Observations from Mark Conklin in his 25th year at AIQ

2024 marks an impressive milestone for one of AIQ’s team leaders, Mark Conklin, as he celebrates his 25th anniversary working with the company. Now one of the company’s principals, Mark’s role affords him the opportunity to engage with nearly every AIQ client.
We thought it would be fun to take a walk down memory lane with Mark to learn about some of his experiences in his long career at AIQ.
Q: Tell us about how you started at AIQ?
When I started way back in 1999, I didn’t have any experience at all in technology or procurement. I am a creative person and I had mostly worked in the performing arts in my early years. But acting is a tough way to make a steady living, so I was always looking for side gigs. I took some HTML coding courses in the late ‘90s because everyone could see that the internet was booming, and I was hired into an entry-level job at AIQ back when it was called Applied Research Technologies. My job was to build web portals for clients that would display the status of the client’s projects and the results of their procurement auctions, helping them visualize the massive savings we were delivering to them.
Over the span of my 25 years at AIQ I have had the opportunity to change roles frequently. As AIQ grew, I helped to build solid, repeatable processes for our “procurement-as-a-service” approach and the way we interact with clients. I am proud to look around our organization now and see my fingerprints in many places!
I increasingly gravitated to client-facing roles where my experience as a performer paid off. I was always very comfortable pitching services and presenting results—especially because the results are usually beyond the client’s wildest expectations. I never get tired of seeing that “mind blown” look on the client’s face when I tell them we can save them 40 percent…50 percent…sometimes 80 percent of what they are spending.
Q: Looking back at your journey at AIQ, what observations can you share?
One of the most interesting things I’ve learned over the years working with finance, IT, and procurement people is that they often really don’t understand the power dynamics of their relationship with their vendors. They usually do not have deep knowledge of trends or competitors, or even pricing, in the product category. They are deferential with vendors and feel beholden to them—even as they may be paying a 300 percent premium or more over market value for the product or service!
Once we complete our first project with a client, their people are transformed forever. Going forward, they will know they can negotiate with their vendors from a position of power—as long as they have a data driven process, knowledge of a market and its competing providers, and the willingness to leverage the competition between providers.
Q: What advice would you give to customers so they can maximize AIQ’s value?
My biggest piece of advice is that I urge our clients to have courage. The clients that appreciate the biggest benefit—gigantic savings—are the ones that embrace being agents of change, the ones with the courage to disrupt the status quo. Relentlessly inspecting expenses and aggressively rebidding contracts can be hard on the ego of whoever negotiated the incumbent contract. It can be disruptive to familiar and friendly vendor-client relationships. It can make people uncomfortable by shaking up longstanding ways of doing things within the business. But there is much to gain for companies and individuals who have the courage to do it, like materially improving the company’s enterprise value, harvesting operating capital to fund growth projects, and avoiding drastic measures like layoffs.