The Silicon Review has published an issue of 30 Best Small Companies to Watch 2020

1. Technology CEOs News Business Features
Leadership CIOs
U.S. Special
VIRTIS is revolutionizing the
cybersecurity landscape with its
unparalleled shielding technology
Michelle Wilner
Co-founder & CEO
www.thesiliconreview.com
30Best Small
Companies
to Watch
SR2020

2. B
e it a big multi-million-
dollar enterprise, or a
small startup, almost all
businesses run on one fuel: Leads.
Having a good lead generation
strategy is essential for your
business to survive. Having a great
strategy, however, is essential for
success.
Over the last few years, the world
of Martech (marketing technology)
has quickly consolidated into a few
large corporations with workforces
in the hundreds, there’s a small yet
mighty firm that is able to not only
compete but thrive on this level -
Rapid Response Marketing (RRM).
RRM has operated as a frontrunner
in lead generation and affiliate
marketing for 20 years, hitting
the ‘Inc. 5000 List’ two years
running. The company, comprised
of diverse entrepreneurs, excels
in identifying early-market trends
and using innovative strategies to
capitalize on them. Each associate
brings over a decade of unique
expertise in performance-based
marketing – from media buying
to promotions, from PR to viral
marketing and ad-tech – all based
on performance marketing to drive
sales goals for their customers.
Digital Media Buys,
Built for Scale
RRM’s entire infrastructure has
been-finely tuned to the needs and
scale of their clients, who range
from large Fortune 500 insurance
clients with robust pre-existing
marketing strategies, to small
start-ups that require bootstrap,
custom marketing solutions.
AI is essential in the Martech
industry, of course, but RRM
is able to achieve these results
through a combination of AI and
bold experience – capitalizing on
their best ip: brilliant marketing
minds. They have the ability to
turn around clients’ full marketing
plans within 48 hours, including
high-converting web pages and
launch ads. They leverage “hacks”
across all media platforms – online
and off – to achieve performance
results.
Online Lead Generation:
From landing page creation to
media placement RRM’s team
creates fully-managed campaigns
– researches the competition, the
cost per sale or cost per lead goals,
the lifetime value expectations,
the demographic and behavioral
targets, then builds the ads,
banners, and other creatives.
RRM creates the text and display
ads, keyword lists etc. It tests
multiple sets of different creatives,
optimizes the ones that work and
eliminates the ones that don’t,
measures front-end sales and
monitors lifetime sales, then scales
and repeats. RRM uses technology
to monitor competitors’ marketing
efforts in real-time and in
detail from keywords, to ads,
to spending, and looks at their
competitive offers in order for the
client to stand out from the herd
and sand steps ahead in their given
market.
Offline Antics: RRM’s buying
power and existing network
relationships allow it to quickly
and cost-effectively launch new
campaign tests, limiting clients’
risk. RRM in most cases has
reduced its clients’ acquisition
costs on existing campaigns
within a 4-week period. RRM’s
proprietary unwired remnant
network can offset existing cash
media buys cost.
Affiliate Management
Affiliate Recruitment &
Offer Promotion: RRM has
been at the forefront of affiliate
recruitment and management
since the early 2000’s. RRM
helps clients connect to the ideal
traffic sources for their specific
product or service and gives them
detailed tracking and attribution
and complete transparency on
pricing. With access to over 10,000
affiliates worldwide.
Affiliate payment solutions:
RRM has the tools to handle 1000’s
of affiliate payments on a weekly,
This Small Yet Mighty Marketing Firm
Punches Above Its Weight

