The Intevacon team just returned from a great week in Las Vegas at the NACS show. It is always rewarding to chat with our customers and hear how they love using our system. There is nothing like hearing compliments and referrals from our customers to keep us motivated and excited to continue growing and serving our customers and prospects. We have a very talented development team who works very hard to make the Intevacon system run smoothly and meet all of our customers’ needs. 

Intevacon was founded in 2010, and in the last 4+ years, we have partnered with petroleum marketers across the country who have grown their fleet business with us and helped make us the best fleet card processor in the industry. A blog came out last week by Seth Godin describing the four stages of organizational growth: struggle, Servant, bully, and utility. Seth says that a business “can move to servant mode, delighting and connecting customers, exceeding expectations and performing what seems like miracles. Or it can take profits as soon as it can. The former leads to scale, the short-term approach usually results in more struggle.”

The Servant stage of business is exactly where Intevacon intends to stay as we grow with our marketers. We have big plans for 2015—plans to network our marketers across the nation, plans to help bring more volume to their sites, and plans to maintain strong relationships between the petroleum marketer and his cardholders.

Our business model is not necessarily the most conventional to turn a big profit, but we are satisfied with investing in the long-term growth of our business relationships. An article posted by PYMTS.com recently highlighted the fleet card industry stating that players in this field “charge vehicle fleet operators a subscription as well as transaction fees and they also get a piece of the transaction revenue from the gas station partners whenever anyone uses one of their cards to pay for fuel.” Intevacon just doesn’t operate that way, and we never will. We want to achieve our success by ensuring the success of our customers first.

To wrap up this blog post, here is a final quote by Seth Godin on organizational growth, “I’d like to believe that the goal is to figure out how to live a life in the servant stage, to create an organization that doesn’t become a bureaucratic haven or an avarice-focused engine of profit.” Amen.