Reflections on 10 Years and 29,323 Hours at Enstoa

On Monday, September 7th, 2020, I passed a significant milestone—a decade working at Enstoa. When I look back at 10 years of activities I've logged, I’m reminded of just how exciting and fulfilling it has been:

• I worked 13,096 hours (44.66% of all my hours) on projects for 42 clients across 11 industries.
• 9,015 hours (30.74%) were focused on internal strategy, operations, and developing new products and offerings.
• I communicated the value of our products and offerings to new clients for 3,142 hours (10.71%).
• Planes, trains, and automobiles shuttled me around the globe for 2,783 hours (9.49%).
• Yes, I worked a lot. Because I love it. But I also spent 1,287 hours (4.39%) on vacation enjoying time with friends and family, swimming with whale sharks off the coast of Exmouth, camping amongst the Soay sheep on St. Kilda, exploring the Chardonnays of Margaret River, and wading my way through Thucydides.

There’s more to my experience at Enstoa than what my time breakdown conveys. How we rejoiced in our wins and achievements. Together. How we wept at our losses and failures. Together. How we matured professionally. Together.

Reflecting on last year’s milestone and catalyzed by the recent passing of an inspiring Upper Arlington High School English teacher, I’d like to share some stories. I hope not to focus on only rah-rah stories, because I’m not perfect and neither is Enstoa, but I instead aim to share authentically some of those experiences and learnings across my time at Enstoa as Dr. James Allen encouraged his students to do (1).

Please note that this is a long piece (by LinkedIn standards). If you have questions about, comments on, or challenges to what I wrote, send me an email. Let’s chat.

Introduction: The Stoa

In ancient Greece, a stoa was where philosophers gathered to share and explore ideas. Enstoa was founded in 2007 to bring our team members, clients, and partners together to explore solutions for the built environment. We focus on digital transformation for organizations that have capital construction budgets in the billions of dollars by providing strategy, systems implementation, integration, organizational change management, education, analytics, and data science services. In short, we help organizations build better.

Prologue: The Journey to the Stoa

My journey to Enstoa was eight years in the making, filled with many nudges from friends along the way. On Tuesday, October 29th, 2002, I had the good fortune of meeting Rev. John Gage at 254 Crown Street in New Haven, Connecticut. As a fellow Yale alumnus, he and his friends encouraged me to attend Yale Gala events in New York where I met Julius Towers and John Appiah on Saturday, June 26th, 2004. At the time, they volunteered with the Human Rights Campaign, and they inspired me to get involved. I volunteered for two years with the many talented professionals who planned, marketed, and produced HRC’s annual gala fundraiser in New York City. During that time, I worked closely with Jacob E. Miles who joined Enstoa in 2009. In August 2010, Jacob told me about this cool company he joined that was growing, and he encouraged me to apply. The interview (called Super Friday at the time) was daunting, and I quickly realized I was lacking in technical expertise. The take-home case study that followed presented an opportunity to demonstrate my mettle as I spent a few near-sleepless nights learning how to analyze complex data sets with QlikView, and a SQL crash course beforehand with the help of Adam Baron (a fellow HRC volunteer) set me up for success.

In retrospect, all the people I mentioned—and many others—who supported me set me up for success. Sometimes, having an abundance of support can reveal the potential you don’t yet know or see in yourself.

I joined Enstoa because they saw potential in me. I didn’t come pre-packaged with the full set of technical skills or experience they needed, but they were willing to make a bet on someone who was adaptable and had an appetite for learning. And I, finally, was willing to make a bet on myself that I should have made long before (2). 

Chapter 1: The Promise and Path of Transformation

In my first few months, I worked with two healthcare clients at very different stages in their digital transformations. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) was already benefitting from its digital initiatives, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was just starting its digital transformation journey.

With NYP, I saw how powerful the impact is when an organization was committed to digital transformation. After several years of implementing best-of-breed applications for its capital projects and facilities department, integrating them, and building a data warehouse, NYP engaged Enstoa for a business intelligence initiative to develop a comprehensive set of QlikView dashboards leveraging the enterprise data captured across its systems. The day we completed the first suite of dashboards, Matthias Ebinger, then the Director of Facilities Process Engineering and Systems, turned to me and said, “This is the best day of my professional career. We’re finally able to understand how we’re operating.” He was right. It was a thing of beauty. We could see trends related to risks, issues, and change orders. We could forecast cash flow many years into the future. We could track project manager’s workloads. We finally had a holistic view of the organization and could see where they were operating optimally and what could be improved. Although Matthias made that comment in passing, I remember it quite clearly—where we were sitting, what was on the computer screen, the joy in his voice. It was a powerful moment. After only a few months with Enstoa, I saw the tremendous impact and scale of our work and that I was contributing in a meaningful way. It was a singularly affirming. And I was ready for more.

