(This is part of a series of technical advisor CEO Spotlights, where leading TAs share their secrets for success and goals for the future).

Steven Gerhardt started D&M Enterprise Group 25 years ago because he felt “corporate America failed me.”

He found himself jobless when his boss at Destia told him the company was shutting down immediately. With two children under the age of 3, Gerhardt went into business for himself the following day. “D&M started May 1, 2001,” he said. “When I started, the only thing I said to myself was ‘if this fails, this means you did not work hard enough.’”

Twenty-five years of hard work later, Keyport, NJ-based D&M is thriving. It now has 20 professionals and works with the likes of Intelisys, Avant and Sandler Partners in the tech advisor/TSD channel. Gerhardt was named one of the inaugural Channel Partners TA Thought Leaders. He is known as a pioneer and brand ambassador in the channel, and a mentor to many agents and channel managers. Gerhardt helps suppliers shape and redefine their channel programs.

“D&M Enterprise Group exists to close the gap between what technology vendors sell and what enterprise buyers need,” he said. “We operate inside the TSD/master agent ecosystem across connectivity, CCaaS, cloud, cybersecurity, and CX. Our job isn't moving product. It's translating a genuinely confusing vendor landscape into decisions our clients can stand behind. Too many technology initiatives, AI especially, get handed to IT as a procurement exercise when they're business transformation problems. Our mission is to make sure our clients don't make that mistake and to provide our customers with the best customer experience in this industry. We want to make every customer feel like they are our only customer.”

I conducted the following Q&A with Gerhardt.

Who are your main technology partners?

Gerhardt: “We work within the master agent/TSD channel -- Intelisys, Avant and Sandler Partners -- so our bench spans the full range of connectivity and technology types a client might need, not a single stack. On connectivity: SD-WAN, MPLS, dedicated internet access, broadband, and fixed wireless, represented through partners like Spectrotel, BCN, CommandLink and Mettel. On voice and UCaaS: Nextiva and 8x8. On managed IT and cloud: Blue Mantis and Xtium. On AI and contact center intelligence: Genesys, Five9 and Nice, Observe.ai. Boost.AI, Capacity, Replicant and more. We've also run client-specific evaluations on the cybersecurity and CX side, including Reality Defender, Solera, and Krisp.

What do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges in your industry over the next five years?

Gerhardt: The opportunity is that AI is about to make the CX and contact center stack genuinely intelligent for the first time. Agentic systems that can resolve issues, and detection layers such as voice fraud, and deepfake defense that didn't exist as a category three years ago. The challenge is that most buyers, and honestly most advisors, are still evaluating these tools with a pre-AI mental model: feature checklists, RFP scorecards, and per-seat pricing comparisons. That approach breaks down when the real differentiator is how a platform reasons, not what boxes it checks. The other challenge is channel consolidation. The TSD/master agent layer will see real roll-up activity over the next five years as the economics of representing dozens of point vendors get squeezed. Advisors who don't move up the value chain into genuine strategic advisory are going to get disintermediated.

How is your company using AI and other emerging technologies to stay ahead of the curve?

Gerhardt: We treat AI evaluation with the same rigor we'd want a client to use before they spend a dollar. We built a detailed, multi-tab cost model to pressure-test enterprise AI platform claims --Snowflake Cortex, specifically -- separating what AI adoption costs from what it's marketed as costing. We've done hands-on discovery and vendor evaluation work on the emerging-threat side too, including a deep-fake-detection platform assessment [Reality Defender] built around the contact-center voice-fraud use case, which is becoming a real exposure for our clients' CX operations. And we published our own thinking on how AI should be adopted, not as an IT procurement line item, but as a business transformation decision, in a whitepaper built around the Business Imaginators/IT Enablers framework. Staying ahead of the curve, for us, means being the advisor who's already stress-tested the technology before the client must bet on it.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs or leaders in the tech space?

Gerhardt: Don't wait for your “second act” to feel fully de-risked before you start it. You'll wait forever. Sales are not a 9-to-5 job. You need to be all in and committed to if you want to have success. It is not like a diet where you want to lose 15 pounds. You need to make a lifestyle change. You need to stay in touch with everyone so you can build your network of referral partners. Everyone knows one person that you can sell to. And don’t let technology pass you by. If you do, you will be obsolete.

Steven Gerhardt

What do most people misunderstand about building a sustainable business in the advisor channel?

Gerhardt: It takes time. Even if you sign up your first customer on day one, you will probably not see any commissions for six months. Once you have a customer everyone is trying to take the business away from you. You are one person away from getting the business and one person away from losing the business. You need to stay in front of your customers.

Where do TAs risk losing credibility with buyers today?

Gerhardt: The scorecard trap is real: running a formal vendor bake-off that looks rigorous on paper but was functionally decided before it started, because the advisor already knew which vendor pays the best margin. Buyers pick up on that faster than advisors think. Credibility also erodes in the stakeholder navigation problem, when the advisor built the whole business case around whoever they had access to, and it turns out that person wasn't the actual decisionmaker. If your recommendation collapses the moment procurement or a different executive gets involved, buyers remember that, and they don't come back.

What incentives in the channel are misaligned with customer outcomes today?

Gerhardt: MDF is the biggest one. Marketing development funds are supposed to help advisors educate buyers, but in practice they often steer advisor attention toward whichever vendor is funding the most activity that quarter, not whichever vendor is the best fit. Deal registration culture pushes advisors to lock in territory early, before the customer's real requirements are even clear, which front-loads commitment ahead of discovery. These are not outright dishonest. They're just structurally pointed at the wrong outcome.

If you were starting today, what would you do differently and what would you do exactly the same?

Gerhardt: I should have stayed in touch with everyone. Time goes by, and you lose touch with people you used to do business with. I think about this all the time. If I maintained all the business relationships from day one would have an endless funnel. Stay in touch with everyone

I would have hired more hunters to help drive new logos and revenue.

I'd move earlier into a more diversified operating structure, proper entity structuring for how different engagements get billed and delivered, rather than staying inside a pure reseller/TSD-dependent model as long as we did.

What I’d do the same is, invest time and build relationships with carrier and supplier reps. As much as you sell to end users you also need to sell to carriers to get them to put your orders to the top. Your primary job is to sell to end users, and get your services installed as quickly as possible. We only get compensated when services start billing. Our last role is to make sure when your customer is having a service-related issue or billing issue that our customers are taken care of first. Our customers need to be at the top of the list.

I’d also keep constantly networking and attending events, and host events to attract new and existing customers. Can you build a business via email? Yes, but you need to build relationships. There is a big difference between contacts and relationships. Customer-first mentality. If the customer wins you will win. Keeping the customer’s success as the tip of the spear – always a winning strategy.

We hire based on culture fit.

We built a customer-facing portal which sets D&M apart from most of our competition. Our customers can see all their services even if they did not provide them through us.