The week before last, I was out in Oakland; this week in Philly — same client, same project. Why? Read on…

I met a potential client at PIMA’s MarkeTTech conference last November in Pittsburgh. The CMO for this particular carrier is tech-savvy and is finally getting buy-in at the top. So now he needs a Web development partner that can help him get where he wants to go better, faster, cheaper. Fortunately, he has a Web-savvy marketing veteran working for him at one of his subsidiaries. She can convert his terrific ideas into tangible deliverables.

So we met out in Cal. and walked through everything that was “possible” and then prioritized the results based on needed baseline functionality and product ROI. Like most insurance companies, 80% of the revenue is being generated by 20% of the products. So we will tackle those products first in Phase One, spending about $75 to $100k on Web development over about 10 to 12 weeks — a lot of experienced horsepower focused on developing a few well-defined and inter-connected Web sites.

So in contrast to my previous post on another in-house IT debacle, this savvy company is taking on the competition using a strategic partnership with IdeaStar. In fact, based on my research, it looks to be another Spanish Armada taking on the British Navy. My client could very well over-take its larger competitors within just a couple months.

Why?

I happen to know that the competitors’ internal IT departments are hyper-focusing on making sure the Web sites they build have triple-protection firewalls and encryption (even though the data captured is immediately transferred off-line to the back-end and ‘wiped’ from the site). GEESH! So while the competition is sweating the small stuff, my client will be engineering an end-run.

Watch out, big boys. You will wake up one morning next Summer and wonder why it seems like you’re the only one left standing when all the music has stopped!