3 Ways To Align On The Prize After Merger

Jeff Hilimire and his marketing agency, Dragon Army, knows something about change. The firm had already earned the distinction of the fastest growing agency in Atlanta for the years 2016-2018, when Jeff and his management team considered acquiring two new agencies, at the same time. Watchword, a branding firm founded by Rachelle Kuramoto, and Atlanta web design agency Sideways8, led by Adam Walker, were established and well-respected when they joined forces with Dragon Army earlier this year. The three of them talk about how they maintained cultural alignment and customer-centricity amidst change.

Weave a Culture that Works

The first and last thing to consider in a merger or acquisition is company culture and this one benefited from familiarity and respect. “The three of us had gotten to know one another over a number of years collaborating on client and philanthropic efforts,” said Kuramoto. “Our values and respect for one another have formed the connective tissue during this process.” This was illustrated in their integration process and in the results to date. “We started by making sure the leaders at the top of each organization fit the company culture,” recalled Walker. Once that was established, then leadership teams and all of the employee base was considered. “In the end, it was an amazing fit all around and the merging of the companies has been very smooth,” he said. But smooth integration after a merger comes with a lot of work.

Finding the initial common ground required a look at the company values and leadership styles. Hilimire speaks often about PVTV, which stands for Purpose, Vision, Tenets, and Values, a series of guiding principles and guardrails that he outlines in his recent business fable book “The 5-Day Turnaround.” Hilimire describes two of Dragon Army’s values as “team first” and “think positively.” These combine to create a powerful recipe for positive change management when team members are “able to accept the changes, see the path forward, and encourage other teammates to see the way through in a productive way.” Regularly pointing employees back to the PVTV “continues to guide us and shepherd us through the transition,” Hilimire notes. They serve to “remind people how to behave and work together.”

Kuramoto said that they “spent a lot of time ahead of the acquisition giving people a chance to know each other” in order to begin the endeavor with strong relationships, even with people who were remote. Making choices about what to do next was made clearer with leadership alignment. Kuramoto said they “put a lot of rigor into when, how, and why we meet at leadership, and much of that time has been focused on prioritizing, setting objectives, and staying on track.”

Take Away:

Spend time on the purpose and values of the company. When adopted at all levels and across all locations they will help to do the work of alignment.

Practice Change

Walker noted that the leadership style and structure across all three companies had not been overly hierarchical which helped prepare the organizations for change. “We embrace a node leadership structure with coaches leading teams of people.” The teams are dynamic allowing them to “flex and bend, but also scale, as needed.” Kuramoto noted that paying attention to each other during the merger and now in operating mode requires some regular practices. “As an expanded team, we do many things to attune to one another as people, from a weekly huddle during which we discuss every important detail and allow for questions to highly agile processes. From Slack channels like #nodumbquestions to regular team round tables dedicating to articulating what’s making people happy, challenged, and available to one another.” Walker credited the regular team check-ins as being critical. “Also, creating documents outlining any struggles and our plans to fix has helped a lot,” he added. “Just having issues written out where people can really see and understand them builds a lot of momentum towards fixing them.” Kuramoto noted that having things documented also helps not having to answer questions multiple times and helped integrate their remote workforce with their physical one. “We’ve had lots of conversations and learned what to put in writing to make everyone feel secure and empowered.”

Take Away:

Have communication mechanisms in place that will scale. Write things down. Create documents for problem solving and communication, as a form of inclusion to remote employees.

Create New Opportunities | Minimize New Distractions

The strategy behind the merger was to provide a greater capability to serve a larger customer base. “We brought together agencies that worked with small to mid-sized companies and agencies that worked with larger companies,” Walker observed. “This enabled us to work on projects small and large while also dramatically expanding our service offering.”

However, in times of change, the focus can shift internally and away from maintaining momentum on new business. To minimize this distraction, the team implemented road shows to clients, “introducing them to the new team members and talking with them about the changes, specifically focus on how the changes would positive affect them,” Hilimire said. Kuramoto added that “once the deal is done, the number of details involved in the M&A transaction is monumental. As a leader in the organization, you’re accustomed to putting the lion’s share of attention to client service excellence, team members, and growth.” So things like integrating timekeeping software platforms, making sure roles across the company are similarly defined, or aligning internal communications, although critical, can consume the leadership capacity. “Operational to-do lists can’t distract from those customer priorities,” Kuramoto noted, “so it made for a few weeks of long days.”

