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Cathrine (Cathy) Jooste

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Cathrine (Cathy) Jooste is a business leader with nearly 30 years of experience in consultative and technology-enabled services. She excels at scaling companies, optimizing operations, and driving digital transformation. 

As the founder of Nuvidea Solutions, Cathy brings clarity and effectiveness to revenue generation strategies in an era of intelligent automation. She helps clients maximize cross-sell potential, streamline sales operations, and empower businesses to focus efforts on the right clients, offerings and markets. Her ability to blend analytical precision with strategic vision makes her a catalyst for transformation and value creation in today’s modern business environment. 

Cathy previously served as President of Global Services at Computer Generated Solutions (CGS Inc) and as Chief Commercial Officer at Atento, where she spearheaded record-breaking growth and accelerated business modernization initiatives across both organizations. She has held executive leadership positions at DXC Technologies, Cognizant, Avanade and Accenture. 

Cathy’s most meaningful role is at home in St. Petersburg, Florida, where she nurtures the brilliance of her teenage twin boys — future innovators with a deep passion for technology and environmental stewardship.  Maybe with a slight Mothers bias?  She’s a dedicated volunteer with the FIRST Robotics organization, championing hands-on learning and innovation in young minds. 

Why are you passionate about helping leaders of IT services firms?

Helping leaders of IT services firms is deeply personal to me because I understand the immense challenges they face in balancing innovation, operational efficiency, and sustainable growth. After nearly three decades in the field, I’ve seen firsthand how rapidly evolving technologies force leaders to adapt, innovate and make bold, future-shaping decisions. I thrive on helping leaders cut through the noise, focus on what truly matters, and unlock their full potential.

Throughout your career, you’ve helped organizations scale and transform their customer experience strategies. What key lessons from that journey do you hope to pass along to the next generation of founders and leaders?

I am but a student in this journey, and the best advice that I can pass on is that which I have learned from those who came before me:

  1. “The make up of a successful leader is only 20% vision and genius. The other 80% is stick-to-it-ness.” This advice has been a necessary reminder for me that it is not all fun, strategic planning and big moves.  Sometimes it is a lot of number crunching, data analysis or just plain meetings to get through… and the moments of brilliance emerge after all the elbow grease has been expended.
  1. “Go make mistakes, make many mistakes, just don’t make the same mistake twice”. This is a helpful reminder that you can only truly achieve greatness if you take risks.  Facilitating an environment where your leaders are not afraid of owning their mistakes, is the mark of an evolved organization. Learning from those mistakes to achieve better every time is the mark of progress.
  1. “Don’t lead from a perch, lead from within”  – Ben Jooste, Proprietor of Co-Art Gallery and Picture Framing (aka my Father.)  As a teenage immigrant in the USA, I was asked to oversee a couple of employees in our mom and pop family business as we completed our daily or weekly work items. I very quickly learned the value of servant leadership and earning the respect of those you work with.  This lesson is always close to me, and I never ask my team to do things that I am not willing to do also.  

Customer experience and outsourcing are evolving rapidly with technologies like AI. What do you believe are the biggest opportunities — and risks — for tech-enabled services firms in the next 3–5 years?

The next 3–5 years will be a defining era for tech-enabled services firms as AI continues to reshape customer experience and outsourcing. The top 3 opportunities I see for these firms are 1) using AI to deliver truly personalized interactions at scale that resonate and build loyalty; 2) letting AI handle the repetitive stuff to free up teams to focus on high-value, human centric work; and 3) using AI to create new services and revenue streams that go beyond traditional models.

On the flip side, the top 3 risks for firms in my view are 1) automating so much the lose the human touch and the trust required in these relationships; 2) hurting their brand and end up in legal trouble by ignoring data privacy and ethical concerns; and 3) becoming irrelevant by not keeping pace or upskilling their teams. AI is reshaping roles fast, and a lot of companies aren’t paying attention to the talent gaps.

What’s one piece of unconventional advice you often share with leaders that has had a big impact on their growth?

Slow down to speed up.  In fast-moving industries like ours, leaders often feel pressure to move quickly, react instantly and push forward at all costs. But the most transformative leaders pause, assess and align their teams before charging ahead.

