Success Story: Lytmos Group LLC
Lee's Summit, Mo.

Their friends might affectionately call them "Dancers with Bears."

Considering all the challenges Peggy Shults and Mary Bernard have confronted in their professional lives, the moniker would be appropriate. Shults and Bernard — CEO and COO, respectively, of Lytmos Group LLC — have the vision, vigor and determination to lead their consulting company in the right direction.

Peggy Shults, president and CEO of Lytmos Group LLC, founded the Lee's Summit-based consulting firm in 2001.

Founded in 2001, the firm was originally intended to serve as a conduit for high-tech small businesses to obtain expert feedback as they pursued federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding.

Along the way Lytmos Group has evolved. Peggy started the company with her father, a retired small business consultant. He lived in Wichita; she lived in Lee's Summit. It combined his consulting experience with her expertise in systems engineering and SBIR grant writing.

However, Lytmos Group is not Peggy's inaugural plunge into entrepreneurship. Encouraged by her husband who ran a business of his own, Peggy embarked on the road to entrepreneurship in 1998, following a 12-year career as a manufacturing engineer for AT&T Microelectronics. After a succession of increasingly responsible positions Peggy found herself jobless. Her employer had been sold and her job moved to Pennsylvania. She declined to move with it. That's when she opened the door to self-employment.

"The bravest I could get in the beginning was freelance grant writing," says Peggy. "I worked from my home for several passionate people who were seeking federal funding, mostly high-tech applications.

Shults and her partner Mary J. Bernard (left), the firm's COO and vice president of operations, have developed the Lytmos Process, which connects their clients "with qualified specialists who can provide independent, informed feedback on an idea, whether it's a grant proposal to be submitted to a federal agency or an invention created in a laboratory or workshop."

"We had a very high success rate, but after a few years I decided I'd rather do something more on my own than work from the sidelines as my clients worked their opportunities."

At about the same time her husband sold his business. Proceeds from that sale freed Peggy to take the deep entrepreneurial plunge by starting Lytmos Group. However, her husband cautioned her that owning a business is like "dancing with a bear...you better keep dancing or it will eat you alive!"

So dance she did.

Through the first three years in business she sunk $60,000 of her money into the enterprise and still received no paycheck. After her father retired from Lytmos in 2003, Peggy hired strategic planning consultant Mary Bernard. Having recently left Sprint as director of information technology, Mary drew on her 20 years of experience in the corporate world and in private practice as a management consultant to help Peggy map the future for the company.

When Mary joined the still-struggling firm, many would have called it an extremely risky move for a single mother of four, two of whom were soon to enter college. But a big breakthrough for Lytmos came in 2004 when the duo landed a three-year $1-million contract from the state of Florida.

"The contract called for a much more comprehensive portfolio of services, which allowed us to hire a few more people, demonstrate our diverse capabilities, and claim a track record in work we could market on a broader scale," explains Peggy.

Shults and her company received legislative resolutions from state Rep. Kate Meiners (above; D-Kansas City) and state Sen. Matt Bartle (below: R-Kansas City) at the 2008 MO SBDC and MO PTAC Client Showcase Jan. 30, in the capitol rotunda in Jefferson City. The resolutions honored Lytmos Group LLC for its contributions to the economic development of Missouri.

As their professional association blossomed, the two women discovered complementary skills and a shared enthusiasm for tackling the work required to meet their plan for the company. Consequently Mary transitioned from consultant to employee to partner at Lytmos.

The company has since evolved into a full-featured provider of services and Web-based systems for the grant-making industry, specializing in competitive high-technology research programs. Today the firm employs 10 professionals and the company's revenues have mushroomed from $90,000 the first year to $1.5 million in 2007.

With Mary in charge of the day-to-day operations of the firm, Peggy concentrated on growing the business. In doing so, Peggy felt she needed a greater leadership perspective to properly direct her company. So, in 2006 she applied to the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program in Kansas City. Lytmos wasn't yet big enough to make the cut for that program, but it led to an equally beneficial opportunity.

That opportunity came from Carmen DeHart, director of the Small Business & Technology Development Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. DeHart saw a need in Peggy and several other KC-area entrepreneurs who craved business leadership training. She invited Peggy and the others to participate in the inaugural program of CEO Coaching & More at the UMKC SBTDC. They began the enlightening year-long journey in January 2007.

"I needed assistance in my personal development as a leader of my business — learning to work more 'on' my business and less 'in' it," says Peggy.

She cites two benefits among the many she derived from CEO Coaching & More. One was the opportunity to work with an established business-owning veteran and mentor, Michelle Johnson.

"Michelle offered terrific advice when we were approached by an individual interested in taking an equity position in Lytmos," says Peggy. "This advice significantly influenced how we handled the situation."

The second big benefit was DeHart's formation of a CEO forum comprised of the program's participants: "This forum has been a great source of personal growth for me, and the relationships I formed will outlast my participation in this program."

And after all the advice she's received, Peggy wants to return the favor. She advises DeHart and the UMKC SBTDC to keep up the innovative programming designed to help and encourage small business owners.

"Through the CEO Coaching & More program, Carmen DeHart and her well-rounded team of experienced mentors helped me wrench my attention from focusing on fighting day-to-day problems in my business to building my capacity to grow and lead my business."

Consequently, Peggy Shults and Mary Bernhard continue to dance with those bears, and they're the ones leading the dance.

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This story was featured in the February 2008 newsletter

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