When Cedars-Sinai’s Facilities, Planning, Design and Construction department began its digital transformation, their vision was similar to that of NYP’s—comprehensive, up-to-date insight into the organization’s performance. The first step was to replace manual, paper-based processes with automated systems. This achieved two key goals—it freed project managers from tedious, time-consuming activities and it provided management with the visibility it needed. But the Cedars-Sinai leadership team didn’t stop there. During the course of our decade-long (and ongoing) relationship, Cedars-Sinai has continued to implement focused solutions to improve a variety of processes. Their digital transformation is rooted in a practice of consistently—and quickly—implementing targeted digital solutions, optimizing what has already been implemented, and deprecating what is no longer needed.

NYP showed me the promise of digital transformation. Cedars-Sinai showed me that digital transformation was a way of operating, not the endpoint of a single project.

What they both showed me was that, when it really counted, I could hit my stride. Enstoa’s bet paid off. My bet paid off. And soon I would be asked to stretch into my next challenge—on the other side of the globe.

Chapter 2: Going Global

Everything changed at Enstoa on Thursday, July 19th, 2012. Enstoa CEO Jordan Cram gathered everyone in the middle of our West 31st Street office in Manhattan. The creaky wooden floors of office were louder that day as the tectonic plates of our business shifted beneath our feet. Jordan announced that Skire’s Unifier project management and cost control software was acquired by Oracle. Jordan assured us this was an exciting opportunity given our long history implementing solutions with Unifier. He was right.

Oracle has a strong partnership program deeply embedded in its operational DNA, and through this Enstoa partnered closely with Oracle’s global sales teams. Enstoa had a long track record of architecting project control solutions built upon implementations of Unifier, and we were uniquely positioned to communicate the value proposition to clients. In partnering with the Oracle sales teams, Enstoa was introduced to large opportunities around the globe. We were force multipliers for each other.

On Tuesday, February 5th, 2013, I started my first international project for a client in Australia, and it presented many challenges that set it apart from anything I had worked on previously. It was larger in scale and value. We were implementing technology that was new to me. It was a new geography. I’d be working with a different team, including a new employee, Chris Long, who I met only two days before. At the airport. In Hong Kong. Shortly before we boarded our flight to Perth. I quickly learned I’d need to become both comfortable and effective operating in circumstances of greater uncertainty. The technical skills I acquired working on previous projects, though helpful, were not the skills needed to effectively sell to enterprises, develop a team, or build partnerships. This required a deep, honest self-evaluation of my weaknesses. It’s difficult, and the mantra “know thyself” was helpful to anchor my introspection. Interrogatives are the links of the anchor’s chain: What can I do? What can I not do? What should I do? What should I not do? What can I do but requires significant priming? Who can I rely on to do the things I can’t—or shouldn’t—do? And so on… The number of links in that chain of questions sharply increases with additional leadership responsibilities.

Five months and a few new clients later, Enstoa opened offices in Australia, and I relocated to Perth to lead engagements in the APAC region as Enstoa expanded its global footprint. While there, I saw how deftly digital transformations could be executed. While mid-construction of a $4B project, a client decided to excise the Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) company responsible for managing the construction work. The client’s goal was to manage the entire construction program itself. To achieve this, they needed to separate the EPC with scalpel-like precision and transplant a new management structure, processes, and systems. They engaged Enstoa to design their business processes, operationalize those processes and controls in Primavera Unifier, migrate data from the EPC’s custom software, and develop reports and dashboards bringing that data to life. Within a matter of months, the client had a command center in operation and was in control of its construction program.

Australia showed me how quickly digital transformation can lead to significant, durable, and valuable change.

Australia also showed me how leadership development must start from deep, honest introspection in order to lead to significant, durable, and valuable change. And you need to be prepared when you stumble along the way.

