Kevin D. Glass: Managing Business like an Artist

Art is about critique and honesty. An artist must be prolific, ‘thick-skinned,’ and creative to stand-out from the rest. These attributes inherently play a role in a person’s business acumen, especially when responsible for making managerial decisions.
From training and passion, Kevin considers himself as a visual artist. According to him, in the art world, when your work is not sufficient, you hear about it directly, and this has had a unique and significant impact on his approach to running his company.
He is an exemplary combination of East Coast Boston directness and creative-minded artist, with an education that started out with professors saying things like: “look to your right, left, down the center, heck no one in this room or school for that matter will probably cut it as you most likely won’t be good enough or have what it takes to survive and thrive in the art world.” He credits his art degree for giving the him best business training he could have hoped ever to receive.
Kevin D. Glass is President and Chief Executive Officer of HAYSTACKID, the premier technology-neutral litigation support, consulting and solutions organization. Kevin is a 15-year veteran of the litigation support industry, beginning his career with Bowne & Company, an institution with a rich corporate history founded in 1775.
As the company’s first-round hire following its entrance into the business outsourcing arena, he grew that new business enterprise concept from the ground up into a multi-million dollar, well-respected division. Kevin also served as the National Director of Sales and Operations for a billion-dollar international Business Process Outsourcing (“BPO”) firm.
He was charged with saving a doomed division losing millions of dollars annually from its closure and turned it into a highly profitable and client-focused success. Before his leadership position at HAYSTACKID, Kevin enjoyed an outstanding track record in his entrepreneurial endeavors. He has experience of working throughout the country in the fast-paced litigation support markets in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., and various other litigation hubs.
HaystackID: An International eDiscovery and Forensics Services Provider
HAYSTACKID is an international eDiscovery and digital forensics solutions provider, with office locations throughout the country, Canada and in Europe. The company provides corporate customers and their counsel with cost predictability options that allow an accurate budgeting and forecasting of their discovery expenses without the additional cost of software, hardware or implementation fees. They started with a forensics first approach that gives reason and context to a data corpus. HAYSTACKID is headquartered in Boston with offices in New York; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Houston; Los Angeles; San Diego; San Francisco; Beaverton, Oregon; Toronto Canada; Paris, France; and Frankfurt & Berlin, Germany.
Unique Strategies Assuring Success
HAYSTACKID competes in a worldwide marketplace where scale and financial stability are paramount in the eyes of a prospective client, especially when it comes to partnering with a vendor. It is all about trust.
The law firms and their clients have to know that the partner will not only get a complex project completed, but also feel the utmost confidence that the organization will also be around for years and remains as good as when the relationship first began. Large litigation matters last for years, and firms need to have a trusted partner throughout the entire lifecycle.
Also, many law firms faced with dwindling billable hours began aggressively bringing all these eDiscovery services in-house to create new and profitable revenue streams. However, neither law firms nor their clients wanted to be called to court as witnesses and asked to defend their methods of collecting data on the stand.
Many court rulings pointing to the “fox guarding the hen-house” have made a third party indispensable. HAYSTACKID’s approach is also a safer and “better” way to go about this process. Their experts work side by side the stakeholders, IT personnel, and the custodians involved in a litigation matter performing forensics investigations while creating the evidence workflow. As an observer, the law firms that are embracing their type of approach are winning deals and doing better overall.
At this rate, they will get to that lofty goal. They were #38 in Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in America last year and the year before they were #67. Kevin has never professionally heard of that kind of back-to-back growth and success.
TEAM – Together Everyone Achieves More
“We have to mobilize quickly and be creative. We have to work together as a lean and mean team efficiently. We have to give more effort every day in every engagement. We are only as good as our reputation in the marketplace,” says Kevin about his team.
Kevin believes that every client wants to engage the nimble, creative, fleet and quick footed, service-oriented provider. The scale holds them back. They recently opened data centers in Canada and the European Union. Combining scale and that nimble service has proven a winning combination for them.
Expanding Geographical Footprints
HAYSTACKID offers a global perspective backed by extensive industry expertise. They maintain six major United States operations in Boston, Chicago, New York, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. They also have a European office in Paris, France. Their network spans over 50 geographic markets.
Because of HAYSTACKID’s flexibility and responsiveness, combined with their unique go-to market focus, they are taking very hard-fought EU business away from the “big three” and other billion-dollar service providers.
“Our people instill a confidence that multi-billion dollar players cannot. If we are involved with scoping a project, most of the time we win it. Last year we were Inc. 500’s 67th fastest-growing company in the US. We recently submitted this year, and we will top that accomplishment. It is so refreshing to hear time and time again from prospects, clients, new hires and others that they are extremely satisfied. We are winning and doing so in a way like nothing anyone has seen before,” says Kevin.