Joshua Aaron was just a few years out of college, working in a senior project management position for a technology consulting firm in New York with major financial customers.

What may have seemed like an ideal position gave Aaron a vision for something even better. The job kept Aaron in the field with clients. He often felt disconnected from the rest of the consulting company and rarely worked with other members of the firm, he said.

That experience gave Aaron the idea for a consulting firm where people could feel like part of a team and leverage each other’s knowledge and experience to deliver better advice and service to clients. Around that same time the founder of ThruPoint, a consulting firm formerly known as Total Network Solutions, became a friend and mentor to Aaron. Soon the Jersey City resident began to see that starting his own firm was within reach.

In 1997, Aaron founded Business Technology Partners and started building his own team, he said. Aaron is president of the firm, headquartered in New York City. Business Technology Partners started as an information technology consulting firm, working solely with companies in the financial services industry. In order to grow the business, they expanded into professional services, health care, education and hospitality, Aaron said.

The firm of about 15 to 20 people upgrades existing technology, designs and builds new systems and maintains telecommunication and data networks for its clients.

Aaron spoke to The Star-Ledger about the information technology industry.

Q. As a relatively small firm, how have you been able to appeal to such large clients?
A. Listening to the customer is important. Many technology firms have a bad reputation when it comes to customer service. BTP works closely with the IT department within a client’s business. Secondly, we anticipate new trends in this ever-changing industry and can implement, oversee and design many technology networks and infrastructure projects before our competitors can.

Q. How has the climate of the industry changed since you started BTP?
A. Margins are under pressure and many IT consulting services have been commoditized as more jobs have been outsourced overseas. You really need to demonstrate a unique value and expertise and certainly cannot rely on relationship selling any longer.

Q. What is the most memorable project you ever worked on?
A. The most memorable project I ever worked on was the relocation of the New York Board of Trade from their disaster recovery site in Long Island City, N.Y., to One North End Avenue at the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan. The project had not only some fantastic challenges for (at the time) the latest and greatest IT infrastructure and innovative trading floor design, but also represented for me a resumption to normality in a post-9/11 world as we returned a major exchange to normal operations in New York City.