Case Study: Getting Ready for Growth
Client Background & Problem Statement
“What got us here, won’t get us there.”
Simpleview is a successful technology company based in Tucson, Arizona, providing Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Content Management (CMS), website design, and digital marketing services to Destination Marketing Offices and travel destinations worldwide. They are currently making strategic investments across people, process, and tools to get ready for their next phase of growth.
Despite how it appears from the outside, scaling a business is never easy. As your company grows, you must keep breaking your mold and reinventing yourself. Your business strategies, talent management strategies, ways of working, systems, and tools that made you successful must be changed to get you to the next stage. It’s hard enough to recognize when change is necessary, but it’s even harder to know what change is needed.
Simpleview recognized these challenges and wanted to reinvent themselves without the pain companies typically face in this phase of their growth. The founder-led company has a track record of 20 years of success. They have long-tenured employees who are proud and loyal and love working at this values-based company, which is known as an employer of choice in the Tucson area. They have a strong builder and engineering culture, with a history of adaptability, building whatever was needed to meet the needs of the growing company. All of these powerful assets got them to where they are today, but as they look to the future of continued organic and M&A growth, they understood they were reaching the limit of their current systems and tools, which were mostly homegrown, custom-engineered solutions. Their current systems environment had three main challenges:
High maintenance costs, requiring specialized engineering and domain skills to enhance and maintain their custom solutions.
Access to data was limited, requiring engineering resources to build and run reports, preventing self-serve access to data by departmental executives.
Impacts to customer experience, mostly due to disparate systems across sales, support and customer success with limited integration capabilities, providing a disjointed customer experience at times.
Simpleview wanted to invest and prepare for the future by modernizing their internal operations. The company recently hired a Chief Operating Officer with extensive experience scaling high-growth SaaS companies. He reached out to us to help evaluate their current systems and offer a strategy and blueprint for creating a robust systems environment that built on their people-first culture to support their continued growth.
Solution: Tenger Foresight
We worked with Simpleview to deliver Tenger Foresight, a holistic approach to developing a strategy for high-performing, high-impact Technology Operations, including the Enterprise Applications supporting business operations (CRM, ERP, HRIS, etc.), Data & Analytics, and IT Services. The 3 main components of a Foresight are 1) a quantitative assessment of current state, 2.) the vision & strategy for an ideal future state, and 3.) a realistic plan for getting from here to there.
Methodology
We followed our proven Tenger methodology with its three distinct phases:
Prepare. During this phase we meet key team members, get onboarded with access to systems and collaboration tools, and most importantly we listen to and learn more about our client. While most of our clients have similar problems, they are all unique. We take the time to learn about our client’s culture and values, and we confirm we’re working on the right problem. We approach this phase with humility and an unbiased mind because we firmly believe there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to technology strategy and execution.
Quantify. The quantify phase is all about examining and documenting our client’s current state across culture and values, business processes, capabilities, and technology. As an independent third-party, we help our clients look in the mirror and take an assessment of their current state. While our clients hire us to help them build a future state, it’s impossible to get to where you are going without knowing where you are coming from. Most companies grow organically and don’t have documentation covering exactly how they work. That’s what this phase is all about and providing this written documentation is a valuable asset not just for this engagement but for the years to come.
Clarify. The clarify phase is the longest and where clients get the most value. This is where we work on creating the future state vision. The documents we created for current state – across culture and values, business processes, capabilities, and technology – in the previous phase are now recreated with a future state vision. In addition to future state recommendations, we also provide tactical steps and a roadmap for achieving this vision. The client now knows where they are, where they want to go, and most importantly how to get there.
Preparing For a Successful Engagement
Simpleview’s COO, the champion for our engagement, made his expectations clear from the beginning. He knew the systems and tools that supported Simpleview’s business operations were suitable in their current state but will not support their next phase of growth as they were planning for M&A and attempting to double their annual revenue. He was looking for a full assessment of their business processes and tools across Marketing, Sales, Finance, Support and HR, followed by a recommendation for a target vision for optimal business processes and the technology needed to support those processes, and a detailed roadmap for how to achieve that vision.
During our kickoff meeting, we listened to Simpleview’s COO and CEO as they expressed their desires for this project and the success criteria they would use to evaluate our work. We also listened to them talk about pain points they had with prior experience with other consultants. Based on this conversation we made a commitment to avoid a few challenges common with consulting:
Providing generic recommendations that don’t take the client’s uniqueness into account. One size does not fit all and it was important that they work with someone who can balance both industry best practices with their unique culture and context.
Focusing only on future state recommendations without a path for achieving it. Simpleview’s CEO cautioned us against providing strategic recommendations that would “sit on the shelf collecting dust”. The real value he was looking for was in specific steps for how to achieve it.
All or nothing recommendation. The recommendations we would provide might be the size of an elephant, but it was very important we provided steps for Simpleview to get value along their journey. Simpleview’s past experience with an expensive Netsuite implementation that didn’t provide value for years made them hesitant to adopt other enterprise applications because they need to see improvement today, not in two years.
