PJM Consulting’s Morettini is Excited to Work With So Many Startups
I had the pleasure of interviewing Phil Morettini, CEO & President of PJM Consulting.
Mr. Morettini is an accomplished senior executive with many years of experience in SaaS, hardware, and mobile software businesses, as well as early career experience in the automotive and heavy industrial sectors. In 2000 he founded PJM Consulting, a startup advisory and consultancy that provides practical, hands-on assistance to companies in the technology industry. PJM Consulting focuses on stimulating rapid improvements to the top and bottom lines of technology businesses. The practice’s core competencies are in General Management Advising/Coaching, Product Marketing, Business Development, Channel Development, and M&A.
Mr. Morettini began his business career as a Product Design Engineer in the automotive industry. After attending business school for an MBA, he transitioned into a long, successful run in high technology businesses, originally in Product Marketing/Management and later extending into Business Development, Sales Management, and General Management. Prior to starting his consulting practice, he held positions such as President & CEO, VP/Division Manager, and VP-Marketing & Sales in several High Tech enterprises.
The background of Mr. Morettini includes full P&L and general management responsibility, as well as managing product lines as large as $90M in revenue. Possessing broad domain experience within the high tech sector, he has launched numerous new products, created new brands, and pioneered entirely new product categories. His experience spans many technologies and markets, from low-cost consumer software to enterprise SaaS, hardware products and semiconductors. He has started up, built and led international organizations and excels at pinpointing key products and IP then exploiting them through efficient marketing and multiple worldwide distribution channels. He has worked in and consulted with a large number of early-stage software and hardware companies, in addition to major corporations such as Hewlett Packard, Teledyne, and Ford Motor Company.
Mr. Morettini earned a BS-General Engineering from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Detroit.
Thank you so much for joining us!
What motivated you to launch your Management Consulting Business?
It actually wasn’t a decision that I had planned on. I have a son with special needs who’s now an adult. Early in his life when he was first diagnosed, it became apparent that more flexibility in my work life was needed to fully attend to his needs. At the time I was leading a startup software company and working 7 days/week, with great responsibility. I started my consulting practice intending to do it only as long as necessary, as I’m a startup software CEO at heart. But the need for flexibility stretched out and my consulting practice flourished. So I continued on and here I am still enjoying it 22 years later. Sometimes when life throws you lemons you need to turn them into lemonade, as the old saying goes.
What is it that excites you about your consulting practice?
Like I said, I’m still really a software CEO at heart. So being able to work with many startup CEOs and their teams is something that never ceases to get my blood pumping. I’ve also always enjoyed variety and new challenges in my business career. Working in a advising/consulting capacity has allowed me to experience a far greater number and variety of markets, technologies and business situations, than if I had continued to manage one company at a time as a CEO. I believe that this breadth of experiences has really enriched my ability to assist my CEO clients. I’ve become very adept at diving into and new situations, often in times of startup chaos. My experiences have allowed me to develop the ability to quickly break business scenarios down to their fundamental building blocks, by separating the important from the unimportant. This enables myself and the client’s senior management team to focus on the most important issues and maximize improvements to the company’s performance in an expeditious manner.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your management consultancy?
There are two challenges to growth that prominently come to mind. I have a strong marketing and sales background, so marketing and selling my services certainly isn’t a foreign concept. But I’ve found that selling consulting services is much different that selling a software or hardware product. When working with tech startups, there are two major impediments. The first one is that “consulting” is kind of a dirty word to a significant segment of CEOs, who would never seriously consider retaining services such as mine, even though I may be perfectly positioned to help improve their businesses in a very cost-effective manner. The second big problem in working with early stage tech startups is money. Even though I strive to ensure that my services are VERY affordable and cost effective, many early stage businesses that could benefit greatly from working with me just have no budget for it, or we haven’t come in contact until after they’ve already run through their startup capital.
What are your future plans for your company?
I intend to continue to let the business take me to where the market need for my services exist. My business has morphed and changed in many ways over the last 22 years, but fundamentally it’s about sharing my expertise and experience with software and hardware CEOs, enabling them to build their companies as efficiently as possible. A key emphasis is allowing them to dodge the many startup pitfalls that I ran into in my owned career as a software CEO, as well as those encountered by the great number of CEO clients I have worked with in my consulting practice.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
There are so, so many important words of wisdom that I like to provide to startup founders. If I have to limit it to one, it would probably be “Don’t spend startup capital like it is operating income”. These two things are not the same, and I find all too often formerly “starving” startup founders tend to spend money like drunken sailors, after finally managing to raise some outside funding. It’s natural to have a long list of people and things that your company could use if you “only had the money”. The problem is that unlike repeatable operating income, startup capital is a scarce resource that once it’s spent, it’s gone. Because of this, it’s imperative that your startup capital is spent on only the most desperately needed people and equipment — never on simple “wants”. For more thoughts on this topic you can check out an article that I wrote on the difference between startup success and failure: What Makes The Difference Between Tech Startup Success And Failure?
How can our readers follow you on social media?
My twitter handle is @technologyguy. You can also look me up on my Personal Linkedin Account or contact me on the PJM Consulting Page on Linkedin, as well as the PJM Consuting Page on Facebook.
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
