When Brendan and I started ATX in 2013, we had a vision for filling what we perceived to be a critical need in the marketplace - a business-focused technology consultancy that allowed emerging middle market companies to compete with larger industry peers.
As we reflect back on the past 10 years, we will be sharing insights learned along each year of our journey. This post is part five of a ten post blog series highlighting lessons learned each year at ATX.
2017 - Strategic Planning (i.e. Takin’ Care of Business)
We survived the first four years of ATX and had some success along the way. Business was lumpy as we found ourselves in the constant cycle of getting work, doing work, and then needing to find more work. We were retaining clients but also determined that it was a difficult business to scale. We found ourselves needing to hire nimble experts and our ability to meet our goals hinged significantly on individual contributions.
It was time for a change if we were ever going to be the kind of company we had envisioned when we started. One of the benefits of doing a lot of different types of things was that our management consulting practice gave us dedicated time to focus on business strategy. About 20% of our work at the time was providing leadership coaching and strategic planning to clients. In addition to our client work, we also ran and facilitated a monthly CEO peer group called TechExex which also functioned as a CEO book club. In June of 2017, one of our members introduced the book Traction by Gino Wickman to the group and we took it on as a reading assignment.
“Most people are sitting on their own diamond mines. The surest ways to lose your diamond mine are to get bored, become overambitious, or start thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. Find your core focus, stick to it, and devote your time and resources to excelling at it.” - Gino Wickman, Traction
Of all of the business books I have read, Traction has had the most profound impact on our business. While most of the concepts are not new, it functions well as a greatest hits album. Traction is fantastic at simplifying the complexity of business decisions and provides readers with a framework to help prioritize what’s most important.
2017 marked an inflection point for ATX, we moved out of our coworking space and into our first dedicated office. We conducted our first team offsite and developed our first annual strategic plan. We also started our quarterly all hands team meeting series to monitor our progress against plan.
The outcome of our first strategic planning exercise … we shifted our broad focus from Accounting, Technology and Executive Advisory services to any potential customer to a more refined focus of simplifying software and data initiatives for scaling businesses. It’s ironic that we stumbled upon this lucid vision while running TechExex as it also led us to transition TechExex to the CEO Roundtable since it no longer aligned with our core focus. But ultimately, we found clarity. Hiring decisions were easier, we knew where to spend our time, how to train our team, and what to market and sell.
Our newly refined strategy also led us to the decision to build out some deeper technical capabilities to directly solve the integration and analytics challenges faced by our clients. I’ll cover that next time!
Cheers,
Mark
Check out the other entries in this series below: