Two "natural born innovators" are teaming up in Atlanta to help corporate America innovate, leveraging their entrepreneurial experience and research.
Co-founders of Core Consulting Scott Weaver and Evan LaPointe together share a long history of building businesses, inspiring innovation and growing companies from the inside out. LaPointe, a co-founder of Atlanta-based Search Discovery, sold the company's Satellite unit to Adobe in 2013 (better known today as Launch) and started three other businesses in Atlanta. Weaver has served notable positions with Optimus Solutions, an IT Service Management Company acquired by Softchoice, and Akamai Technologies for more than 10 years.
Combined, these founders have created one of the top-4 behavioral data gathering technologies on the Internet, started services and consulting companies that are on the Inc. 5000 list, built departments and launched products in 10,000 plus person organizations, created micro and macro cultures of quality and high-output, and more.
At Core Consulting, the duo plan to teach large businesses how to innovate products, customer experience and marketing departments by focusing on the core competencies and culture of the business and the people who work there. Innovation, Weaver said, at Core Consulting is all about quality and focusing on the core---the employees--- of the business.
"Many (large companies) are facing rapid disruption, either with new technology and/or new players in their market," he said. "So we set out to help them innovate better and faster and add a little bit more value to their customers."
Weaver and LaPointe said they've known each other for years, first as college classmates at Vanderbilt University and even as the best man at each other's weddings, but this is the first business venture they've committed to together. Based out of the WeWork 1372 Peachtree Office, the founders are continuing their research and learning from other successful players in the community during the soft launch of their startup.
"It's a little yin and yang," Weaver said. "Not only do we have very similar yet very different experiences in our jobs, but (LaPointe) went off and worked with 300 different brands and I’ve worked with probably 200-250 different brands and a lot of the same challenges that we see around innovation around the companies we’ve worked in, we also see within the companies that work effectively. [So] now we’re kind of setting off to go solve that innovation problem for midsize and large businesses the way we see it."
After extensive research combined with their own experience, Weaver and LaPointe found that departmental silos have a significant barrier to innovation. Many organizations in corporate America naturally stick to the status quo, hindering growth and innovation, they said.
"It’s not just kind of the top down, divide and conquer, because when you create division, you lose perspective," LaPointe said. "You have to truly make it an ecosystem where all these people are really truly adding to each other and executing on their own goals."
The origin stories for some of the most successful startups in recent history began inside a large company that didn't give founders the opportunity to innovate within, Weaver and LaPointe said. At Core Consulting, these entrepreneurs hope to make companies more comfortable with mayhem, leaving the manual at home and getting intentional with chaos.
"The mistake is not figuring out a way to harness the chaos," Weaver said.
