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Leadership, technology team up with Tanduo

Software consulting company grows people, companies via collaboration, technical and non-technical work

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January 13, 2025

GREEN BAY – Technology consulting can be troublesome, Bryan Jorgensen and Josh Shafman said, when companies lack the proper internal leaders to effectively collaborate with external consultants. 

Shafman and Jorgensen – partners and co-founders of software consulting company Tanduo Technical Partners Inc. – said it’s ideal for organizations to have someone on staff who understands the dynamics and goals of the company and is also knowledgeable about technology, software development and people leadership.  

The duo said this baseline of knowledge enables not only a successful consulting partnership but also helps these leaders hold their companies accountable for new initiatives. 

Unfortunately, the partners said, in their work before co-founding Tanduo nearly five years ago, they discovered “the technology industry was consuming leaders faster than it was creating them.” 

“It feels like companies are out hiring these people, not growing them (internally),” Jorgensen said. “The analogy we used was people are chopping down the trees in the forest – those leaders – but they’re not replanting the seeds. They’re not helping grow and foster the new growth. So that was kind of the concept for us – how do we grow these people that other people aren’t creating?” 

With Tanduo, Jorgensen said the initial vision was to grow such a caliber of well-rounded leaders – which he and Shafman said they’ve termed “exceptional generalists” – before they would eventually “graduate from Tanduo and go somewhere else.” 

“But instead,” Jorgensen said, “we found that we were the leaders at those companies.” 

Rather than train individuals to go off on their own – “in a silo by themselves; the one leader at a company, or one of few” – he said the more impactful method has been to cultivate “a group of leaders, banded together, going and helping companies and helping the community.”  

“That’s been more the (business) model,” Jorgensen said. “We’re going to stay together, keep growing those leaders here, grow (clients’) organizations and then do more with that.” 

Growing, together 

Shafman said Tanduo – which recently expanded to 20 team members – helps to scale companies with a combination of its fractional CIO (chief information officer) skills and delivery teams. 

“Our fractional CIOs, more or less our leaders, they come in and help do that digital transformation planning – ‘How do we transform this organization? How do we evaluate it? How do we have hard truths?’” he said. “And then our delivery teams typically come in to help us get that work done. The delivery teams will help us build products, integrate systems, modernize old systems – things like that.” 

Josh Shafman. Submitted Photo

This combination, Shafman said, makes it suitable for Tanduo to work with any company, but they’re “primarily focused on helping mid-market-size companies, which is normally between $20 million to $250 (million).” 

“Mid-sized companies find the most value from us,” he said. “We can go in and provide a ton of value, because we can be that ‘exceptional generalist.’ (We can say,) ‘let’s go work on the sales systems, and then six months from now, let’s go work on the HR systems, and then six months from then, let’s go work on how we manage all of our vendors.’” 

Jorgensen and Shafman said its client base spans small- and medium-sized businesses to multi-billion-dollar companies, offering blocks of hours to achieve anything from full organizational growth, departmental growth and/or project management via: 

  • Full stack development 
  • Cloud and DevOps 
  • Identity management 
  • Data science 
  • Modernization 
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) management 

“In many ways, what we’re doing is helping fill those gaps and helping on that growth journey,” Shafman said. “(If a company says,) ‘Hey, we normally do two big initiatives every year – we need to start doing four, because customers are being handed to us by the market. Our product’s so good’ – and there are a lot of businesses like this right now – ‘we have so many customers we can’t even onboard them all.’”

Shafman said that’s a perfect spot for Tanduo to come help, “because that growth needs this kind of exceptional generalist leadership.”

“A lot of times the problems they have aren’t a single problem,” he said.

To identify issues and effectively provide solutions, Jorgensen and Shafman said Tanduo’s first priority is to build trusting relationships with clients – as opposed to taking a detached approach of passively completing tasks per request. 

“As a consultant, it’s way easier to just do whatever you’re told – way easier,” Shafman said. “But if you care about your outcomes and you care about delivering value, you’re going to go have that hard conversation and say, ‘No, I think we should pause this (initiative),’ even though (Tanduo) might have less revenue this week because we’re going to cut some hours.” 

