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
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