Our History

In 2003, Dale Gibbons left EDS and the big corporate world and began doing marketing and business development work for a small new venture that had been launched by another Louisville area entrepreneur, Mr. Tim Clark, one of the original co-founders of ACCENT Marketing.

Another company, ACCENT Training LLC, a small I.T. training firm founded by Clark and located across the hall from Clark’s new venture, caught Dale’s attention. 

ACCENT Training was well established with a solid reputation, but was struggling in a declining computer training market.
Having worked in I.T. for years and with a passion and expertise in marketing, Dale could see great potential in the struggling business.

During his many brainstorming lunches with Clark, Dale made several friendly suggestions to Clark in an effort to improve the training business.  Clark was intrigued, but was focused on his new venture.  After many such lunches and friendly banter by Clark for Dale to “buy the company”, Clark made Dale an offer he couldn’t refuse, and in January 2005, Dale became the majority owner of ACCENT Training.

Within a few short weeks, Dale began reinventing the business and, with a new strategic plan and new team, the I.T. consulting firm, Ebit Information Systems, was born in late 2005.

The new company continued to offer computer training, but scaled back the offerings to match market demand.
After three years of focused marketing, sales improvements and people development initiatives, the business increased revenue fivefold and became nicely profitable.

But then the next problem presented itself.

While marketing and sales were working fine, operational efficiency issues began to stifle the team’s growth and morale.
Dale hired continuous improvement expert Larry Porter to help in the summer of 2008.

After 90 days of CI work, Dale was able to promote his second in command, Danny Castleman, to replace him as president in November of 2008.

Dale and Larry spent hours brainstorming different ways to rescue struggling business and make good ones great.  They knew they both shared a passion for improving businesses, and decided to explore starting a new company together.

In January 2009, Dale spun off the remaining training business from Ebit and he and Larry combined their respective talent and passion for making things better—and  the Continuous Improvement Center was born. 

Since then, Dale and Larry have built the CI Center to 8 team members and a growing list of clients who are delighted with the results they are getting.  To hear from them in their own words, visit the home page and be sure to join us for an upcoming Lean for Leaders networking meeting.  To be notified of future CI Center events, webinars and training programs, be sure to enter your name and email in the dashed box on the home page.