Reflecting on lessons learned, Hilimire noted that he would have focused more on ensuring growth without disruption. “Growth is important for many reasons, and can be the lifeblood of an agency,” he explained. Kuramoto added that Dragon Army is committed to grow through relationships and that the “whole leadership team, led by Adam in his specific growth role, helps to nurture new and organic growth through relationship-based activities like board work, networking, speaking, and supporting endeavors and causes that are important to our partners.” This helps ensure growth is on the top of the agenda.

Take Away:

Never take your eye off the company’s growth engine. Know your levers for growth and keep management attention there.

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This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

On Development

“If you spend all your time catching the little fish, you won’t have time – or develop the technique, for the patience – to ever catch big ones.” – Stephen J. Dubner

On Learning

“Continuous peer learning is the best strategy for long-term improvement.”- Chris Dede, Harvard

Speak in Numbers. Build the Story.

Often passionate leaders and visionaries resist expressing their vision in quantitative benefits.  Although the story narrative around customer benefits is very important and can lead to the kind of sticky, emotional connection that everyone strives for, if you can also quantify the benefit in terms of dollars saved or earned, time saved, injuries or deaths prevented, or other outcome improvements, the message is much stronger and more credible.  I recently heard Norman Winarsky, author of If You Want to Change the World, express it well when he said “the more you can quantify the benefits, the more customers will understand.”  Numbers don’t stand on their own, typically, but they are a strong pillar on which to build the story.
 

Remain

Remain an artist - Picasso
Remain a beginner - Jobs
Remain calm and carry on - Churchill

The Long Play

I learned recently that the research firm SRI employed researchers that developed the hyperlink and many of the conventions that we use today on websites and other digital interfaces.  And the same team pioneered some machine intelligence, AI, and voice recognition developments that were behind Apple’s Siri application.  It struck me as ironic that over the decades, this group sought to undo its own work.  You don’t have to click on anything, if you can just speak to your devices.

Planar, now a Leyard company, has a history of this kind of cannibalization.  We make our own products obsolete regularly.  The Planar® LookThru™ OLED transparent display addressed many limitations of previous offerings and has essentially replaced the Planar® LookThru™ LCD offering.  We have single displays that are larger than 2x2 array of tiled video wall products, making this style of display easier to specify and install than previous generations.  We add features into products that used to require separate purchases or third-party equipment.  You have to look no further than the latest version of the Planar® UltraRes™ display to see how much image processing, scaling, and control we have built into the product, especially once you consider the free iOS or Android UltraRes App.  As the bezels have been shrinking on LCD tiled video wall displays, like the award-winning Clarity® Matrix™, we have also introduced cutting-edge, fine-pitch LED technology that is truly seamless (see Planar® DirectLight™ or the Leyard® TVH or TW series).

Innovation companies that last are ones that aren’t afraid to kill their best product lines with a new idea.  To stay relevant, I heard someone say recently, you need to be prepared to run a different company every few years.  In the fast-moving space of display technologies, flexibility is a requirement.  Planar has been innovating for over 30 years and Leyard for over 20.  It’s a testament to our shared commitment to the long play.

Zero Sum Game

Each year, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has a fixed number of games among a fixed number of teams.  This means each season is a zero sum game.  There will be equal number of wins and losses.  Those wins and losses might fall on different teams each season, but still they are equal to the number of scheduled games.  

Like other things that are fixed in this scenario, we have to optimize within those constraints or work around them.  

This creative thinking lead to the development of fantasy leagues.  When you pick players from multiple franchises and pit them statistically, you aren’t as limited to the same number of games or teams.  In fact, a fan can have multiple teams, each created with different players and played with different strategies.  

Why CMOs Should Drive Product Strategy

When my company reorganized several years ago, we went from a business unit structure to a functional organization, and I was considered for a position that would run marketing as a member of the executive team.

As part of those discussions, I negotiated to have the role include both traditional marketing functions, such as advertising, PR, events, and sales tool development, but also product strategy in the form of product management and road map planning. Why? I had three reasons:  

1. MarCom Is A Pink Ghetto
As a female executive, I was sensitive--sensitive to my observations and the reputation that marketing (and human resources, by the way) had of being places where women got stuck in their careers. Careers focused in these areas resulted in professionals who were often pigeon-holed and excluded from real participation in the business strategy.

I am not sure who coined the phrase, but I had heard it applies here: the pink ghetto. It's a place where women are seen as a support function for other more “important” roles, such as sales, finance, or R&D--roles typically held by men, at least in the technology industry. I didn’t want to get stuck and had worked throughout my career to gain broad experience that made me a better business person, not just a better marketer.

In my role, which combines both go-to-market and market requirements, I have broad impact on the company, and my team is able to impact the direction of the business overall.

