Creating YOUR leadership culture through technology!

And how Acumatica is the key…

In today’s modern Company, culture is considered to be the most important factor determining success or failure. If we scratch the surface of the new business model, we will see many forms of employee activities designed to strengthen the culture of the organization. Things like foose-ball tables, ping pong, free lunches and unlimited PTO are used to help the employee feel valued, and to strengthen the sense of family. A culture of “belonging” is fast becoming the catch cry of the new employee.

But is that enough?

How do you transition a “culture of belonging” into a “culture of leadership”? Is it possible to create a culture where all employees have access to the best information possible to make the decisions that leaders make? Can the burden of good decision making be pushed downward, freeing your more seasoned executives to work on strategy?

One thing I have learned, throughout my career thus far, is that everything is possible, with the right leadership, the right talent supporting that leadership, and the right technology in place to support the initiatives of the team.

And a culture of leadership is definitely possible!

Here’s my success story….

Texas Research International, Inc. (TRI), is an Austin based company, comprised of 13 entities.  TRI focuses on R&D for the U.S. Government, Materials Conformance Testing, focused heavily on geo-synthetic material, compressor air testing, and manufacturing and distribution of proprietary products. 

It is a $30 Million dollar company, with many businesses that have different customer requirements, different business models, and different drivers.  What does this mean for TRI?   Finding the right talent to support our unique requirements and technology that will meet the needs of all our businesses, is to the say the least: challenging.

But we were asking the wrong questions!

Instead of asking how we can use technology to improve our “business” we should have been asking “how can we leverage technology to empower our people”.

Today, at TRI we have a Leader that has a vision that is shared with the employees.  The Employees are empowered and engaged in constantly improving our processes and procedures. They have adopted a “culture of leadership” and are now fully engaged in the performance of the group. The turning point was when we chose to leave our legacy DOS Based ERP System and move to a real-time Cloud based ERP system “Acumatica. We are now on a path of consistent revenue growth and, more importantly, earnings growth in excess of revenue growth year after year.

We have been using Acumatica now for 2-1/2 years.  We have invested in training our staff, enhancing the usage of the functionality available with this Platform to fit our business, and our employees are excited and engaged with continuously automating more and more of the processes within their business.  When we found this technology and discovered that the Platform could fit our business rather than us having to fit our business into the Platform we became a team of visionaries…a team of leaders who no longer asked “why?” but rather “how can we make this process better?”  It’s been exciting to see the transformation in our talent, with our customers, and with our financial results.

The role of leadership is sometimes seen as simply to define and drive the vision, empower the talent, and ensure the employees have the tools they need to excel! 

But that does not leverage the huge power of your team.

When I took the CFO role at TRI, the first thing I did was to collaborate with the leadership team.  We developed our vision.  We defined our goals and objectives to support our vision.  We shared that vision regularly with our employees and helped them define goals and objectives in their individual roles that aligned with the corporate goals. We accessed our talent and identified where we had holes in our skill set needed to execute our vision and we went out and found that talent. We identified where we had strength in our talent pool and empowered those people to make changes to processes and procedures and guide those that supported them.

  We utilized our new technology and made adjustments to support the employee’s execution of their tasks and ensure we had the visibility to pertinent information within the company for rapid decision making…decisions could be made by all employees.

A culture of leadership was emerging before our eyes!

In 2018 we formed a new company, TRI Solutions Inc.  I lead TRI Solutions, along with my very capable Business Manager, Becky Hesson, and our Director of Sales, Helen Jones, and our goal is simple….. it is to partner and be an advisor to businesses ready to transform to a culture of leadership.   We provide Talent (contract to hire or permanent hires) and Technology (Acumatica) by partnering with our clients and advising them how to successfully change into a modern business with modern technology.

In today’s market we are faced with many new start-ups exploding faster than they can keep up as well as many seasoned companies finding their second wind.  They all need to empower their employees to a culture of leadership and use real-time up-to-date technology to gain market advantage and to achieve business success.

If you would like to discuss, how TRI Solutions can help your business transform, and create a culture of leadership,  please call us at 512-615-4480 or go to trisolutionsinc.com or erpmadesimple.com