Pushing his plan

Q: Why were TechTeam's commercial customersimportant to you? None of the government contractors? not even TechTeam ? is takingadvantage of the best practices from the commercialside of the business.I saw a chance to take the commercial bestpractices and integrate them with commonbusiness sense, with government sense.I saw a place where I could make adifference and we could provide a service tothe government that I don't see anyone elseproviding. What lessons do you bring from yourtime at SRA? No. 1 is do right by the customer.When you win a task order, ask yourself,what is the underlying reason for puttingout this piece of work? What is the underlyingproblem? If you craft a solution to that, thenyou can convince the customer that you canhelp them with the broader problem.No. 2 is take care of your people.Employees need to feel fulfilled in their work,they need to feel good about what they aredoing, about their customers, and who theyare working with.No. 3 is do not be driven by the numbers.They are a score card. Put theemphasis on forward-lookingmeasures and indicators, suchas the backlog, number of newcustomers and number oflarge jobs. Describe the strategicplan you presented toTechTeam's board. The strategy isto become a real systems integrator; that is, acompany focused on providing a solution tothe underlying problem as opposed to providinga point solution to a piece of the problem.You have a little bit of a dichotomy betweenthe specialist role, where the value propositionis hire me because I'm the best at thisspecialty, and the systems integration role,which says hire me because I'm the best valuefor a total solution.The key is knowing and understanding therole that both play and balancing the two.We need to build the right functional andtechnical expertise that will let us put togetherthe teams that solve the underlying problemfor our customer. How do you make that transition? You need people who can focuson the customers' underlying problem. Thosetypically aren't the project people becausethey are nose down working on deliverables.You need someone not on the project butconnected enough to the project to understandwhat is going on. I call those peopleaccount managers. We are designatingaccount managers with each customer.Where we have to excel is understandingthe customers' mission and becoming thattrusted partner. That is the role and future ofmid-tier companies.