Becoming an Award Winning Company – Part 2 What did base Zero look like for EDIStech – Has your business been here?
Recap of previous article ‘How to Become an Award Winning Business – Edistech’s Journey – Part 1’
I am wanting to share the transformational journey that EDIStech has been on over the past four years. We have progressed from a run of the mill software as a Service IT company to now an award winning company that delivers Excellence in Customer Service as judged at the Westpac Business Awards in October 2018.
By sharing the transformational steps we followed I am hoping other business owners/leaders can adopt some or all of what EDIStech has done to transform your own businesses.
The Beginning:
I started in April of 2015 as General Manager of EDIStech. The owner of the business purchased EDIStech outright in 2011 and had struggled with so many fires within the business that he took the brave step of appointing a General Manager to run his business in 2015. The owner takes on the role of Software Developer and Business Analyst.
The company in 2015, was basically at breakeven in terms of profit and cash flow. Staff turnover of developers was around 100%, meaning that all developers were leaving the company within a year.
Systems were mildly being followed by some, but generally developers wrote code in their own style following their own standards. This made debugging the code extremely difficult as new developers took a long time to decipher how their predecessors had written the code.
The understanding of who our ideal customer should be, had no clarity.
Staff didn’t know what the future plans of the company were, not that these plans were crystalised anyway, and really didn’t feel part of delivering a first class solution for our clients. We were in fire-fighting mode.
To be honest, after three months in the job I said to my wife;
“What the ……. have I done accepting this role”.
So how did we start this turn around?
Well the first take out from what I have written so far if you haven’t already picked up on this, is that the owner of the business is not necessarily the best person to keep running it from an operational and /or strategic stand point once a certain size has been reached. It takes an owner with a lot of integrity, humility, self-belief and pride (rather than arrogance) to decide to pass the reigns to someone better qualified than them to run their business. A further point is that once they have made that decision, they need to let that person run the business with little interference. The owner of EDIStech has been fantastic in that regard and very supportive of my initiatives.
Please read my next blog as I continue to discuss the transformational journey of EDIStech from one of the pack to an award winning outlier.
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