People - Process -Technology: PPT!

Most business problems are either the fault of, or can be solved by People, Process and Technology.

A group of guys I worked with believe we invented PPT. We were thrown together by the promise and riches of the Internet boom in early 2000's at a company named StatementOne. Unfortunately, we didn't know this was actually the end of a decade of Internet hysteria. In retrospect the boom had busted before we came together. Fortunately for us the money guys didn't know it either and we got funding.

We did everything wrong. An inexperienced group at working together we hired mostly all the wrong people. Then we gave them offices and cubes and said "start a company" and then sat back and watched as they didn't know what to do and we didn't know what to do to help them do the right things. We exacerbated the problem, as time rolled by, in a two-fold miss. Not investing in our product smartly or the technology for the people we hired erroneously to do the jobs no one knew how to do.

We went at it for two years and spent all of the money the founders had raised. We came close to closing a round of funding but the deal was due to be signed on 9/11/01. The events of that sad day cancelled the meeting and we figured we were done. Over the coming weeks we would put a bridge loan in place to keep the lights on. This was great news.

So we focused on People

We read every management book we could to get smart on hiring the right people. We basically earned our MBA's through the writings of John Maxwell, Dale Carnegie and Peter Drucker...just to name a few. We hired a seasoned Human Resources executive and built a process for recruiting top talent called the 3 C's which stood for Commitment, Culture and Capability. This tool would help us ensure we had the right people in the right seats. We had passion and looked for people who did too. This would turn out to be a key ingredient for later success because we were exuding passion and hiring people who were passionate at a time when we were basically going out of business.

Then we built Processes

We had a process for everything including; Marketing (Discovery Database), Sales & Relationship Management (Miller Heiman), Pricing (proprietary), Demonstrating Capability and Value (business case), Operations and Support (Six Sigma, Net Promoter Score) and Recruiting (3 C's). We were basically willing to risk going out of business if we couldn't demonstrate our SaaS models' value to prospects and get paid a premium for it. We supported our value with repeatable and defendable processes to bolster our argument. It started to work in 02/03 and deals started to come in.

And the Technology to support them

We bought marketing databases and automation (Salesforce) and forced our people to use it. We renamed the company @Albridge Solutions, as our name was creating confusion in the marketplace. Albridge actually means nothing. Apparently, Albridge is the name of a town somewhere in Europe, and we did think the new name vaguely described "bridging data" which was something our service did, but in the end it meant nothing. We built more technology to clean and scrub the data and our technological wiz built something that would change the company forever. Called Proprietary Name Parsing technology, this would ensure we got our clients' clients names and addresses correct. We put "request a demo" on every page of our website and it worked.

As the millennium's first decade moved on we started to grow rapidly. As we approached 07 the VC's backing us decided it was time to cash out, so we went through a process and sold the company to PNC Bank. The story of our birth, near death and rise will never be forgotten by any of us but when you sit down and think about it was the People, Process and Technology discipline, combined with a healthy fear of going out of business, that made it all go.

We all still use PPT in our careers and rarely does a day go by when I am not talking about one of these key elements. Feel free to use it, it works.

My best, Chris