WorkWave: Focus on the Inputs
By Chris Sullens, former CEO of WorkWave
Outside of being the right thing to do for employees, I have a core belief that curating a culture that aligns and supports a company’s mission and vision is critical to creating long term value. I put that belief to the test when I joined WorkWave (formerly Marathon Data Systems) in 2008 and the results speak for themselves. In my 10 years as CEO, we transformed WorkWave through significant investment and 11 strategic acquisitions. What started as a single product, single market, predominantly on-premise company became a multi-product, multi-market SaaS company that is now the leading provider of cloud-based solutions for the field service and last-mile logistics industries. During his time, we grew the team from 38 to almost 300 people and increased revenue 800% all while maintaining double-digit EBITDA margins, creating an award winning culture and building a world class SaaS leadership team. Unplanned attrition accounted for just under half of our total attrition, averaging 4.8% over the 10-year period. Most importantly, we increased equity value just over 40x during this time.
I joined WorkWave soon after the founder sold a majority share of the business to the private equity arm of a Chicago family office. The founder launched the business almost 25 years prior to my joining and built it into a small but successful provider of back-office software to the pest control industry. The company employed 38 people, had 900 active clients and mid-single digit revenues. The founder hired me to succeed him as CEO, ignite growth, and grow market share – a tall order for a sub-scale software business addressing the needs of a single, narrow vertical that had been run by the same person in the same way for over 20 years.
While we had lofty goals for what we wanted the business to achieve over the next five years, I knew from experience that if I didn’t earn the respect and trust of this tight knit team first, it would be extremely difficult to drive the type of change I felt we needed to achieve those goals. So, rather than make bold assumptions on what we should do and how we should do it in the “new WorkWave,” I spent time with the team and our clients to understand the market, the company’s current processes and approaches that drove success to date, and where the real opportunities for growth might be. Only then did I create the mission and vision for our company and begin driving changes in our systems, processes, products and structure to begin to drive us toward that mission.
There were many changes made and lessons learned over my 10+ years but there were three that I feel were critical to success; creating and over-communicating a clear, compelling mission that ties directly to product strategy, the operating framework we utilized that focused the entire organization on what we termed “the inputs,” and significant investment in the hiring and on-boarding process.
The creation of a clear, compelling mission for a company is critically important but is not unique to us and, thus, is something I won’t spend much time on here. Rather, I’d like to highlight our focus on the inputs and our hiring and on-boarding processes.
While most business leaders, Board members and investors drive to create what I call the “outputs” of business success (revenue growth, profitability, shareholder value creation, etc.), it’s the “inputs” to the business that drive those outputs. The inputs should be the focus of the company and its investors. The inputs fall into 5 categories of focus:
Hire and develop great people,
Develop great products quickly
Create raving fans among your employee and client base
Continuously strengthen processes, systems, and infrastructure
While these seem obvious, in my experience, they often get lost. This happens when Boards and shareholders shift focus and try to manage the outputs, while assuming that management should be left to handle the details of the inputs. This creates a disconnect that results in underinvestment in the long-term initiatives and overinvestment in “strategic” initiatives that make the P&L look better in the short-to-medium-term.
So, at WorkWave, we made a commitment to focus on the inputs, both within the company and at the Board level. Every Board update, Board meeting and internal company update was focused on what investments and initiatives we were making to improve the team, improve the product, improve customer, and employee satisfaction and strengthen the processes, systems and procedures of the company. This forced alignment and accountability from the Board to the individual contributor, ensuring that we were all speaking the same language and focusing our efforts on the things that would drive the outputs we all desired.
Culture starts with what you hire and is reinforced by how you onboard, develop, and handle the day-to-day decisions and interactions with your team. So, while all four of the inputs are critical, culture is created, strengthened and perpetuated by the people you bring into the organization so hiring and on-boarding are critical. There were a number of elements to our approach that we believe were keys to our success, including:
Developing an internal program to certify every interviewer prior to them interviewing prospective team members
Utilizing Caliper assessments with each prospective team member prior to making an offer
Staffing a dedicated on-boarding and talent development role within our talent organization
A signed welcome card with swag at your desk or home to make you feel welcome
A mentor to show you the ropes and answer any questions you may have as you assimilate into the organization
Employing a 4-6 week on-boarding process that includes WorkWave Company training that exposed new employees to every leader in every team within the company, product training, a client visit among other elements.
All of those elements were important to creating a great experience for new employees but the area we really zeroed in on at WorkWave was the interview process. I began interviewing every late stage potential employee in 2009 and continued to do this until leaving the company for CentralReach in 2018. I did this for three reasons: 1) to send a message to the WorkWave team that selecting new team members is an incredibly important task, 2) to send a message to the prospective employee that people matter and this is an important decision for the company and 3) to increase the probability that our efforts in selecting employees will be a success.
I can’t tell you how many times I had a prospective employee of both large and small companies say that this interview was the first time they ever got a chance to speak with a CEO, which really made me feel good and wonder what was going on in these other organizations.
Finally, I want to highlight one aspect to my interview process that I think is unique. I make it a point to never look at a prospective employee’s resume before I speak with them. I do this because it removes any bias I have of the person before speaking with them. I don’t know where they’ve worked prior, what they’ve done, where they’ve gone to school or even if they’ve gone to school. The onus is on them to tell their story in their own way and their own words, which I’ve found to be very enlightening. Now, candidates don’t make it to me until they’ve been fully vetted by the organization, so the risk of wasting time with a truly unqualified person is very low. I’m not saying resume reviews are not helpful as part, but if you can, I would advocate giving this approach a try.
I’ve talked a lot about my experiences with WorkWave because my time with CentralReach is still early. That said, we are employing the same focus on inputs, the same long term approach to investments and introducing many of the lessons learned at WorkWave, all of which give me confidence that we will be able to build an organization with a similarly strong culture and hopefully an even better results over time. I’ll end by saying that no person and no organization is perfect and we certainly weren’t at WorkWave, and we won’t be at CentralReach either. However, methodically investing in the inputs and methodically focusing on execution of those investments will yield the outputs that you and your shareholders are looking for.