Jul 25th, 2024
Best Practices
It Takes Courage
Written by: Jesse LaDousa, Chief Executive Officer
Before I began working at Clientek, I was a customer for many years. I got to know the leadership team, the consultants, and the culture of the company over a series of years and projects. Clientek’s owner, Kirk, became a confidant to me and I began to leverage his experience and advice to help me further my career.
Eventually, the company I was working for was sold and much of the local staff disbanded or moved to other locations. After waiting out a short non-compete, I reconnected with Kirk and asked for some assistance in networking for new opportunities. He bluntly replied, “Nope, you need to come work here.”.
At the time, Clientek was almost purely a staff augmentation firm. While that provided a great service, drove nice revenue, and employed very talented individuals, running a company specialized in that model wasn’t of much interest to me. I politely declined but Kirk was persistent. He presented the idea of transforming Clientek and creating a model in which we could field teams of people, become true partners with our customers and experience the value we could deliver on every project.
That type of transformation was very intriguing. I quickly said “Yes, I’m in.”.
As we began to plan this transformation it quickly became apparent that this was going to be challenging and a bit painful along the way. We had to think through every aspect of how we staffed, how we marketed, how we sold, how we delivered, how we measured outcomes and how we prepared our leadership team to run this new model.
It took about two years to completely switch to the new model and we’ve continued to evolve and strengthen it to this day. While I look back fondly on those two years, having accomplished something I am very proud of, it was a bit terrifying while we were in the midst of it.
That’s the thing with transformation though, it can’t be done without a little bit of uncertainty, some risk and some fear. You must push past these things and trust that you are going to come out the other side in a better spot. Otherwise, why even attempt it?