3. Kevin De Vincenzi, CEO of Rapid Response Marketing,
has been a leader in the pay-per-performance internet
marketing industry for years. He is a marketing consultant
and strategist as well as CEO of other companies rolled up
under the RRM umbrella including Xy7Elite and Elite-Calls.
He has been in Internet marketing since 1996 and he has
seen and monopolized of most of the trends out there. Kevin
always looks for new partnerships. He specializes in internet
lead generation strategies. Kevin also runs a weekly industry
podcast called “Internet Traffic Kings.”
Wizard behind the success of Rapid
Response Marketing
bi-monthly, or monthly frequency,
with the ability to extend terms to
clients, allowing partnerships the
flexibility to deal with thousands of
vendors with one point of contact.
They not only manage payments,
but compliance - which is constantly
changing in this industry. RRM’s
success is evidenced by their roster
of brand clientele and an ‘A+’ rating
from the Better Business Bureau –
no small feat for a company that’s
been around for two decades!
Right Pricing Campaigns:
Not all traffic is the same. RRM
understands that the affiliate
marketplace is fragmented and
confusing. They price the client’s
product or service based on each
affiliate and their traffic source.
Consulting: RRM has dedicated
significant resources to securing
trusted and exclusive partnerships
with thousands of publishers
in digital media. Drawing on its
reputation in the industry of 20
years, it’s easy for RRM to turn
to its partners with new client
opportunities as they arise. They
offer full scale marketing and media
strategies, operations/systems/
technologies evaluations and
turnkey publisher management
solutions on a consulting basis
depending on a client’s business
goals.
Old Agency Model with
a New Twist
RRM’s team of professionals
knows how to scale a
campaign effectively and safely,
understanding the nuances of
extensive industry regulations and
compliance concerns. RRM has the
ability to build a client’s brands or
send traffic through RRM’s owned
and operated lead-gen sites. The
systems in place are bult for agility
as RRM buys its own media, does
its own creative, measures its own
results, and scales programs in-
house, and partners with affiliates
when more scale or specific
expertise is needed.
“Rapid Response Marketing is truly a one-stop shop just like
it used to be, with a team that has seen it all and is always
learning more.” – Kevin De Vincenzi, CEO of RRM
SR

4. of all enterprises shoot
themselves in the foot
every time they implement
a new information system. The prevailing
mindset, the “application-centric” mindset,
guarantees that each new system introduces
yet another incompatible data model into
the firms datascape. It doesn’t matter
whether the firm is building a custom
application, whether they are buying an
application package or whether they are
renting Software as a Service. It doesn’t
matter whether the methodology is waterfall
or agile. Solving business problems by
implementing applications is what creates
the dreaded silos.
The compounding problem is these
application systems each have their own
completely idiosyncratic data models. In
addition to being arbitrarily different, almost
every application is at least an order of
magnitude more complex than it needs to
be. The net result is, after a few decades, you
have hundreds or thousands of applications
implemented, each with their own data
model. You spend most of your IT budget on
systems integration, without really achieving
it.
Semantic Arts discovered it’s possible to
build an elegant core model of even the most
complex enterprise in a limited amount
of time (typically less than six months)
and with a limited amount of complexity
(typically fewer than 500 concepts (classes
+ properties). When well implemented, the
said model can be extended and specialized
in handling specific requirements of
subdomains or departments while still
staying aligned with the enterprise core as
business continues to grow. The model can
be directly populated with data from the
legacy systems, and queries can be federated
over the legacy systems through the core
model. Such a model in the short term can
provide a simple integration platform that
not only integrates legacy systems but also
allows the integration of unstructured and
external data.
Semantic Arts future-proofs the enterprise
with data-centric transformation programs
Meet the leader behind the success of
Semantic Arts
Dave McComb is the President and Co-founder
of Semantic Arts. He and his team help organizations
uncover the meaning in the data from their information
systems. Dave is also the author of “The Data-Centric
Revolution”, “Software Wasteland” and “Semantics in
Business Systems”. For 20 years, Semantic Arts has helped
firms of all sizes in this endeavor, including Proctor &
Gamble, Goldman Sachs, Schneider-Electric, Lexis Nexis,
Dun & Bradstreet, and Morgan Stanley. Prior to Semantic
Arts, Dave co-founded Velocity Healthcare, where he
developed and patented the first fully model driven
architecture. Prior to that, he was a part of the problem.
Dave McComb
President & Co-founder
99%

