think I’m at my desk at 6:30, but I’m at the baseball diamond, because my son’s there.
