Nick Mancini founded The Tech Consultants, a managed information technology services provider in Woodland Hills, 20 years ago this month.
In that time, the firm has come to serve companies with just a handful of employees or headcounts in the hundreds, ranging from professional services operations, manufacturers and engineers, and healthcare practices. In looking back on the firm’s years, Mancini considered the ramifications – and missed opportunities – of selling yourself short.
I think from more of a philosophical perspective, I guess I’ve always been super conservative about what my capabilities are, not only as an individual but as a company. Under my leadership over the last 20 years, we’ve taken a very conservative approach to what we can and cannot do, and unless I felt 100% certain that we could take on a client or a project and excel and really over-deliver on the expectations, then I would often shy away and say, ‘This is too big for us. This is too complex for us. It’s just not an opportunity for us to excel in.’ Inevitably, over time, you bite off more and more and more because you gain that experience. But the biggest regret earlier in my career was being afraid of taking on opportunities that I felt I could not deliver on, and in retrospect, there are probably dozens of large opportunities that I would have absolutely excelled at, where my company and my team and my colleagues would have absolutely overdelivered on the services.
Pushing back on imposter syndrome
We just didn’t bid on certain things because we were concerned. I guess that kind of goes a little bit towards the imposter syndrome that we all suffer from in our careers, right? Where we just think, ‘Why am I here? I don’t belong in this group of people.
These are the captains of industries, and these are big time people, and I have no business being in this room with them or talking with them.’ Well, you know, that’s bull****; I had every reason to be in the room with them, and I had every reason to pursue the opportunities that presented themselves to me.
Maintaining confidence
In retrospect, it would have served me and my company and our clients extremely well had I taken those opportunities on, because, in some cases, I later found out that because we didn’t take on an opportunity, somebody else did, and boy, did they screw that up! So many times, you think you’re going to walk into a room where everybody is going to be incredibly smart and you are just an idiot and you have no business being there and then you walk out afterwards, you’re like, ‘It’s a room full of idiots.’ A lot of times, when we take over IT management for an organization, we think, or at least we used to think – we figured this out after 20 years – ‘Oh boy, we’re going to inherit perfection, and how are we going to make it better?’ And then, as we start peeling back the layers of our clients’ previous configurations and services and standards, we realize that the other IT provider had no business servicing that customer, that we were in fact the smartest people in the room and that we do deserve the business. That’s my philosophical biggest regret, is having impostor syndrome fear.