Peter McGarahan is the founder and president of McGarahan & Associates. McGarahan & Associates. We are in the business of helping organizations achieve service and support excellence and value. Pete served as the Chairman of the IT Infrastructure Management Association, a sister organization to HDI and currently serves as a Business Service Management Expert for BSMReview.com. Pete’s value to the support industry and business is his thought leadership and vision.   As a practitioner, product manager and support industry analyst and expert, he has influenced the maturity of customer service and support by emphasizing the critical importance of aligning business goals and objectives with the support organization. His thought leadership repositioned the service organization from a back-of-house cost center to a vital link in the customer service-profit chain responsible for the customer experience, loyalty and profitability.   He passionately voices the importance of the service value proposition. His curriculum, white papers, briefings and keynotes continue to challenge the service and support industry to think innovatively in utilizing and integrating state-of-the-art technologies, best practice processes with trained, motivated professionals.

Pete’s twenty-sven years in business and IT go both deep and wide in all areas of IT, business and service and support. His business and IT boot camp started at PepsiCo in 1984 where he worked for six years in various IT positions. He implemented the first campus-wide Local Area Network while building the first PC and LAN Help Desk. He spent the next six years at Taco Bell in various positions, his last 2-years as a Director responsible for technology planning and support Taco Bell’s technology infrastructure from the corporate office to the 4,500 restaurants. Pete spent the next three years as Director of Help Desk Marketing for Vantive Corporation and the Executive Director of Help Desk Institute (HDI) before joining STI Knowledge and Help Desk 2000.

Pete McGarahan held the following positions with STI Knowledge; Executive Industry Fellow, Chairman of Help Desk 2000, VP of Business Development and Chief Marketing Officer. He was instrumental in growing STI into the global leader of Enterprise Support delivered through industry-recognized certification, consulting and outsourcing. Skilled at managing Industry Analysts relationships, Pete worked with Gartner for three years to position STI Knowledge in the Leadership position in the Gartner Help Desk Outsourcing Magic Quadrants along with 7 other billion-dollar companies. Pete helped to grow STI’s revenue from a $3 million to $33 Million in 5 years – all organically. The STI best practices, certification, marketing, events and thought leadership was instrumental in giving STI the appearance to the market place of being a billion dollar company.

A world-renowned expert and motivational speaker, Pete’s can speak from experience on service/support industry trends and directions, real-life experiences / practical results, support best practices and the importance of business alignment. His peers, customers and the support community globally recognize Pete for his great story telling ability approached with humility, humor and take-aways. He has addressed audiences throughout North America, United Kingdom, Poland, The Netherlands, Hong Kong, Singapore and India. He consistently scores in the top 5% of all conference speakers. Pete is comfortable speaking to all levels including senior business executives, IT executives, managers and professionals as well as vendors and analysts in the support industry. He has held Executive and Advisory Board positions with all of the major Service and Support conferences including HDI (www.thinkhdi.com), Shared Insights (www.sharedinsights.com) and the Signature Customer Service and Support Professionals Conference (http://www.hthts.com/hdp.htm). Pete created the senior service and support executive event of the industry with the STI Knowledge Symposium held yearly at the Bellagio Hotel. The program attracted over 650 support executives from around the world in all three years of its existence.

McGarahan was editor of the well-respected support industry publication Impacttm. He also authored numerous Industry White Papers, Position Papers and articles appearing in many of the industry leading publications including “How to Survive Call Volume Spikes” which appeared as the cover story in Customer Support Management magazine. McGarahan and his support team at Taco Bell were the recipients of the 1995 HDI Team Excellence Award. They were featured in Fortune magazine as well as appearing as the cover story in Software magazine in January 1996. Service News also named him one of the “Top 25 Professionals in the Service and Support Industry” in 1999. Support professionals voted McGarahan “The Legend of the Year” in 2002 and again in 2004 at the Help Desk Professionals conference for his endless energy, mentoring and coaching and his valuable contribution to the support industry and community.

Pete has a BA in Psychology from Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland and an MBA in Management Information Systems from Iona College in New York. He resides in Yorba Linda, CA with his wife Melissa and two children, Connor and Kayleigh.