Connecting the Dots

If you happened to be driving along the winding country roads up near Buffalo, New York, back in the 1950s, there’s a chance you passed by a small picnic table in a ditch where two little boys were selling produce. Maybe you stopped to buy vegetables and had the chance to chat about the weather with Bob Dinkel, the older brother. You would have certainly noticed his easy charm and natural way with people—character traits he cultivated at the small roadside business that would later carry him all over the world. Now a Managing Director of Pierce Capital Partners (PCP), a boutique M&A firm launched in 1993 that helps package and sell small businesses to mid-market companies, Bob has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles since his days of selling vegetables, but his work has always been about bringing people together and connecting the dots.

“From 10,000 feet, our firm is about bringing buyers and sellers together,” Bob remarks. “It doesn’t sound very complicated, but when you start drilling down, there are a myriad of considerations and realities that must line up for our work to be effective.” On the seller side, Bob works primarily with small business owners in the IT government contracting space for a period of time to get the business ready, ultimately packaging it into a document that effectively communicates its value to a prospective buyer and indicates how it might complement the buyer’s growth and strategic plans. On the buyer side, he takes care to note restricted contracts. “A seller might have contracts that can only go to small, veteran-owned, or women-owned businesses, for example, so you can’t just connect any two dots in making a sale,” he explains. “You have to mix and match to make sure the buyer can continue to grow the asset.”

In this line of work, social events and networking play a big role in Bob’s success, and in a sense, he’s never truly off the job. “I’m a big believer in the idea that everybody’s always selling,” he remarks. “Whenever you talk to someone, you get a sense of a particular topic or interest they have, and in the back of your mind, there may be a way to connect them to someone else who can help with that. That’s what connecting the dots is about, and I really enjoy bringing that kind of value to people. To me, that’s a home run.”

Having been born and raised in a rural farming environment where hard work permeated everyday life and value structures were strong, Bob believes that life isn’t defined as much by specific moments as it is by the context and tone set by one’s upbringing and culture. His father worked at the local Ford plant, while his mother had an accounting position at a car dealership. They modeled an excellent work ethic for their two sons, and Bob began operating the family’s tractor at age seven with his dad. Because he was expected to help out with farming operations year-round, there wasn’t much time left over for sports and other leisure activities.

Bob and his younger brother were allowed to sell vegetables on the side of the road, instilling in them the idea that if you worked hard, you could earn a few extra dollars for new school clothes or other luxuries. They did well, to the point that his father built a structure so they could expand the modest business into a small farm market. While he was in high school, Bob was also invited to work as a dishwasher at a restaurant nearby, which he eagerly accepted.

“Going through high school, I was far from a scholar and never really found something that resonated with me,” he remembers. All that changed, however, after he enrolled at the local community college and began to embrace school. He had the opportunity to take a course in the new field of data processing, where he mastered COBOL and other data processing languages. He worked for a while on the weekends as the desk clerk for a hotel, but ultimately gave that up for a job running a computer for a local Board of Education, cultivating a love of technology that would come to define his career. Meanwhile, his family sold their land, bought a lakefront home, and built a new farm market to develop the produce business further. But Bob, having had a taste of a different kind of business early on in school, knew he wanted to pursue something else.

After getting his associates degree, he transferred to Miami University in Ohio with plans to finish his college career. But when he was offered a job back in Buffalo by the Board of Education a year and a half later, he decided to pursue that instead. For the next two years, he learned systems programming and was responsible for keeping computers current with the latest software available. “When I landed this job that paid twice as much as my father was making at the Ford plant, we all knew it was a home run for the family,” he remembers.

Bob’s ascent up the economic ladder had only just begun. Before long, a former colleague urged him to come join a small consulting firm in Buffalo, which didn’t offer the humdrum stability of the Board of Education job but instead involved more entrepreneurial adventure and risk taking. He spent eight years at the firm, called DataWare, honing his skills in programming, marketing, and sales, which called on both his technical ability and the people skills he had first started developing back at the family produce stand. It was while he was working at DataWare that he went out to a local restaurant with friends and was introduced to Kathleen, the woman he would marry and spend his life with.

The company grew to about 40 people during Bob’s tenure there, expanding and putting in place international distributors to sell tools and programs for people looking to convert from one computer environment to another. One evening, he got to talking with the distributor responsible for selling their products in France and Spain. One of the distributor’s other clients was a company in Washington, Johnson Systems, who needed someone with Bob’s software and sales expertise.

The next day, Bob received a call from the company, inviting him for a cup of coffee to explore the possibilities. In no time, the company offered him a relocation package and the opportunity to run the federal group they wanted to launch. “I didn’t know much about that line of work, but they had spoken with a lot of local people about managing and driving a federal program, and everyone kept giving them reasons why they couldn’t do it,” Bob says. “The owners decided to bring someone in from the outside who had a fresh perspective on federal sales. The way I see it, sales is sales. You’ve got a product and a buyer with a need, so you connect the dots and make it work.”

With that, Bob and Kathleen did the unthinkable and left the comfort of the Buffalo area for Washington in the summer of 1981. “No one in either family had ever thought of that kind of treason,” he laughs. “We had been married for a little over two years, and the idea of taking my bride and moving south was unheard of.” But the couple was committed, and Bob immediately set about establishing himself in D.C.’s sales and software arena.

