Growing the business while integrating three company acquisitions
A highly successful vice president of professional and customer services took on a huge challenge when she was required to integrate three separate company acquisitions into her global part of the business. She had so many top priorities, including continuing to grow revenue, that she didn’t know where to start. Working with us, she quickly understood she would need to step back and trust her people to tackle things themselves in their way – she could provide support but needed them to execute.
She also quickly identified who on her leadership team were the right fit, who she needed to develop to improve performance and who she needed to move out. It was tough stuff and took up far more of her time than she wanted but she knew that understanding the capabilities of her leadership team was crucial to their overall success and the continued growth of the business. Had she not tackled this she would have had to continue with the chaos of four different company approaches, clients receiving poor service, potential clients being put off by the confusion and her people getting more and more demotivated. All of which would have negatively impacted her revenue and margin.
A positive spin-off from stepping back to support her team in this way was that she was better able to see and understand what she needed to do at a more strategic level, such as putting key area processes in place and scheduling to the end of the year, establishing weekly, monthly and quarterly operating rhythms and establishing a leadership team communications strategy. She also developed a deeper understanding of the various metrics the company used to measure performance and use the data more effectively in her team’s planning and decision making.
Inevitably, with so much to do, other things had to be left undone and some things are taking longer to resolve than planned. However, the vice president was in a position where she felt on top of the job for the first time in a long while and was able to prioritise what needed to be done and schedule in time when she or others would tackle it.
The result of her programme was that the new business sales cycle was much shorter, and upselling into existing client base and the growth of mega major accounts were both greatly improved, meaning that, despite all the disruption of acquisition and integration, revenue was up.