Leading with technology. This is where many technology consultants fail. They recommend technology without considering people, culture, and process first. Companies will try to adopt a technology (i.e. Salesforce, NetSuite, ServiceNow) to fix their problems and are surprised when their problems don’t go away. This is why our framework looks at people and process before examining technology.
Value Delivered
We followed our Tenger Operational Model to fully document both current state and future vision for Simpleview’s Operational IT, which includes the technology supporting their Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, Customer Success, IT, Finance, Legal, and HR operations.
The Golden Thread & Value Realization Framework
Change is difficult. A sad truth is most companies fail to get desired benefits from their modernization initiatives. One common reason for this failure is because the many people impacted by the change across different departments and projects are not aligned towards a common goal. There is a lot of activity but it’s not being coordinated together in a strategic way. We developed our Golden Thread & Value Realization Framework to mitigate this risk.
We helped Simpleview define a unifying value language that aligns every single person impacted by change – across leadership, business analysts, designers, and developers. The Golden Thread and Value Realization Framework is a visual tool so everyone, at any point in time, can map their work towards the one common goal that is most important to the company. The Golden Thread provides a framework for everyone to a.) know how what they are working on supports the company’s top goal, b.) make prioritization decisions independently without a lot of coordination, and c.) use KPIs to quantitatively evaluate performance.
The Golden Thread is a visual framework for mapping all activity to one grand unifying goal.
The Operational Framework
The Tenger Operational Framework is a visual representation comprised of the L2 and L3 business processes and the technology that supports all of Simpleview’s business operations. Rather than examining functional silos, we created current & future state diagrams based on business process and value stream mapping which centers and prioritizes the customer journey and experience.
Our framework separates business processes into two categories: Core & Enabling Processes. Core Processes are customer facing and directly impact customer experience and revenue. The core processes we drilled into were Lead to Quote, Quote to Order, Expand and Renew, Order to Cash (Fulfillment), Order to Cash (Finance), Cash to Customer (Customer Success), and Cash to Customer (Customer Support). Enabling Processes just as important but are internal facing and support the core processes. The enabling processes we drilled into included Procure to Pay, Consolidate and Close, Hire to Retire, and Ideate to Operate (IT Ops).
Technology Footprint & Enterprise Data Management
Using the Operational Framework as a guide, we documented all the underlying technology applications that supported all of the business processes. A visual footprint is a great tool to highlight where there are software redundancies and opportunities for rationalization.
The Enterprise Data Management strategy includes an analysis of system capabilities, data model, and ETL considerations.
Capability Assessment
The operational framework follows the customer journey using value stream mapping, but employees are organized by functional departments and still need to develop deep technical and functional skills and capabilities. While business processes focus on how things are done, capabilities explore what can be done. They are the building blocks an organization uses to complete their work. We used an operational maturity assessment to provide insight into where Simpleview should focus on developing additional capabilities within HR, marketing & sales, finance & accounting, and customer relationships. Maturity was analyzed across the vectors that most impact predictability, effectiveness, and control: Intelligence (i.e. ability to share knowledge), Tools (i.e. ability to facilitate work), Standards (i.e. ability to ensure consistency), Automation (i.e. ability to govern automatically), and Measures (i.e. ability to indicate performance).
Impact to People & Culture
The process and technology recommendations were complemented by a thorough examination and recommendations across Simpleview’s orginzational structure. We provided a future state staffing model to centralize technology operations under a Global Business Operations unit, balancing the need for decentralized decision making with a Center of Excellence.
Additionally, we looked at Simpleview’s culture and change readiness. The biggest barrier to large scale digital change is psychological resistance. We provided best practices and guidelines for modern change management that recognizes how change is constant, much like waves in the ocean, and requires a dynamic, engaging, and continuous approach to change.
Roadmap & Order of Solve
After completing the future state vision across people, process, and tools, we built out the roadmaps and order of solve. Simpleview’s journey will be a multi-year effort, but we provided the starting point and 90-day plan for Simpleview to begin to making progress immediately.
The roadmap lists all of the recommended goals and tasks for achieving the future state vision,
Results
As a result of our engagement, Simpleview has full documentation covering their current business processes, an honest and fair assessment of their capabilities, and an inventory of their current technology footprint. They have a future state strategy starting with organizational design, future state business processes, and recommendations for technology to support their growing business. They also have a clear roadmap to go from here to there. Simpleview has a long journey ahead, but they have a great foundation to get started. Their COO was particularly happy with our ability to understand Simpleview’s history and uniqueness and not prescribe a canned solution based on past engagements.
“Tenger was different than other consultants we’ve worked with. They really understood our needs and made recommendations that balanced industry best practice with our uniqueness.” – Patrick, Chief Operating Officer and Project Sponsor
The success of the engagement was not based just on the methodologies and frameworks we bring to the table or our past experience working on similar projects, but largely due to Simpleview themselves. Their value-based culture and proactive leadership created a safe environment for their employees to welcome us in as true partners, collaborating and meeting with us whenever we needed, ultimately resulting in collateral that was co-created and will therefore be more valuable in the years to come.