Having come from a services background in Buffalo, he enjoyed learning the products side of business. Then, in summer of 1984, Johnson Systems was acquired by Computer Associates International, Inc (CA), who wanted Bob to run a federal group for them. While the rest of the Johnson Systems staff was merging into the CA structure, Bob was given the leeway to take a piece of CA and run it as a federal group. He was on his own, and it was up to him to show his value and worth, but he wasted no time in showing the new company what he was made of. With a platform that he could truly grow with, Bob took the opportunity and ran with it, setting himself apart as someone who could deftly aid in the smooth integration of companies after they were acquired.

From then on, he was involved in virtually every one of CA’s acquisitions in one way or another, which tallied up to well over 50 transactions involving a number of competitive firms. This entailed working on integration, as well as turning his expert eye on the various parts of a company to see which components would fit with CA and which wouldn’t. “CA gained a reputation for being somewhat harsh at acquisition time, which was sometimes hard,” Bob reflects. “But we made a point to let people know where they stood from day one (in, out or temporary), versus falsely expressing a career that would never materialize. As the process matured, we provided outplacement for former employees if they ever needed anything from us later on.”

Bob spent a total of 23 years at CA, where he had an exceptional stable of mentors from which to learn and grow. He saw firsthand how large organizations implement sales teams and support and manage products on a global scale, and he had the opportunity to develop close relationships with CA team members and their families all over the world. Bob and his family moved to Chicago in 1986 to run the company’s Midwest region, and was then asked to move to Long Island in 1988 to work at their corporate headquarters. In that capacity, Bob was responsible for Canada, Latin America, the federal practice, and the company’s corporate events. “I had no idea what I was getting into at the time,” he laughs. “Our Latin American operations, for instance, were run out of Sao Paulo, and included everything south of the U.S.”

Several years later, Bob was sent back to Washington to run CA’s government unit. By that time, he and Kathleen had two daughters, and when he was called back to corporate several years later, the family decided to stay put and continue fostering its D.C. roots while Bob commuted back and forth to Long Island. “Kathleen has always been a phenomenal partner and soul mate, and she really took care of the home front through all of that,” he reflects. For the next four years, they made it work, and Bob still made the time to serve as a trustee at the Connelly School of the Holy Child, where his daughters attended.

In the late 1990s, after establishing itself as a multi-billion dollar global product licensing company, CA decided that it would only be able to further evolve toward its vision if it expanded into services. This transition finally brought Bob back to D.C., where he ran all of the firm’s government work and also became the new Senior VP. He was later assigned to a small subsidiary, Computer Associates Services Inc (CASI), which he grew to $80 million and a staff of 400. CA’s commercial sectors began to use his model as an example for their own work, and CA continued to acquire services companies through the early 2000s, until it realized that 85 percent of those service efforts were going toward supporting non-CA products. With that, Bob was asked to divest and reorganize the global services organization, responsible for its North American, European, and Latin American regions, and traveling weekly to new opportunities. He also spent three years developing alliances with some of the companies CA had divested to, until, at long last, it was time to retire and move on to something else.

Upon leaving CA in 2007, Bob was approached by a small D.C. consulting firm that wanted to partner with him and see what they could do. He then identified another firm to partner with, connecting the dots and pulling the companies together into something they could build upon. This yielded FedResults, a company geared at helping outside organizations enter the government sector via business development, GSA schedule support, and product resale. “We were essentially a local sales team for outside organizations,” Bob explains. They built that company for three years until the economic crisis of 2008, at which point they decided to package and sell it with the help of Pierce Capital. “We sold it locally to a firm in Herndon, and upon that sale, the managing partner at Pierce asked me to join them,” he remembers.

Having established himself at Pierce and acquired a familiarity with the different mid-market buyers, systems integrators, and small businesses within the community, Bob now especially enjoys the seller side of his work. “I really enjoy working with owners, talking about their challenges and where they hope to go,” he remarks. “I also like that you have to really learn a company’s history, customer base, and inner dynamics in order to match it with the right buyer. Typical buyers are interested in revenue and profitability, the agencies a seller works with, and the contract vehicles it has, and I love holding a refined lens up to those considerations to achieve successful transactions.”

As a leader, Bob makes a point to be fully engaged, providing feedback to those who invest real time and effort into their work. He also leads by example, never asking someone to do something he wouldn’t do himself. He replicates these tenets in the leadership roles he plays in organizations like the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) and the Small and Emerging Contractors Advisory Forum (SECAF), and as a father when his two daughters call him up to ask for advice.  In these phone calls, and in advising any young person entering the working world today, Bob says it’s not enough to just get your feet wet. “You’ve got to just jump into the deep end of the pool and see how it goes,” he says. “You’ll learn from mistakes. And pay attention to the little things, like arriving a little early, staying a little late, and keeping things organized, as that can go a long way too.”

Beyond that, he emphasizes the importance of taking a step back and really looking at where you are and where you want to go.  When he takes this advice himself, pausing the process of connecting the dots to take a look at what his efforts have created over time, he sees a balance of family trips around the world, transformative work experiences, and quiet afternoons buzzing around the hills of Great Falls, Virginia in the 75 TR6 he’s had since his days in Buffalo. He spends his free time enjoying his volunteer efforts for  child advocacy groups, the panels and local business clubs that now ask him to come share his expertise, and the business colleagues he feels honored to know. His example shows that taking the time to connect the dots yields the complete picture of a full life, sacred in its breadth and rich in its detail.

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