Taking time to clarify priorities, listen deeply, and make strategic choices doesn’t slow progress – it accelerates it.  Rushed decisions can lead to inefficiencies, misalignment, and wasted energy. But when leaders invest in thoughtful planning, purposeful execution, and adaptive course corrections, they create a foundation for sustainable, repeatable success.

Chris Cali

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Chris Cali is a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits of technology product and services companies.

Most recently, Chris was the co-founder and managing partner of Spark Digital, a technology consulting andsoftware engineering firm specializing in the Communications, Media and Technology industries. The firm served clients like Dow Jones, NBCUniversal, WWE and Verizon and was sold to intive in November 2021.

Prior to Spark Digital, Chris co-founded Panvidea, a venture-backed B2B SaaS company focused on cloud-based video transcoding and distribution. Here he oversaw sales, marketing, product, and engineering, ultimately selling the business to a private-equity owned stock video company in 2011.

Chris is an expert in the media industry, and has held various technical roles at Sony Music, Maven Networks (acquired by Yahoo!) and Music Nation. He has been a Techstars Cloud mentor, is an active investor, a member of the Renaissance Executive Forum and is on the board of the Elm Project – a summer camp for underserved youth with Sickle Cell Disease in the NYC tri-state area.

Why are you passionate about helping leaders of IT services firms?

My passion is in growing people and in helping them learn new skills and realize their potential. People are the largest asset of IT services firms. Creating a collaborative, learning culture where people are rewarded for innovating and putting clients first is what will ultimately set them apart.

When you and your partner founded the digital engineering firm Spark Digital in 2012, you chose to go deep in a specific vertical. What did that look like and how did that contribute to your success?

Having worked in the Media & Entertainment vertical as a software engineer for the years prior to starting Spark Digital, this was a natural fit. It was the easiest path to closing sales given my existing network. Much later we learned that the Communications, Media and Technology vertical existed at many larger consulting firms and this would make a nice fit for a tuck-in acquisition.

My advice around choosing a go-to-market strategy is to lean into your strengths. We’re operating in a very saturated market and any way you can differentiate early on and build upon your proven experience (be it horizontal or vertical) is going to strengthen your position. If you’re looking for a change in your GTM strategy as a more established company, look for the common thread in your portfolio where you have the most successful case studies and build a story around that. Narrow your focus and double down.

From the beginning, you chose to build the core of your delivery team in Latin America – Argentina specifically. What were the benefits of building there? What was harder than you expected it to be?

This was a lucky accident. My mom was born in Argentina and had already worked with teams in India and Romania in previous roles at Sony Music and Yahoo! I decided to explore LatAm first for time zone purposes. I also hoped that I’d have some sort of connection to that country and, therefore, my family there that I didn’t know very well.

I quickly learned that Argentina was an amazing choice given its availability of engineering and education. I then got lucky again in meeting my Co-Founder, Francisco Amadeo. He’s one of a kind and I would still go to war with him if need be.

As demand increased and supply got overpriced during COVID, we expanded our reach into other LatAm countries with much success. There’s no better place to serve the U.S. nearshore than Central and South America. There are some nuances in labor laws and the like that you will need to understand. Make sure you either have a trusted partner, employee and/or law firm located in the region.

Treat them the same as you would your onshore employees. Nobody performs well if they feel like a second-class citizen.

You sold Spark to intive in 2021 for a great outcome. What advice would you give to others that are considering selling their business? Anything you would do differently?

We never built our company with the thought of selling. We operated for cash flow and as a byproduct, built a very healthy, growing, profitable business. The time to run a sale process became apparent through a combination of market conditions and founder interests. Being organized, profitable and having a great management team in place for years prior made the process much easier than it would have been otherwise. A buyer is going to see through your last-minute org changes and notice that you’re scrambling to track down your unorganized data. Run your business well and wait for the time to become apparent.

If you are selling and planning to leave the business, don’t underestimate the mental loss you’re going to feel. It’s comparable to a death. Give it some thought and have a plan for your time. In my experience, the type of people that start and run a business are not the kind that are going to enjoy doing nothing for an extended period of time afterward and nobody has any sympathy for post-windfall depression.

There are a lot of benefits about building with a co-founder, but there will come times when you aren’t always aligned. How did you and your co-founder Fran navigate those times and remain a united team for your employees?

