Content area
Full Text
Lee Kolquist wasn't supposed to be around to even talk to me. But then neither was his employer, Lending Solutions, which 10 years ago any "expert" would have told you would soon be out of business, its name just another in a long line of otherwise forgotten headstones moldering away forever next to the likes of Blockbuster and your local record store, all slain by the world's most prolific serial killer, the Internet.
And yet its grave was never dug. Indeed, the Internet threat has had just the opposite effect on Lending Solutions, better known as LSI, which is thriving not despite the explosion of e-services but because of it. Interestingly, the company is an example of the counter-intuitive, in its case having found that the more people go online, the more they want to talk.
The Internet is the mother of "disruptive technologies," so woven into our everyday existence that it only seems to make sense that a company that specializes in talking to people via the telephone should have been disrupted right into shutting its doors. And yet now the Elgin, Ill.-based LSI is marking its 20th birthday, founded in the days when "dial-up" had a different definition.
The Initial Plan
"Initially, when the doors were opened, the interest was twofold: expand hours of operation and...