5. Semantic Arts is a professional
services firm—they do not sell
software or hardware—therefore,
the company is completely
objective and can bring business
outcome thinking and considerable
experience to every engagement.
In conversation with
Dave McComb,
Co-founder and CEO
of Semantic Arts
Can you tell us about your
services in brief?
Semantic Arts delivers a single
offering: we help guide clients who
are committed to transitioning to a
data-centric future by implementing
this capability through our
consulting services. Some may
come to the need to do this through
their digital transformation
efforts, which more and more are
discovering to be far harder than it
should be because they are trying
to build on a foundation of brittle
complexity inherently in relational
and legacy data structures. Some
come to it through big data, AI, and
ML, when they find that they are
spending most of their time and
effort wrangling data that should
already be organized. And some
have come to it from first principles,
as we did. Our first engagement is a
combination of what we call “think
big / start small” implementation
methodology for most clients. We
discovered the need to do both in
parallel. To do only the think big
part (as we did for more than a
decade) creates beautiful models
that do not get implemented. To
only start small (as every agile
project does these days) almost
guarantees the furtherance of silos.
By doing the two in parallel, we
can show how the core model (the
think big part) guides each “small”
(incremental) project to conform to
the core.
After that first project, most
clients re-engaged us for many
more projects, which either
tackle additional domain
areas, begin building out the
information architecture needed
to take maximum advantage of this
approach or establish training and
governance to make this the new
normal.
Huge amount of data
is created every second
from sources like online
transactions, social media,
or customer data. Do you
think the existing ways of
managing data is enough for
exponentially bigger data
quantity?
Well, it has to be managed in layers,
it’s obvious that we will have
even more data, and the Internet
of Things is going to swamp the
existing data completely. But the
traditional approach of just copying
all of the data and moving it around
to a big data platform so that people
can do analytics is not going to
scale to that. There’s more data
than what the systems can process
over. What will happen instead is
there’s going to be a lot more edge
computing where the big data, IoT,
and the clickstream analysis will
stay. It’s going to be abstracted, and
the essential differences are going to
come into an analytic framework.
With the situation today due
to coronavirus, everything
is going online. How are you
helping your clients adjust to
the new normal?
One of the big things that people
are doing right now is called digital
transformation, and I think that
the coronavirus pandemic has only
accelerated the process. But as a lot
of authors have pointed out, digital
transformation projects have about
a 70 percent failure rate, and they
are incredibly expensive. People
are just trying to use brute force to
change their existing procedures
into a fully digital-enabled, stymied
sheer scale and complexity. So, our
approach is to find the elegant,
simple model that represents the
core of your business and use that
to fuel your digital transformation.
We’re guiding our clients in
implementing this capability to ease
information findability, accessibility,
interoperability, and re-usability.
Normally reliable and high-
quality services come at an
expensive price tag. How do
you manage to keep your
services affordable?
We primarily work with very large
firms and have small, agile teams,
so compared to a typical application
implementation project, these are
a fraction of. Our services are very
affordable and barely noticeable, but
in the longer term, the data-centric
approach is going to move into
mid-market, where it will become a
platform play.
Semantic Arts exists to help organizations transition to a newly
emerging paradigm of information systems based on flexible data
structures and deep semantics.
“ “
SR

6. If you’re not ecstatically happy or if
your relationship isn’t satisfying and
sizzling, maybe you need a retreat
with Sedona Soul Adventures
S
edona Soul Adventures is very
different, that’s what their
founder, Debra Stangl, wants
you to know. “When most people
think about doing a retreat or going
to a conference they think about going
to a retreat center or a hotel and
doing activities with a group”, says
Stangl. “I did so many of these over
the years and found that I would feel
great and all pumped up while I was
there, but the minute I got home, I
was the same old me and nothing was
different”. That all changed in 1999
when she came to Sedona, Arizona
for the first time and her life was
completely transformed.
In conversation with
Debra Stangl, Founder
and CEO of Sedona Soul
Adventures
How did you come up with
the idea for Sedona Soul
Adventures?
I came to Sedona for the first time
in January 1999. At that time, every
single part of my life was a mess:
I had just started my 20th year
as a divorce attorney in Omaha,
Nebraska, and I hated it; I was in an
unhappy marriage; I was 40 pounds
overweight and $50,000 in debt. I
came to Sedona for what I thought
was going to be three days of quiet,
but instead, I did one session with an
amazing Practitioner here and got
the message I had to leave my law
practice and change my life.
I went home and two weeks
later, $50,000 fell out of the sky,
six months later I closed my law
practice, and I spent the next three
years traveling to Sedona to do my
own personal healing work with
different practitioners I was finding
here in Sedona.
Two weeks before 9/11, I was in
Sedona again and received the
message I was to move here. I moved
to Sedona and sat for six months
with no direction. Then I started
having dreams and was shown
that my working one-on-one in
private sessions with these amazing
Practitioners who are so skilled at
utilizing the energy and taking you
from where you are to where you
want to be had transformed my
entire life. I was shown how I could
create that experience for others
by compressing it into 3 or 4 days.
The joke at the office is that my Soul
Adventure took three years, but
everyone else does it in three days!
No one else out there is doing
what we’re doing and it’s been
so gratifying to see people’s lives
completely changed and to help
so many couples transform their
relationships. I feel like I was
divorcing people for over 20 years
and I’ve been helping them stay
together for almost 20 years now, so
my karma is almost balanced out!
Why is Sedona Soul
Adventures so different?
1. Unlike a group retreat or
conference where you are
hoping they will address your
particular issues, each Sedona
Soul Adventures retreat is
completely custom designed for
each individual or couple for
exactly the transformations they
need and desire.
2. Each retreat consists of sessions
that are completely private,
one-on-one or two on-one (for
couples), not in groups, with
the retreat having a beginning, a
middle and an end and designed
to be transformational, taking
you from where you are to where
you want to be.
Debra Stangl, Founder & CEO

