Upon acquisition by a Fortune 200 enterprise software firm, our client - a cloud-based software integration startup - was challenged to increase revenue from $1B to $5B in four years. Increasing revenue by 5X in four years is a steep mountain for any organization to climb, but particularly for this scrappy startup whose growth was fueled by a focus on product and technology versus profitability and scale.
The expectation for our client was to integrate into the parent company's global operations and reach $5B by 2026. In addition to the daunting revenue goal, our client was expected to fuse their independent practices into the parent's ways of working.
To meet the mandated performance goals, our client would have to make radical changes. What got them to $1B was not going to get them to $5B. Successful organizational change hinges on the willingness of individuals to shift their mindsets – an especially difficult task in startup environments. Entrepreneurs often pour their passions and identities into the companies they create – the way they work becomes who they are. For our client, this shift was indeed personal. Leaders were expected to surrender control and open their practices to collaboration with their parent company. Simultaneously, they were expected to embrace and advocate for the new paradigm that represented the end of their independence.
To help our client become an integral part of the parent company's global enterprise by 2026, Expressworks helped develop a step-by-step roadmap and an organizational strategy to recalibrate the prevailing culture and introduce a more intentional focus on discipline and process rigor as a means of driving needed profitability. The design required our client to think and plan in longer than the 12-month horizons they were used to. More significantly, our client was required to formalize their structure, operations, governance, and oversight in ways that the organization had not previously needed.
Over the course of a year, working with seven teams made up of 70 people leaders, Expressworks developed a solution comprised of four components to create an operating environment capable of building the business and supporting the desired performance goals. The cross-functional effort featured parallel, yet intertwined activities designed to enable the client to fly the plane while they were building it.
With strong leadership involvement, we created a four-year strategy focused on leader capability to shift to profitability and scale organizational structure.
This roadmap helped executives and team members envision the four-year journey and set specific milestones by year, component, and team. The roadmap also created a means by which to measure progress and reward incremental success.
The creation of a PMO provided oversight of established standards, implementation practices, and a playbook for measurement and governance. This function also included guidance and coaching to help leaders develop disciplines they needed to execute the roadmap and enable systemic adoption.
To help mitigate the enormous toll a major paradigm shift takes on people, structured and reinforcing activities were developed to support:
BUSINESS OUTCOMES Expressworks’ holistic strategy and organizational design helped orient leaders to their new reality and gave them the confidence that they could successfully steward their 700 employees through this massive transformation. New operating standards and processes coupled with a comprehensive implementation structure gave leaders the tools to align the organization, drive adoption, and measure/reward behavior as they shifted to support the new operating environment and their performance goals.
