Posts Tagged: Hedgehog

Herd Philosophy — No Comments
3
Oct 11

Inside IBEX Herdquarters – How to grow your herd part 3

In a previous post, how to grow your herd part 2, I talked about defining our Hedgehog Concept.   In our case that turned out to be:

  1. Providing payroll, employee scheduling and employee time tracking to developmental service agencies across Canada.
  2. Providing PREMIUM payroll services to small to medium Canadian organizations.

The idea of a hedgehog concept was popularized by Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great.   It needs to be what you honestly believe you can be the best in the world at.  We believe we can be the best in the world at these two complementary things.

When we started our good to great journey, we thought that it would only be #1 above, we could only be the best in the world at serving Canada’s developmental service agencies, but we also knew we were not going to be able to do that without confronting some brutal realities.

The reality of the situation at the time was that we had figured out what really mattered to developmental service (DS) agencies and built that onto our existing systems, much to the delight of our first group of DS customers.  The problem was that the system we built it onto was not up to the challenge of serving the entire Canadian world of developmental services.  These organizations range from 50 to 1000’s of employees and the first group of customers of that size was taxing our systems and some key IBEX herd members as well.  It would not be sustainable to grow heavily on that base; it would be a big heavy house on a weak foundation.

We made the stunning realization that the problem was our basic payroll system.  Our pride and joy, built from the ground up over 10 years, was not up to the task at hand and would need to be scrapped.  Cost estimates for building a fully web-based, highly scalable, highly secure, web payroll system ran into the millions.  Even if we had those millions, what a risk!  We would need to increase our contingent of herd geeks from 3 to 10 or more and we better choose the right team or we would not get what we wanted for those millions and we would be bankrupt.

The solution was to find a partner.    In a previous post How “IBEX” built Canada’s most advanced online payroll system I explained the partnership between Protegra and IBEX that led to the creation of our new payroll platform.  It also led to the formation of Blue Canvas, a company to formalize and explain our partnership to the world.

Through the analysis of what the new system had to do, we realized that the payroll needs of Canada’s developmental service agencies was about as complex as can be and what we really needed to build was the best online payroll system in Canada, very flexible and highly adaptable.  We love the payroll business and we love serving our client base of over 500 organizations of all types and industries and now we had the chance to give them not just the legendary IBEX customer service, but the best system in the country.

In the time since, much has come to pass.  The reality is that we now have one awesome system, capable of delivering a very deep and detailed solution to developmental service agencies and also a great online payroll experience for any kind of small to medium organization.  We honestly have the most advanced and best system in Canada in both areas and the work to keep it that way is not mutually exclusive.  Working on one always improves the other.

We will be the best in the world if we stick to our hedgehog – no distractions please world!

In part 4 of this series I will talk about getting the herd word out.

Herd Philosophy — No Comments
14
Sep 11

Inside IBEX Herdquarters – How to grow your herd part 2

In a previous post, why I wore only my underwear to work, I talked about why we want to grow IBEX.  In part 2 of this series on our growth journey, I am moving on to our first growth step, defining our Hedgehog Concept.

One of the most influential business books for IBEX has been Good to Great by Jim Collins.  In his book, Collins talks about how great companies have a Hedgehog Concept.  Collins talks about the shifty fox, always scheming new ways to attack the seemingly hapless hedgehog, versus the hedgehog, which does not lose sleep over the fox and simply rolls into a spiky ball each time the fox attacks, waiting out the fox’s latest brilliant scheme.

IBEX in the past, like many companies, acted more like the fox.  We realized that what we had always done (shifting focus too often and being reactive instead of proactive) was not the best way to grow, motivate ourselves, or be a great company.   The best companies have a simple Hedgehog Concept and they stick to it.

How to get to your Hedgehog Concept is much more difficult than just understanding the concept.

We were given a gift a few years ago by one of our customers.  The gift was taking the time to explain to us the full spectrum of their payroll and staff management challenges.  We were shocked at what they had to go through.  The day to day job of managing their staff and getting the payroll figured out was much harder then we imagined.  Processing their bi-weekly payroll (our job) was easy compared to what they had to go through to get us the payroll information.  Doing the easy part was not our idea of being a great supplier or a great company, so we rolled up our sleeves and dug in.  Along the way we realized that there were many organizations just like this one and our first industry specific solution was born www.ibexinclusion.ca.

It consumed all the spare energy we had in order to make this solution work, but the joy we produced for our customer was immense.  It felt good, really good, to be appreciated.  IBEX’s financial return was good on this and what was really cool was that we were saving our customers while doing well ourselves.  A win-win situation.

We were sold on narrowing our focus and doing a much better job at much less things.  We now knew what to say no to.  And, as we learned from Jim Collins, the hallmark of a strong Hedgehog concept is knowing what to say no to.

Today we focus on two things that go hand in hand.  We provide premium payroll services with the newest and best payroll platform in Canada (more on how we made that happen in my next post) and we provide the Inclusion system to developmental service agencies across Canada.  We’ve whittled down our What We Do List to these two key things,  our list of Things We Don’t Do Anymore is much longer – and that is a good thing.