Growing up, I was always a big fan of motorsports, and auto racing in particular. This is a sport where all contestants spend years building and tuning their vehicles using only the finest parts, to try to shave off mere fractions of a second on a circuit, with one common purpose: to win.

As I got older, I became fascinated with technology. With every year that passed, I saw computing technology become more and more powerful, and I began to see parallels between auto racing. With each improvement in technology, I learned that the leverage you can get by having the best components in your workstation was similar to having the best parts in your racecar. Except instead of racing around a circuit, your workstation is like a racecar for your mind.

Whether I was doing school work, programming for my part-time job, or researching a topic I found interesting, I noticed an improvement in my productivity with each upgrade I made to the technology I was using. This led me to always seek out and purchase the best components that I could afford for my workstation, and everything connected to it.

After I graduated from university and entered the workforce, I was surprised to find that, although we live in a predominantly technological world, most businesses did not share the same passion and high standards for technology as I did. In the business world, no one really cared about which laptop, monitor, or set of peripherals was better, more reliable, or easier for staff to use. No one really gave a lot of thought into which brands of network components perform better under load, or even which cloud platform was the best fit for their line of business.

The answers to these types of questions are fundamental, and as I've come to find, contribute to the reasons businesses today still have technology problems.

After speaking to many business owners to try to get a better understanding of their views on technology, I learned that oftentimes they just didn't know enough about the subject to make informed decisions. However, it was not their fault. They were almost always guided by an in-house IT team that lacked real world experience or by an outsourced managed IT services provider (MSP) that resold the same cookie-cutter solutions while preaching cost savings.

This type of thinking forces business owners to always see their IT department as if it was a cost center, cheapening technology where possible, then having it perform suboptimally, and creating problems for them in the long term.

I wanted to change this viewpoint.

I knew that with the right technologies today, configured correctly, a business's IT department can transform from a cost center to a profit-generating powerhouse that promotes productivity and puts the business and its people on the path to be leaders in their industry tomorrow.

I was determined to create that IT department, and together with my partner and best friend Mariano, we formed ALT Consulting – a company created to help our clients achieve one common purpose: to win.