2 min read February 2023 — The last two years have been a wake-up call for many companies about how their supply chain is structured. “While it’s not easy to just move a manufacturing plant halfway around the world, I think that there will be a concerted effort to do more onshore,” Avis Yates Rivers, president and CEO of Technology Concepts Group International, told Invest:.
What are the biggest achievements and milestones for your organization in the last year?
We signed six new customer contracts ranging from $200 thousand to $15 million and will continue that growth in 2023. We’d like to reach $100 million in the next 12 to 18 months. We have been able to deliver value to our customers in both divisions – Technology Solutions and Procurement Solutions. We’ve strengthened our data and analytics capabilities and invested heavily in AI-enabled technology.
We also had some major accomplishments in our giving arm, the TCGI Foundation. We were able to bestow three scholarships to young Black women studying technology and/or engineering in college. Two of them were incoming freshmen at Harvard and Virginia Tech. The third is a senior at Jackson State. Our scholarships are $10,000, and we are super excited to add more and more Fellows each year. We will financially support our Fellows throughout their college career and support their needs for internships and full-time jobs upon graduation.
We held our first memorial golf classic on Juneteenth to raise funds for the scholarships. That was an important day for us, commemorating the end of slavery. While we honor our history, it is just as important to look forward and do all we can to ensure the next generation of tech talent is as diverse as possible. We will hold our golf outing every year on Juneteenth at Commonwealth National Golf Club near Philadelphia. All are welcome!
How are inflation and supply chain issues impacting the work you are doing?
We’ve all suffered with extended lead times in getting products in hand over the last three years. That has been revealed as a huge supply chain weakness. We are too heavily dependent on the Far East for the manufacture of chips and other electronic components.
We started to help our customers with their demand planning and pre-ordering and stocking products that they were going to need this year and the coming year. Normally, we would do that a month in advance, but we started doing that on a six-month basis because that’s how long it was taking to get some products. So, a lot of pre-planned demand and preordering helped. And the customer doesn’t pay for the product until they activate it, meaning they request it from the inventory that we have on hand. That has helped a lot.
Do you think we will see a shift with more manufacturers setting up shop in the U.S.?
Companies have had a wake-up call and, while it’s not easy to just move a manufacturing plant halfway around the world, I think that there will be a concerted effort to do more onshore or near shore. I see companies insourcing back some of the business functions they had previously outsourced to the same regions of the world to capitalize on low-cost labor. But even that now is taking more of a hybrid approach. I recently saw one giant corporation bring back in-house all of their shared services activities. And so that was a big move. Some pieces of the business are coming back onshore and in-house.
What do you consider your key challenge now?
Managing our growth and expeditiously securing the right talent. It’s taking too long to fill roles both for us and our customers who look to us, in some cases to help them fill some technical roles. Many people respond to our outreach on traditional recruiting methods, but 90% are not qualified for the position they are responding to. That means we have to spend a lot more time in the screening process and most of the ones that we get are less than qualified for our openings. Gaining access to capital is also important to fuel our continued growth.
What is your take on how blockchain and cryptocurrencies are changing the way of doing business?
They are in their infancy and they’re not going away. I think it’s in everyone’s best interest to understand how they can be leveraged in your own business and your supply chain. Those are supply chain disruptions, cutting out the middleman with blockchain and creating a ledger in the cloud where you can see every transaction which can’t be changed.
The banks are all fully on board with crypto currency because they know that this is a trend that is going to continue to expand as opposed to contract. And so, I recommend that all companies, large and small, take a look at the opportunities that are coming as a result of these new technologies and see how they can leverage them.
How is the TCGi Foundation having a major impact in the community?
The TCGi Foundation’s mission is to provide opportunities for Black girls and women in Technology and Engineering by providing financial support in the form of scholarships to college-aged women. We identified three Fellows in 2022 and hope to identify at least 10 in 2023, and then continue growth in every successive year. All Fellows will be financially supported each year of their college career.
In order to continue to support a growing cohort of Fellows, the TCGi Foundation presents several events every year to raise funds. In addition to the John Fitzpatrick Memorial Golf Classic on Juneteenth, we are hosting disruptive, immersive experiences around the country. The first one will be in the Fall of 2023 in New York City. It is called, The Beauty in Tech, and will bring together industry leaders in ethnic hair, skincare and makeup, technical women of color, fledgling product companies founded by Black and Brown women, to solve challenges that still exist in the industry.
What is your outlook over the next two to three years?
We have a goal to continue to grow exponentially both organically as well as inorganically. We want to continue to make acquisitions to fill gaps that we see in our customer portfolio, and we want to continue to be an employer of choice in New Jersey but also around the world as this work-from-home modality is here to stay.
The global aspect of it has always been appealing to me, and we’ve ventured out and done work in some countries like Singapore, Ireland and Costa Rica. But I’d like to make that a more concerted effort and to grow with customers, many of whom are global entities, beyond the borders of North America.
For more information, visit:
