Staying relevant – a wake up call from an advisor
Join Projectworks’ CEO Mark Orttung in this new series titled The Consulting Balance, as he shares experiences and insights from his career growing successful services firms. In his fourth article, Mark shares a 2015 experience – when a heavy-hitting tech advisor told him that all the work he’d just done, would soon need updating.
“All of the things you are doing now are great, but they’ll be commodity services in three years.”
I had just finished walking a prospective advisor through our new company pitch. We had settled into our new name, differentiated and updated our positioning, and had a tidy new homepage to show it all off. We had really tightened it from where we had been a few months prior so I was excited to share everything with him.
The potential advisor was Ralph Szygenda, a legend in corporate IT. He had held multiple roles at Texas Instruments, Bell Atlantic, and General Motors. At GM, he had led business groups (one created Onstar) and also had been the CIO, leading the largest IT budget at the time – over $1 Billion. I was just getting to know him, but it was obvious he could read a company and where it stands in the market incredibly quickly.
I thought our new focus on US-based Agile development was clear and differentiated, as we were in an early stage of offering Agile development services. He believed that it would soon be adopted by many software outsourcing companies, a lot with offshore labor pools, who’d be able to dramatically undercut us on cost. I wanted to make the argument that our team was stronger, and that since we were in the same market and time zone as our clients, we would offer a superior service. But I knew deep down that Ralph was right. To show your strength and superiority you first need the work, and new work is often won at the bottom line.
I started my career at Andersen Consulting (which later became Accenture). One of the things I observed there was that they were constantly reinventing what the firm did, and what the services were that they offer. I realized we had to do the same with Nexient, at least once anyway. If we could pull that off, then we’d work on making it a habit. Ideally, we’d need to reinvent ourselves every three years to a new positioning statement that led the market.
Embracing cross-functional collaboration
To figure out how to deliver even more value to our clients, I went back to my time working in SaaS product companies.
The real magic happened when we got a cross-functional team together to work on a problem for customers. Engineering alone was valuable, but it was much more valuable when combined with product management and user experience design. I’ve found that the best products are created when these three disciplines get together and discover a place that is outside each of their individual expertise. When they stretch to work in the space between disciplines they create great new solutions. This insight felt like something we could leverage and helped us arrive at an idea for how to position the firm, again.
Most of our clients were enormous enterprises (in the Fortune 500). The high level idea went something like this… “Whatever industry you’re in, you’re already competing with a startup you know about, or you’re competing with one you haven’t discovered yet. Those companies are able to create great software much faster than your company. We offer software development teams that will get you moving at the speed of the startups you’re competing with.”
Continuous growth
It took a year to refresh our positioning externally. We even had to hire the right team to fulfill our promise, but in the long run it paid off. Ralph’s business advice call got us started on what would become a constant process as a leadership team. We were always looking at three areas of our business plan:
Our current core business - how we spend most of our time;
What we’d like to do - where we had one or two projects in new, higher value services;
What we aspired to be - where we didn’t have any work yet, but where we really wanted to move the company to.
Whenever a positioning refresh went live, we’d start the review again, meaning Nexient was continuously evolving and successfully growing.
A few final thoughts
If you want to give your services business a boost:
Find business mentors who will push you. Ralph had so much more experience and knowledge in the industry than I did. He could listen to where we were and immediately give us feedback on what we needed to do.
Move up the value chain. Look at your services from your clients' perspective and keep pushing your team to add more value.
Reinvent your company every two to three years. To remain a market leader, you need to continuously reinvent the services you offer.
