ALL THE technical wizardry in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t have vision and a flexible business plan, says Barbara Manning, president and CEO of IT Interactive Services Inc. in Halifax.

"I always say you don’t have to know how you’re going to do, you need to know what you want to do first," she said in a recent interview at the firm’s multi-floor offices above a Greek restaurant in downtown Halifax.

"You need to set a plan in place, but man proposes and God disposes, so you need to follow the plan roughly as you go along and keep adjusting the plan."

IT Interactive Services is the parent company of GenieKnows.com, a pay-per-click Internet web crawler recently named one of the top 250 IT companies in Canada by the business magazine, Backbone. It was one of only two IT firms headquartered in Nova Scotia to make the list; the other was xwave, a division of telecommunications giant Bell Aliant.

"We’re probably one of the best kept secrets in Halifax," said Ms. Manning, a Whitney Pier native and Saint Mary’s University MBA graduate who was a teacher, business consultant and restaurant owner before taking the helm at IT Interactive.

Ms. Manning co-owns the business with her husband John, a psychologist originally from Chicago who founded the firm in 1999 with Rami Hamodah, who has since moved on to other things, and Barrie Romkey, who maintains a third ownership interest.

The company’s history reflects Ms. Manning’s views about the need to be flexible. GenieKnows was born out of its founders’ frustrations with search engines that provided, in effect, too much information and has evolved under her leadership into a service that focuses on vertical Internet searches within specific subject categories.

"What we’re getting ready to launch on June 29 is what we’ve been working on for three years, which is what we call focus crawling," she said.

"We search the entire web, like Google and Yahoo!, but we determine what categories we want to retrieve the information in. We have focused right now on games, as in X-Box and PlayStation. We’re also doing the same thing in health, which we’ll launch probably later in the summer."

Mr. Manning, who initially wanted to provide online psychological counselling services before realizing "there was no money in it," said GenieKnows takes the legwork out of Internet searches...

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