2. Marketing Is The Center Of The Hub
Being responsible for products, I am at the center of creative ideas and cleverness. I get to work closely with R&D to determine what can be done and the relevant and high-value applications of technology. I get to work closely with the sales team to determine how to aim them and equip them to capture the market potential of new offerings. My team and I get to be in the center of the hub and are tasked with combining what can be done with what should be done to create new possibilities for the company.

3. Customer Empathy Runs Deep
True innovations are grounded in customer empathy. Understanding the customer problems is the foundation of “solutions,” which companies are so anxious to talk about but execute so poorly. And that customer understanding not only affects the products we bring to market, but how we market them.

This may involve creating sales tools that require a deep understanding of the product in order to simplify the customer experience and accelerate the buying process. Without responsibility for both the product road map and marketing communications, this connection would be more difficult to make and would cause “marketing” to be less strategic and more reactive, instead of leading the charge of innovation in the marketplace.

This article was posted on CMO.com.

Backing into the Future: 4 Ways to Make Change Work

Last week, we celebrated “Back to the Future Day.”  The day to which Marty McFly and Doc Brown set the time machine at the end of the movie Back to the Future:  October 21st, 2015.  The day came and went without mass market hover boards or funny futuristic clothing, but it brought to mind to me the strained relationship we have with the future and the change it implies.  And how often, like Marty, we are swept into the future without a strategy for making change happen, and instead let it happen to us.  In short, we back into the future, instead of diving in with purpose and resolve.  This kind of drama is great for the movies, but is difficult for our organizations and teams.

Below are four ways that you make change work in your organizations to take maximum advantage of changing conditions, business circumstances, or technological advancements.

1.       Give Up Nostalgia

The “good ol’ days” of how things used to be, weren’t always so good, so make sure your memories don’t take on mythic proportions.  In the movie, Marty was told his Dad was a pedestrian hit by a car and that caused Marty’s Mom to notice him, when the truth was something slightly different than that (I won’t spoil it for you, in case you need to watch the show again).  Unlike in the movie, you can’t go back to the way things used to be, and even if you did, the past may not be entirely as you remember or how it has been depicted by others.  The past is warmly familiar, but let’s not forget that it had problems.  Problems that prompted solutions we now rely on and take for granted.  You have to be willing to agree that change is inevitable, and possibly good, to be able to move forward.

2.       Listen to Yourself

As you face periods of uncertainty and change, don’t neglect or downplay your emotional reactions.  Although irrational and impulsive, they will often identify some underlying risk or unrealized opportunity.  Your gut is trying to tell you something.  When that happens, get curious.  In your curiosity, note what you are feeling and why.  Bréne Brown in her book Rising Strong, talks about writing out a SFD (“shitty first draft” - her words, not mine) to describe how you feel and why.  Reading that private description back, you can see more clearly the flawed logic and alarmism and focus on the facts you need to pay more attention to next.

3.       Listen to Others

Everyone has a different tolerance to change.  As vocal and unapologetic optimist, even I can tell you that there isn’t one approach that is best.  Because risk mitigation begins with risk identification, the most positive and fluid in your organization might not be the best at helping you face the future prepared.  Inspired, perhaps, but not fully prepared.  So, get the most conservative members of your team to envision the future.  Facing forward in this way, listen to their concerns.  Listen not to change their mind, but to pick their brains.  You’ll be better for it.

4.       Take Heart: It’s the People that Matter

We often talk about technology changing or evolving. At the most basic level, however that isn’t true.  One technology generation actually replaces or supplants another making the previous obsolete; this is especially true in the disruptive developments that shape industries and create tipping points.  From covered wagons to Uber.  From encyclopedias in the reference section of the library to the Internet.  The same is true of disruptive business models, market conditions that set new standards of performance, or even changing customer sentiment.  The generations of technology may play leap frog, but the people are the ones that make the mental jump.  Only people change with the circumstances and evolve.  And there we find our comfort and our challenge.  Because people, like us, have been proven to be highly irrational, cruel, and fear-driven.  And we have shown ourselves to be generous, adaptable, and capable of radical change.  How we show up in the midst of change at work depends a lot on the leadership and how we are given opportunity to listen to ourselves and others, permission to loosen our grip on the past and our stories around it, and how we take care of each other in the process of change, knowing that our relationships are the things that endure.

The future might not look like the scenes from the movies, but as we move through different time periods, circumstances, and use different technologies, the characters are the same. Biff Tannen, George McFly, and all the other characters in Back to the Future showed how circumstances can bring out the best (and worst) in our personalities.  Whether it was 1955, 1985, or 2015, the choices that we make are strikingly similar because we ourselves bring ourselves along for the ride.  So, when the credits roll, make sure you are the character that chooses to face the future facing forward.

This article was published on LinkedIn Pulse.