Not every company
has a story worth telling.
Most corporate histories are little more than dates, milestones, and polished summaries. That is not the story of EGS.
Empire Global Services was never built as a traditional consulting company. It emerged through real relationships, real challenges, and the pursuit of meaningful results.
This is the journey that built EGS.
EARLY–MID 1990s
The groundwork
The story starts before the internet mattered: in desktop publishing and print production, producing weekly flyers for Key Food supermarkets. The earliest business experience was graphics, publishing, and client work that shipped every week, no matter what.
By the mid-1990s that work had grown into sports media and internet services through Creative On-Line, Mike’s ISP, whose client work included production and support for the New York Giants: the beginning of operational and client-management experience under real pressure.
In the same years, Rick was working with financial data at S&P Comstock, the market-data backbone behind trading desks.
As the commercial web emerged, Creative On-Line moved with it, growing from dial-up access into web design, hosting, and development for clients.
Among Creative On-Line’s early builds was the first website for what is now the American Institute for Stuttering: then a small New York nonprofit treatment center, today a nationally recognized institution. The thread that runs through EGS’s nonprofit work starts here.
The globe in the Creative On-Line logo was already spinning in 1997. It never stopped.
creativeonline.com, 1997. Hand-coded HTML.
American Institute for Stuttering, c. 1998. Built in Microsoft FrontPage.
1999 – 2001
Where it started
All of it prepared the team for the high-stakes world of trading, where execution under pressure is not optional and the systems either function or fail visibly.
The two threads met at On-Site Trading, a New York direct-access trading firm. On-Site was Rick’s client at S&P Comstock, where he handled their trader support. His relationship with the firm and Creative On-Line’s web work came together when Creative On-Line built On-Site’s website. Soon after, in 1999, On-Site hired them as a team. The website had opened the door, but the technical depth was what the firm was really buying, the kind that was obvious within minutes of a conversation.
On-Site was already established and successful. Its traders worked in a physical trading environment, the way trading had worked for decades. What the firm did not yet have was the technology and operational infrastructure to extend that model beyond the walls of the office.
That is what the team was hired to build. Remote trading systems. Digital services. The technology layer that let professional traders operate from outside the physical floor at the exact moment the internet was making it possible.
On-Site was acquired following the events of September 11, 2001. The team moved on.
What they took with them was more than a set of technical skills. It was a specific way of thinking about technology. Not as a product to sell, but as an operational layer that keeps real work running when the stakes are real.
That way of thinking is what EGS was built on.
On-Site Trading, Inc. website, May 2001
2000s – 2023
The pattern
From On-Site Trading, the team moved through a major engagement at ATS and on through Andover Trading and Assent LLC, where the EGS model ran at real scale for the first time. The team built and operated Assent’s remote trading division, coordinating between traders, systems, and leadership across multiple locations. Their fingerprints were on the platform itself: point-and-click order entry and market-maker functionality in Hammer, the firm's direct-access trading platform, and the Citrix delivery system that made remote HammerTrade possible. At its peak, the remote division supported more than 200 traders, with seats as far away as London, Israel, and Hong Kong, averaging 50 to 60 million shares a month. Near the end of the Assent years came a technology partnership with Prestige Capital, scoping trading infrastructure, black-box hosting, and multi-site trading facilities. From there came Dimension Capital, where the team ran its own remote trading branch and built and operated most of the firm’s production trading infrastructure, with full responsibility for risk management and trader operations.
Alongside the trading firm work, EGS began serving clients directly. The National Police Defense Foundation became one of the first, beginning in December 2001, within weeks of EGS’s formation, and spanning website management, network and server administration, IT operations, cloud modernization, and everything in between. That relationship has run continuously ever since.
During the same period, EGS founders operated and participated in projects at Natural Balance Pet Foods, where the sales data and analytics platform their team built gave the company visibility across its sales operation. Natural Balance was subsequently acquired by Del Monte.
A quieter pattern ran alongside: On-Site was acquired by AB Watley, Assent by SunGard, and Natural Balance by Del Monte — each with the team’s work running inside it when the deal closed.
One decision from that era outlasted all the ventures: as the work grew, the founders deliberately split technology from operations. EGS remained the operating company. Zivlyn Systems, formed with the same partners and running by the mid-2000s, became the technology arm, the lineage of the technical team EGS still builds through today. The division of labor was never undone; it became the model.
Additional ventures during that period included Black Box Guru, Seton Securities, MJ7 Solutions, Financial Cloud Services, and, from 2018 to 2023, BattleStocks and its successor TradeStars: years of investment in startup concepts, DevOps, product architecture, and operational design.
Some ventures grew. Some stalled. Some failed. Some evolved over years.
Across all of it, a surprising pattern kept repeating. Projects with smart people, strong funding, impressive technology, and compelling ideas still struggled to execute.
At first, this was frustrating. Eventually, it became illuminating.
The Hammer trading platform, Andover Trading and later Assent LLC
THE REALIZATION
The real problem
And yet progress stalled.
Why? Because the real breakdown usually happened somewhere between vision and execution.
Teams became disconnected. Ownership became unclear. Vendors worked in silos. Priorities shifted. Communication degraded. Accountability weakened. Momentum disappeared.
Organizations often had all the pieces.
They simply could not get those pieces to work together.
THE INSIGHT
The missing layer
That realization changed everything.
EGS gradually understood that its highest value was not simply building websites, managing servers, deploying software, or solving technical issues.
Its greatest value emerged in the space between specialists.
That space became the defining insight behind modern EGS.
Executives
→Technical teams
Strategy
→Execution
Planning
→Progress
Business needs
→Operational reality
The missing layer was not another tool.
It was operational alignment.
2024 – TODAY
EGS today
The journey shaped something specific. Not a firm with a methodology. A team with decades of hard-won operational judgment and the technical depth to back it up.
Every environment EGS moved through produced the same thing. Judgment. About what breaks between leadership and execution, why it breaks, and what it takes to keep complex things running in environments where failure has real consequences.
That judgment is what EGS brings to every client engagement today: a pattern recognized across decades of operating in high-pressure environments, and the operational discipline to do something about it.
The missing layer EGS identified was not a product or a platform. It was a function. One that most organizations leave empty because they do not know to look for it. EGS knows what it looks like because it has been that function across trading firms, ventures, and client organizations since before most of the platforms EGS operates today existed.
When an engagement requires technical depth beyond platform implementation, EGS works with a technical team it has operated alongside since the late 1990s. That team has built trading systems, financial data infrastructure, and complex backend platforms across multiple ventures. The client does not manage that relationship. EGS does. The result is a range of capability most operational firms cannot offer without bringing in an entirely separate vendor the client has to deal with directly.
The tools will keep changing. The platforms will keep changing. What does not change is the need for someone who knows which one fits, makes it work, and stays in.
That is what the journey built. That is what EGS is.
Pattern recognition.
→The same breakdown kept appearing across every industry and every venture. EGS learned to see it before it happens and to own what it takes to prevent it.
One team throughout.
→From the first conversation through implementation, operations, and everything that follows. The same people. The same relationship. As long as you need it.
Still running.
→The longest EGS client relationship is still active today. The newest currently active engagement has run for six years.
The journey continues.
Twenty-five years of clients, projects, and challenges shape the experience behind EGS.
If your organization needs someone to own the operational layer and keep it running, that is exactly what EGS does.