Meet the Member: Mark Dodge, GovHill

GovHill is a professional service firm providing service delivery solutions to customers through process engineering and systems audit.

It gets its name from the home address of founder and president Mark Dodge on Governor Hill Road in Eliot, Maine.

It gets its business cache from its membership at the Cooperative Venture Workspace at 36 Maplewood Avenue in downtown Portsmouth.

Mark created the company in 2014 after working at jobs for Digital Equipment Corp., MCI, Brand Partner, and Captivate Network, among others.

At Captivate, known its vast network of 12,000 elevator and lobby digital displays located in 1,800 premier office buildings across North America, Mark was director of field operations for six and a half years. He not only had seven direct reports, but oversaw two dozen third party resources. From all that, Mark saw something that he thought he could create on his own.

“What I saw was a method that was repeatable from a third party standpoint,” he said.

According to Mark, he cultivated all third party and vendor supply chain relationships, and negotiated all vendor pricing and union and nonunion labor rates, thereby reducing the cost of service delivery and new product delivery by 30 percent.

With his founding of GovHill he wants to do for other businesses — in the $5 million to $20 million in revenue a year range — what he did for Captivate.

The core business functions supported by GovHill include:

• Project Management
• Enterprise systems evaluation, review and recommendation
• Field Service Operations
• Call Center Operations
• Network Operations Center Operations

GovHill develops a simple, cost effective, standardized data integration system designed to integrate Third Party, Field Service Management (FSM) functionality with multiple customer’s information and enterprise systems.

“That’s where our core competencies are. We’ll help them design a customer support strategy,” he said. “I’ve got the organization that can cover that footprint.”

While he lives in Eliot, Maine, the bulk of his clients are across the Piscataqua River in the Portsmouth, N.H., region and in the south.

The convenience of the Workspace in downtown Portsmouth was high among the factors Mark sought when looking for office space closer to his clients and still be nearby to his home office.

“It was better for me to have space close to both where I could work for both,” said Mark.

The Class A office space and amenities offered at the Workspace suit the come-and-go demands of Mark and other entrepreneurs.

“It fits perfect with my needs right now,” he said.