Relationship Asset Management represents a radically new approach to doing business. The system rests on the notion that a company’s relationships are unique and valuable assets. Actively managing these "relationship assets" creates a strong, unassailable competitive edge. In Business Is a Contact Sport (in stores September 2001), Tom Richardson and Augusto Vidaurreta give readers the tools they need to implement Relationship Asset Management (RAM) in their organizations, and in their lives.

The authors used RAM to grow their first company, Systems Consulting Group, Inc., from two employees and zero revenue to 200 employees and $30 million in revenues in eight years with no outside capital and no sales force. In 1995 they sold SCG to Cambridge Technology Partners for a large multiple of earnings and moved on to develop other businesses based on RAM.

Essentially, RAM involves:

• Seeing relationships with all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, investors, analysts, universities, government agencies, the media, the community and even competitors—as assets, just like land, equipment, information and cash
• Creating a balanced relationship universe where all stakeholder groups received proper attention
• Analyzing ways in which these relationships can help you achieve the wins that mean success to you and your company
• Developing ways to create equally important wins for stakeholders and their organizations
• Making contact with these people and building the honest, long-term, non-exploitative, win-win relationships that lay at the heart of RAM.

The system has been presented—and enthusiastically received—at prominent graduate schools of business and at business organizations. Practitioners agree that RAM turbocharges their relationships with the people who hold the keys to their success. Systems Consulting Group and the authors themselves are living proof that RAM works.

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