7. 3. We work with over 50 of the
Master Practitioners of Sedona,
who are practitioners of almost
every known modality.
4. Our retreats produce what I call
“The Sedona Effect” ™
What is The Sedona Effect? ™
The Sedona Effect™ is a process of
transformation that can be accessed
by those who have a deep desire
to bring this kind of conscious
transformation into their lives. It is
the result of an unusual confluence of
three factors:
1. The transformational vortex
energy of Sedona. As Bashar,
the internationally recognized
spiritual teacher says, “Sedona
is a powerful, transformational
vortex unparalleled in its own way,
unique in its own way that allows
for communication and connection
to multiple dimensions of reality on
your world.” The energy of Sedona
is unlike any other place on the
planet.
2. The amazing practitioners who
have been called to Sedona from
all over the planet to do their
work (our Practitioners come
from England, Germany, South
Africa, Ireland, the Netherlands,
Australia and of course the
United States and Canada) and
who are Masters at connecting
and utilizing the special energy of
Sedona.
3. The intense desire of those
coming to us to effect a life-
changing transformation.
Sedona energy is unparalleled
and unique – you won’t find it
anywhere else on the planet. When
you combine that special energy
with these amazing Practitioners
who are Masters at connecting with
and utilizing this energy, plus the
intense desire of those coming to us
seeking transformation, the result
is transformation which is real and
lasting.
What kind of people come to
you?
We have people from every walk of
life, male, female, old, young (starting
at 17, depending on the person),
straight, gay, transgender, Christian,
Jews, Muslims, atheists, Republicans,
Democrats, a-political, corporate
people, doctors, lawyers, accountants,
office workers, laborers, truck drivers,
ministers, nuns, mothers, fathers,
single, married, divorced, about to be
divorced, about to be married, people
who want to save their relationship,
people who want to add more zing and
sizzle to their relationship, people who
have just gotten out of rehab, people
who want to find their life purpose
and live it, people who want more
happiness, peace, and connection in
their lives. As our clients are always
saying, “everyone needs to do a Soul
Adventure.”
Do you have any new services
ready to be launched?
When the pandemic hit, we went to
zero overnight. Within two weeks,
we were doing Virtual Retreats, and
I have to say the results have been
astounding. Energy is energy, and
what we are doing is moving out the
old energy and bringing in the new
energy. My Practitioners are such
Masters at utilizing this energy and
bringing it to the people with whom
they’re working, so it doesn’t matter
whether you’re in their healing
space in Sedona or in your living
room, you’re going to feel it and be
transformed by it, so we are able to
reach people all around the world with
our Virtual Retreats. We’ve opened
up again for in-Sedona retreats, and
people need this now more than ever.
I’m also so happy that we are making
online Masterclasses available to
people and I’ve just launched our
“Meeting the Masters” Podcast where I
interview incredible people who have
had a huge impact on my life, such
as Dr. John Gray, John Assarraf, Dr.
Christiane Northrup, Janet Attwood,
etc. It is available on Apple Podcasts,
Google Podcast or Spotify.
I’m also doing a new edition and audio
version of my book (which was a #1
International Best Seller when it came
out in 2016), “The Journey To Happy
– How Embracing The Concept That
Nothing Is Wrong Can Transform Your
Life”.
“Individuals leave us happy, content, peaceful, knowing their purpose
and ready to live it. Couples leave us with the past healed plus a new and
deeper love and connection.”
Master Practitioner Yana with one of our clients in the Sedona vortex
SR

