During the Kinetic conference in Indianapolis this past May, Trek10 CEO Shane Fimbel joined two other panelists to discuss how growing companies can prepare for changing employee needs. Fimbel is in the thick of this challenge. Trek10 is only 5 years old, but the team has grown to 45 people, including 13 hires made just between January 1 and June 13, 2019.

The Elevate Ventures portfolio company has done business with nearly 100 unique clients on four continents, with as many on the East and West Coasts as in the whole Midwest. Customers range from high-growth, venture backed startups to Fortune 200 companies.

Fimbel calls talent attraction part of what makes Trek10 “the best in the world.” Indeed, the South Bend- scale up company is arguably No.1 at what it does. The key to this success, Fimbel says, is a high degree of focus. you likely can’t name any other company in the world selling exactly what Trek10 sells, and that is very much by design. As Fimbel describes it, Trek10 designs, builds and supports systems for its clients using Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.

“It can be very easy to sprawl in terms of the types of things that you do as a company. In our case, we’re 100 percent focused on the Amazon Web Services ecosystem. We don’t deal with Google Compute or Microsoft Azure. And within that AWS ecosystem, we focus on a very niche aspect of it called ‘serverless computing.’ It’s this focus that enables us to be the best in the world,” Fimbel says.

Trying to be all things to all people is tempting. It can seem like you’re hedging your bets or spreading around risk in case one part of what you’re selling doesn’t take off. This behavior is exactly what Fimbel says to avoid.

“We’re not diluting ourselves, either by trying to be a multicloud player or by trying to own every part of the ecosystem, even within AWS. Instead, we’re just laser focused on what we do best. That focus makes us best at what we do,” he says.

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