Small Company Thinking - the art af being "Folksy"

My last company was small by most standards; about $40mil in annual revenue. We had been struggling, and were eventually purchased by a private equity firm. Of course private equity does not usually buy healthy companies, they buy sick ones and fix them, or dissect them and divest of the assets if the numbers are in favor of that. We were lucky in that our owners brought in a new CEO that was a real sales guy, and knew that the key to success was a true focus on the customer. Seems obvious, but so few companies truly get it.

To make the long story short, we had great success fixing the company, and it was eventually sold to a very large software company. As is often the case, we were culturally at odds with the new company. They were very internally focused, much more concerned with the proper paperwork being completed than with doing what was right for the customer. Very heavy process centric approach to everything. We were often scoffed at, with our "small company thinking" approach to things, and were repeatedly told "that is great, but it would never work in a big company".

As an example; I used to do lab tours for visiting potential customers. Deal win rate when getting the customer to visit and take a tour was near 90%. Within days of the acquisition close, this stopped. When I questioned a visiting exec as to why we no longer did customer visits, given the high win rate, I was told "That just wouldn't scale. If all of our sales teams sent every prospect here, you would be completely overwhelmed". True I said, but we went from three per week to zero, and we could easily support five. If we had more requests than that, we would figure it out, maybe tape it and use video for the smaller deals. "Small company thinking" says he. Nonsense. An excuse from big a process guy for not taking action.

When I arrived in my current position I was part of the management team brought in to help turn the company around. Yes, we have the same private equity owners (see a trend?). This company was bigger than our last success, by about eight times in revenue, and maybe four times in number of employees. As we started making changes, and refocusing the company on our customers, we heard much of the same thing; "That may have worked at a small company, but it will never work here".

Ha! It has worked. And not just as it relates to IT stuff, but everywhere in the business. It is harder to make it work in a larger company, and it is critically dependent on having the right people, particularly in the leadership roles, but it is very effective when it does work. We now find ourselves operating as a more or less independent division of a much larger company, though still under the same private equity ownership. Our larger siblings have called us "Folksy", saying that the way we do stuff works in a little company like ours, but big sophisticated companies do it their way (which usually means with an army of consultants).

To all of you that run "folksy" business, please keep it up. It works, and the folksy businesses are much more fun to work at and to do business with.

IT Rocks! - Part Two, a collection a silly sayings

In reality, some of them may be a bit corny, but they all have real meaning in the context of getting IT to rock. the first, and most important, is "There is nothing more important than our customers". This is how we run the entire company. Of course in IT, we have lots of different customers including external customers (the most important ones, as they keep us in business), partners, and the rest of our internal folks. This sounds so simple, but so many organizations miss it completely. We really take this literally. Any of our customers, whether external or internal, come before any of our own IT priorities. Our help desk tool offers self service to our users, but contrary to the way most folks view self-service tools, the goal of this is not to deflect human contact, it is to let folks interact with us in the way they choose. We encourage our help desk folks to call, or better yet, go see their customers when they work on tickets for them. Think about it, how nice would it be to see a smiling face show up at your cube; "Hi Bill, I'm Don from the IT service desk. I am just checking in to see if you are all set with your mail issue"? At the last place I worked, this would have caused heart attacks. They actually did not have the help desk folks listed in the corporate directory, purposely so you couldn't call them up. No wonder they were universally despised.

Another saying; "Try it, fix it, try it". This sums up our approach for continuous improvement, and also for our iterative approach to adding value to the business. We are not big on grandiose plans that take many months to execute. Business is too fast these days for that. We need to quickly add value, and evolve it over time. This one is also kind of a cousin to "I reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow than I am today", which really means we are not tied to a decision, and can change our minds to adapt quickly to a changing environment. Those that can't adapt will get left behind.

Next, we have "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". Sometimes when working to solve a problem for the business, we can envision a beautifully elegant solution, and the only problem is that it really can't be delivered in pieces, so it would be months before the business saw any value. This is actually one my developers struggle with, as they would sometimes like to build the "big thing". The reality is that we can often do something simple that solves 80% of the problem very quickly.While this may be only good, it is often good enough for the business, and they are delighted with the speed of delivery.

The last of my sayings for today, is "Saving money won't get you good IT, but good IT will save you money". This is really about focus. Be careful what you decide your organization is going to focus on, you just might get it. See my rant on Enterprise Architecture. If you loose your focus on the business, and shift it to Architecture, budget reduction ITIL, etc., that is what you'll get, an ITIL shop with great architecture, with barely enough funding to stay alive, and still be hated (and I do not think that is too strong) by the business. By focusing on what was important (Customers First, Enable the Business, and Showcase our Products), we became a valued partner to the business, with a seat at the executive table (I report to the CEO). In the process, because we stopped doing stuff that was not important, we have reduced our spend by just shy of 20% over the last two years (while doing and SAP upgrade, I will add).

I'm sure there are more sayings we use, and I'll try to remember to write them down for another silly sayings post.