Joseph Mortati/GTG Consulting/The Go To Guy (GTG)
SPANNING THE GAP
Joseph Mortati
MBA, 2003
PRESIDENT, GTG CONSULTING
Joseph Mortati was a fighter jet pilot, but he didn’t begin thinking about how high he might go in business until he got a desk job with the Air Force in 1989.
“I became a forward air controller. I got to see operations from a totally different perspective,” Mortati recalls. “Initially, I thought ‘I’m a fighter pilot; how hard can this be?’ But working with different branches of the military can be like going to a different country.”
As Mortati grew to enjoy his new job on the ground, he shifted to the private sector in 1997 and enrolled in the Graduate Business Division at SPSBE.
“The MBA program helped me a lot,” Mortati says. “Was it important for me to understand macroeconomics? Yes. I use it more than I thought I would. But we also got practical skills and a look at how things really worked,” he says. “One of the things I loved was that people would say, ‘That idea sounds great, but that will never work where I am without this change.’ We got a real-world perspective.”
He soon began working for a private consulting firm, where he was responsible for getting software development people to communicate effectively with others. “I was the bridge between the business and technical worlds,” he explains. “They speak a different language, but it is critical that they understand each other.”
Mortati began his MBA to help him make a transition from the military to the business world, but he found it also helped him clearly appreciate what was required as he thought about starting his own consulting firm. “In my own firm if anything is wrong, I can’t pick up the phone and call Finance,” he says. “It is all up to me.”
He is now president of software development firm GTG Consulting, which he started in 2002. (The acronym, he proudly points out, stands for “Go To Guy.”) The company’s clients include Equant (an international firm that establishes business communications systems) and other software development companies. Mortati says he aims to get people to think of the “what” when it comes to software development—what they really need—before they think about how they will get it done. “I consider myself a ‘bridge builder,’” he says, “and my company’s motto is, ‘Your bridge between business and technology.’”
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