Luckily, Francisco and I mostly aligned on major issues. We gave each other a lot of autonomy and if we detected a misalignment, it always led to a great conversation.

Being caught up in the day-to-day most of the time, I think we both welcomed these conversations that challenged our brains a little more than usual. We were a great team in this regard and these conversations are what I miss most about owning the business.

My advice to anybody having these sorts of troubles is that there are very few issues in this business worth dying on a hill for. If you don’t agree with a direction, but you can see that the damage of going that direction for a little while isn’t unrecoverable, then let the learning begin.

Bob Maller

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Bob is the former President and Chief Culture Officer of Collaborative Solutions, and an expert at growing teams, practices and partnerships in the fast-moving cloud computing space. To call Bob an IT services veteran might be putting it mildly. He started his consulting career in the ‘90s at global consultancies Accenture and Deloitte, before going on to manage consulting teams at PeopleSoft. That experience served him well when he joined Collaborative Solutions as its second employee. Over the years he’s grown Collaborative to more than 1100 employees and Workday’s longest tenured partner. Along the way, he’s also created a firm well respected for its work, culture and dedication to diversity, winning a ridiculous number of Best Places to Work awards. Collaborative was acquired by Cognizant in 2020, and Bob continues in the same role at Collaborative as Cognizant’s standalone Workday practice.

Why are you passionate about helping people-based businesses?

When we developed our core values at Collaborative, the clear first value was People. While it can be cliche to mention People as a core value, it’s the businesses that truly nurture and develop their people who are most successful — especially in services. Real magic happens with collaboration, which is why when you’re building a firm or a practice, teamwork is such a critical trait. The “smartest” or most-skilled person may not be a fit for your organization if they don’t thrive as a member of a team.

As the second employee at Collaborative Solutions, you grew the firm from a niche PeopleSoft federal contractor to a ‘crown jewel’ of the Workday ecosystem with more than 1000 employees. What was the most challenging part of that early journey and what was it when you reached scale?

In the early days, the challenge was to differentiate ourselves. As we became a Workday partner, the fear was that we would build a practice and the large SIs would swoop in to hire them away. This is why hiring the right people and building a sustainable, employee friendly culture was, and is still, critical.

Our first acquisition (a Workday consultancy in Australia) was also an interesting milestone. Integrating them into what was then a North American-centric business and making them feel a part of the Collaborative family took real work.

At 500+ employees, I no longer knew each employee, which was a very weird feeling. We needed ways to stay in touch with each other and keep engagement high. So we launched the Collabie Convos series (intimate video calls with 15-20 employees) to discuss a variety of topics. We also put a lot more emphasis on developing the people in the firm to become leaders and great ambassadors of our culture. It cannot just be the senior leadership team who sets the tone for the culture.

You’re a huge advocate of culture and inclusivity. What is the key to scaling culture as the company grows, expands and evolves?

It starts with formalizing and promoting your core values. In the early days, it’s about defining and discovering those values as a founding team. As we got larger, it became very important that every employee around the world knew what our core values were and why we had them. We reinforced them daily and worked them into our processes. They weren’t just words or phrases on a wall in an office.

Selecting and developing the right leaders within your practices is also critical, and should constantly be reviewed. These are the leaders that new hires will look to, even more than the executive team. Do you have the right leaders? Do they exemplify our core values? Did we promote people into areas they cannot handle and would be better suited as individual contributors? We, as leaders, cannot be afraid to ask these questions and make adjustments along the way.

When it comes to inclusivity, it simply needs to be a priority – a focus from the top down. I’d also highly encourage instituting a buddy and/or mentoring program to indoctrinate people into the company and to ensure that they have someone to help navigate their careers within the company.

Keeping employees engaged is never easy, but it can be even more challenging during rapid growth and downturns. What are some things leaders can do to keep engagement high throughout a company’s lifecycle?

The first thing is to survey your employees, but just as importantly, do something with the results. Show your employees that what they told you is valued and, if it needs work, that it’s being addressed. I am a big believer that surveys are anonymous and people understand that improvement is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. For trust to flourish, leaders need to be vulnerable and transparent. Talk to your people more often than you think, through a variety of mechanisms. Use video as much as possible when communicating important things (as opposed to a flat email that no one really reads).

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