With a foundation of trust, the partners said they’re able to foster the level of collaboration necessary for success. 

“We don’t believe that us making the decisions and going in a black box is the best thing – us working together, working with people, is the solution,” Shafman said. “A lot of other consulting companies go in and say, ‘I’m going to do work for you. It’s going to be really easy, and it’s going to be no work for you.’ Then they take it and run with it and when they get done, it’s not exactly what you wanted because it’s kind of gone off a different path – but that’s because you weren’t involved.” 

Two to tango 

Though growing companies is Tanduo’s top goal, Jorgensen and Shafman said, it’s by no means their only motivation.  

To convey their valuation of collaboration and partnership, the co-owners said they brainstormed the name Tanduo as a portmanteau of “tandem” and “duo,” and further symbolized the concept in their logo featuring a pair of dolphins. 

“We really liked this whole idea of a guide and somebody being guided, or a mentor and a mentee, or a coach and someone being coached,” Shafman said. “A lot of what we’re doing is around this (concept of) duo – there are always two people or two groups. Even when you have a client and a vendor, you have a leader in their team.” 

Both externally and internally, the partners said “coaching is infused in everything we do,” whether that’s imparting transformational mindset wisdom, skills and knowledge to clients or developing the expertise and leadership capabilities of the Tanduo team. 

“I love investing time and growing leaders,” Shafman said. “I love coaching. I love helping people become my peers, and I say this often: I just love the idea that Bryan and I are probably creating people who are going to be better than us someday. That is very cool – that motivates me more than anything else.” 

Ignition 

The partners said their passion for coaching led them to develop Tech Ignite, a free group mentorship program for high school students. 

Sessions of Tech Ignite run throughout the year, with the one-hour, after-school, remote sessions meeting bi-weekly to cover computer science topics, such as HTML & CSS, APIs, Git and Python, as well as career-centric topics like professionalism and networking. 

Jorgensen and Shafman said they started the program to build community by connecting students with similar career aspirations, and to raise awareness of the many tech-related opportunities young people may otherwise miss. 

Bryan Jorgensen. Submitted Photo

“You ask any high school student, ‘what does it mean if I get a computer science degree?’ ‘Well, I’m going to be a developer’ – that’s the only path they think exists in that (field),” Jorgensen said. “But there are so many. There’s project manager, product manager, business analyst, robotics-type things – there are all sorts of combinations people go into, that people don’t see at the surface. The whole point is to educate high school students about those different potential career paths and not have them limit their view of the field.” 

These efforts, the partners said, have led to Tanduo working with the Northeast Wisconsin (NEW) Manufacturing Alliance on related events.  

They said they also work with NEW Digital Alliance on events, including the upcoming 2025 CX2 NEW Technology Career Exhibit Feb. 4 in Appleton. 

Jorgensen said these efforts help to build tech literacy and careers locally, with the goal of encouraging burgeoning professionals to establish roots rather than take talents elsewhere. 

“When it comes to technical leadership and investment leadership, our communities around here are under-invested in that space,” he said. “We’re invested in school and education and growing families here, but keeping talent and growing leaders here that are going to continue to lead us in our communities – to grow these communities – we’re a little bit too much ‘build them and ship them off.’”

Jorgensen said he thinks Tanduo provides a better chance to grow those people, “or even just more specifically, let people stay where they are and grow their communities there.” 

In addition to the rewarding experience of growing companies and coaching present leaders, the partners said they find much to appreciate in the “positive feedback cycle” of building communities and teaching future leaders. 

“It feels like we’re doing something really impactful if they can outpace what we’ve done,” Shafman said, “and then hopefully they’ll help people get better than they got as well.” 

Jorgensen said he likes investing in others.

“I like making connections (and) setting people up for success, and if that’s with me or with others, or with tools or whatever, I like that,” he said. “It keeps me going. The other piece that keeps me going is having the ability to pass the torch to peers and successors – somebody to continue this mentality on.” 

Learn more about Tanduo Technical Partners Inc. at the company’s website, tanduo.io. 

TBN
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