Shazad Mohamed, the 16-year-old president and CEO of GlobalTek Solutions, Inc. in Dallas, TX, knows what it takes to solve his customers’ problems. Like the time one of his clients, For Paws Bakery, Inc., was looking for a way to sell its gourmet dog biscuits nationwide. GlobalTek showed the company how to plan, design, and create an online store.

Those are the kinds of dilemmas that Shazad loves to tackle. "The most interesting thing about business is that new challenges come up all the time," he says. "Overcoming problems requires thinking logically and creatively."

When Shazad was only 9, his parents took him along to a computer class. Soon he was cruising the Internet, gathering information on computers and programming. "Eventually, I got into programming and down into the real inner workings of the computer," Shazad says.

Three years later, in May 1999, Shazad founded GlobalTek (www.globalteksolutions.com) with his family and friends as his first clients. From there, he built a portfolio of the Web sites he had constructed for them and began soliciting customers.

In GlobalTek’s early days, Shazad and his then two employees found themselves in a bind. As word got out about a teen running a computer company, Shazad's business was mentioned in technical business journals as well as a Dallas Morning News article. Shazad was also interviewed on radio and television, including MTV. "After that, things started taking off," Shazad says. "We got some press coverage, and that brought in a lot of new business."

It was a nice problem to have, but it was still a problem. "It was a volume of business that, frankly, we could not handle," he says. They had more customers than they could take care of and not enough resources to hire more staff. Shazad came up with a creative solution: contract employees. By hiring contractors, GlobalTek was able to take on the extra work and continue to build its customer base.

About that time, the industry began to change. The economy slowed, and spending on the kinds of services GlobalTek offers slowed with it. Many companies like GlobalTek laid off employees or went out of business. Shazad and his team had a better idea. They used telecommuting — one of the same problem-solving solutions they had been selling to their customers — to improve their own operations.

By asking his employees to work from their home offices, Shazad was able to reduce drastically the company’s overhead. Technology tools — such as video conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging, and collaborative portals (workspaces that are shared over the Internet) — helped them work together, even though they weren’t in the same room or even the same building.

When it comes to solving customer problems, Shazad has consistently shown he knows how to work with his clients to meet their needs. Is he as savvy, though, when two people on his team disagree? What if the team disagrees with a solution that Shazad himself proposes? Who gets to be "right"?

For Shazad, it is not about being right or wrong. To encourage a rich cross-section of ideas and approaches, Shazad promotes a culture not only of hiring talented people — GlobalTek employs 20 full-time and contract employees — but also of making sure that those employees’ ideas are heard. GlobalTek has several teams of highly-skilled associates, each with different backgrounds and different ways of seeing a problem. What they share is a mutual respect for each other’s abilities and ideas.

Shazad knows he cannot make every decision, which is why he assigns a team to each project. He says his job is to find out what each team needs, ensure that they have the resources to complete each project, and provide them with the best technology. The rest is up to the team.

Though solving customer problems in the ever-changing world of technology is never simple, Shazad and his team enjoy their work. "I love technology, and I love business," Shazad says. "The whole process of creating interesting technology solutions and seeing them actually help customers is incredibly exciting."

It takes exceptional problem-solving skills to tackle the problems that constantly pop up in today’s unpredictable business climate. It looks like Shazad and his team are up for the challenge.