CRITICAL MOMENT CATALYST
TECHMD’ s office with monitors displaying real time KPI updates.
Critical Moment Catalyst
CORE ALIGNMENT TOOL
“ WE ARE going to hit our stretch goals for the first quarter,” Sebastian Igreti, CEO of TECHMD said with understated satisfaction.“ And we are now growing by at least 20 percent per year.” It wasn’ t always this way. At the end of 2016, Sebastian and his business partner Mark Perez were feeling the pressure. Their sales pipeline KPIs( Key Performance Indicators) made it clear that the first quarter of 2017 would not be good. They had just completed their first acquisition and were completing a new office buildout to accommodate their growth, and now the credit line was 80 percent drawn. The company needed to deliver free cashflow as it always produced over its first 12 years. During that time, the partners’ decisions to focus on flat fee IT services to a defined customer segment helped them build a thriving company. Q1 of 2017 would be the first time the company would not produce operating cashflow.
They pondered how to turn around the situation. They were both members of two executive peer groups. They used
4DX to guide their long-term planning and met weekly to review operations. They relentlessly measured performance using close to forty KPIs and had monitors displaying real time updates throughout the company.
Sebastian described the all-handson-deck moment in January of 2017. With an anemic sales pipeline and cashflow negative, it was a critical moment. Based on their experience as middle managers during the 2000 tech bubble implosion working for companies that reacted slowly, they immediately addressed their cost structure and their largest cost: payroll.
They reviewed the performance of all team members and whether their behaviors aligned with the company’ s core values. Seven years earlier the partners defined TECHMD’ s three core values but they realized there were now team members whose behaviors did not align with those core values. The partners made the difficult decision to immediately part ways with them and the performance of the team improved
TECHMD CORE VALUES: 1. INVESTING IN OTHERS 2. DOING IT RIGHT AND DOING IT BETTER 3. STAYING POSITIVE AND HAVING FUN
immediately.
Up until this point Sebastian, had focused on operations and Mark on business development. Now the entire leadership team would pitch in to get the sales pipeline filled.
At an executive peer group meeting, they were introduced to the Core Alignment Tool called EOS( Entrepreneurial Operating System). Sebastian liked how“ EOS combined the 4DX big picture discussions together with the weekly operations meeting that we were running in parallel before EOS. It created a weekly cadence of accountability that forced us to confront reality and make decisions that pushed TECHMD in the right direction. We
14