8. Automate lead follow-up, dramatically boost contact
rates, and increase ROI while staying compliant with
omnichannel contact center software: Convoso
L
ead follow up is reaching out
to a lead that has previously
interacted with your brand. Even
though sales reps don’t dread these
sales calls as much as they might
dread cold calling, sales people still
generally regard them as difficult.
However, lead follow up is vital as
it often turns into a very productive
conversation. After all, you’re talking
to someone who has expressed an
interest in your brand. Convoso is
the leading innovator of cloud-based
omnichannel contact center software
that dramatically increases contact
and lead conversion rates. Convoso’s
technology is built to cut downtime
and costs by automating and housing
your day-to-day routines and metrics
in one easy-to-use platform. Call
center owners and managers can
operate with complete clarity through
Convoso’s feature-rich admin portal
and reporting console.
Powerful autodialer
options for your
outbound calls
Whether you’re leading an aggressive
sales campaign or contacting current
clients, Convoso has the powerful
tools to drive your workflow. Choose
from multiple dialing modes: Power
Dialing, Predictive Dialing, Preview
Dialing, and Progressive Dialing.
Increase contact rate with a static dial
level and serious power. The Power
Dialer chooses new contacts as soon
as the previous call ends. Increase
contact rates and reduce wait time
without compromising your drop
rating. Convoso Predictive Dialing
uses smart algorithms to select
agents and dial numbers in advance.
Its power dialing with scaling
capabilities to adjust the total number
of outbound dials up and down based
on available agents and dropped/
abandoned rating. Increase contact
rates and reduce wait time. Keep your
dial rate high while customizing each
call to individual leads. Similar to
Meet the leader behind the success of Convoso
Nima Hakimi is the Co-founder and CEO of Convoso. With
over a decade of experience in starting various companies, his
exceptional leadership has consistently navigated through the
ups and downs of running a successful business. Nima’s clear
vision for Convoso helped establish the core values that nurture
the culture of the Company today. Prior to Convoso, Nima began
his entrepreneurial spirit with the launch of an online advertising
network with millions of users at its peak. Nima takes great pride
in his customer’s success which is what drives him to constantly
research the market space for solutions to challenges. He views
Convoso as his family and goes above and beyond in providing
the needed tools for the Company to succeed.
Nima Hakimi, Co-founder & CEO

9. preview dialing, agents review lead
information ahead of the call, but
with progressive dialing, the calls
are automatically dialed after a set
number of seconds/minutes.
Use Convoso’s Virtual
Agent to close more
business with fewer
agents
What if you could use artificial
intelligence technology to filter
out prospects that don’t fit with
your product or service? With
Convoso’s Virtual Agent, you
can. By using Machine Learning,
Natural Language Programming
& Advanced Speech Recognition
this artificial contact center
technology allows you to replace or
supplement live agents. Scale faster
without spending the same time
and resources of your competitors.
Using a personalized human voice
recording, Convoso’s Virtual Agent
starts the prospect conversation by
asking initial questions designed to
prequalify the lead. The technology
understands the prospects’
responses, and only transfers
qualified leads to live agents.
Marketing and Lead
Generation
Convoso marketing companies
report a 30% to 300% rise in
contact rates, and significant jumps
in conversion and transfer rates
with its powerful suite of software
tools that convert leads faster.
With automated remarketing
strategies, disposition-based redial
workflow, and smart dynamic
scripting, your agents can connect
with more qualified leads to cross-
sell and help prospects across
different verticals. Create more
opportunities to optimize the ROI
on your leads. Know where to
strategically focus your resources
to make your call center profitable
by accessing reporting tools that
show how your leads, agents, lists,
and list sources are performing at
any time. Consolidated real-time
reports reveal your actual CPA
[cost of dialer, payroll, and leads]—
your ROI per list and agent, broken
down by lead source. Remember,
you can’t improve what you can’t
measure.
Cloud-based
Automated Calling
Software
Whether you’re leading an
aggressive sales campaign
or contacting current clients,
Convoso provides you with
powerful tools to suit your
workflow, including multiple
dialing modes. Increase contact
rates with dialing strategies and
powerful tools. Predictive dialing
increases agent efficiency by
automatically adjusting dial speed
based on advanced algorithms,
resulting in more productive live
calls, and fewer dropped calls.
Progressive dialing allows agents
a set amount of time to review the
prospect’s record before the call
is automatically dialed. When a
call is finished, the agent clicks to
initiate the next lead, again with a
set time to review notes on screen.
In preview mode, prospect records
are automatically presented to
your agents, allowing them time
to review notes on the lead before
electing to call for a more informed
and qualified conversation. Power
dialing automates dialing at a rate
you set so that your agents are
always on live calls. Often best
suited to operations with few
agents and a large numbers of
leads.
“Get live
people on
the phone
nearly every
time with our
answering
machine
detection
technology,
allowing
your agents
to spend less
time waiting
for phone
calls and more
time selling.”
SR