Chapter 3: Humble When You Stumble

On Friday, November 27th, 2015, Jordan invited me to join a new project. 49 hours later, I was on the ground in Dallas for what would become a year and a half of boomeranging between New York and Texas for Enstoa’s single largest engagement to-date.

This project, unlike many others, was a complete overhaul of an organization’s processes and technology across all functions, not just capital projects. Finance, supply chain, asset management, human resources, HSE, IT, and capital projects were all working together to modernize the organization. The client, a natural resources company, demonstrated unique resolve in this endeavor. “We’re committed to modernizing our company, even with oil prices as low as they are,” explained the CFO at the project kickoff.

The challenge with such an engagement is the complexity across so many interrelated components. Maintaining the momentum of decision-making and solutioning was emphasized by the delivery partners, as the mantra “a good decision now is better than a perfect decision later” was often repeated. The sheer scope of the engagement presented new challenges to Enstoa as to how we manage such a large body of work. We struggled in the beginning, but such struggles reveal opportunities for innovation (3). Like our client, we acknowledged our weaknesses, we committed to self-improvement, and then we interrogated our own processes of how we plan, manage, document, track, and ensure the quality of our work. We matured many of our project delivery frameworks throughout the course of the engagement and continue to employ these approaches to this day. At the time, however, many of the improvements we made didn’t feel especially groundbreaking. Innovation, though, comes in many forms—new to us, new to the industry, and new to the world.

That engagement highlighted that you need to be humble when you stumble, you need to look within before you act, you need to innovate your way out of suboptimal ways of operating, and you can’t underestimate the aggregate impact of many small innovations.

Chapter 4: An Operation Leads to Internal Operations

My appendix ruptured on February 5th, 2018, a few days before I was scheduled to fly to Peru to kick off an engagement with a new client. I was fortunate to receive care from the excellent surgical and nursing staff at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. In the decade NYP had been a client, it was the first time I saw their medical facilities (and I hope it’s the last time for at least a few more decades). My recovery included a slow transition back to work over the course of a month, during which I assisted with internal operations initiatives. Since then, my focus has remained with digital operations and controls, corporate strategy, special projects, revenue management, and supporting our P&L owners.

This presented an opportunity to apply my project delivery experience and institutional knowledge across a diverse set of initiatives—developing an organizational change management capability, enhancing our project delivery frameworks, and implementing new enterprise systems to support our business. The most rewarding aspect of these varied projects has been working closely with many more team members across all functions at Enstoa.

It’s the people that Enstoa has gathered together that have most shaped my professional growth and for which I’m extraordinarily grateful. They’ve shared their expertise and made me better informed. They’ve offered vastly different perspectives and made me a better listener. They’ve challenged my ideas and made me a better thinker.

Epilogue: A Compass for the Future

My work in the future will likely be as varied has it has been for the past decade, as agility is increasingly important in this post-COVID business environment. The challenge we now face is scaling effective strategic and tactical decision-making. We find ourselves having to make more decisions, at a quicker pace, under greater uncertainty, and with partial or imperfect data. In these challenging circumstances when you’re constantly triangulating your course, viewing your options through the lens of your values enables you to make decisions—both personal and business—that are authentic and internally consistent with how you want to relate to others and operate in the world. It’s empowering.

Identifying and understanding your values, however, can be difficult. At Enstoa, we’ve invited Paul Ingram, Kravis Professor of Business Management at Columbia Business School, to several of our Spark company conferences to guide us through values exploration exercises that helped us identify both our personal and corporate values. That gave us a powerful toolkit, including the language and frameworks to understand values at a deeper level and how to use our values as a decision-making partner.

Looking into the uncertain fog of the future, our values are an invaluable compass. And I’ve never been more optimistic about the journey the next decade will bring.

Footnotes

1. Dr. James Allen encouraged his students at Upper Arlington High School to write with courage and authenticity as Ramzy Nasrallah eloquently described in his tribute to the late educator. It’s hard. It requires practice. I’ll be writing more.
2. This is best discussed over a beer.
3. Opportunities like this don’t always feel like opportunities at first. They can be painful, both personally and professionally, especially in this case. Again, this is best discussed over a beer.

About the Author

Steven Mattson Hayhurst focuses on digital operations and controls to reduce operational friction, and corporate strategy to accelerate digital transformation for the built environment. As Senior Vice President at Enstoa, Steven has led several digital transformations across North America, Australia, China and the Middle East in the healthcare, natural resources, education, and public infrastructure industries.