Nowhere to hide: A real-time business

Nowhere to hide: A real-time business

I’ve built my career working inside and leading some pretty amazing businesses, and the teams that power them. Each of the stops along my career path had one set of common denominators; we designed, developed and sold “stuff”; mobile devices, enterprise software, AI driven mobile advertising platforms, encryption stacks etc. In each of these businesses it was never consciously apparent to me how the perception of time shaped every aspect of how we built and governed the business. Yes, we were data driven, but the event horizon on which we gathered information, correlated it and then made decisions moved at rates measured in weeks, months and quarters. We filled the space and time distilled from long sales & R&D cycles with bloated process, expense, methodology and organizational structures designed to meet the pace of the business, not accelerate it. We sat in meetings, reported to our investors, attended industry events, stood on stages espousing thought leadership, took time for media interviews and generally congratulated ourselves for our self-promotional execution - and we were successful…

GoFor is an entirely different paradigm…. there is nowhere to hide in a real-time service marketplace and SaaS business. Our logistics marketplace is open 6 and soon 7 days a week, 363 days a year. Our merchant and logistics partners rely not only on 99.99% platform uptime but more importantly on our ability to meet our brand promise in every transaction. The meta data flowing through our platform isn’t just providing novel insights it’s become mission critical to how our enterprise merchant partners run, forecast and govern last-mile logistics, how our general contractor partners ensure JIT to site isn’t just a concept, it’s relied on.

When you eliminate the dilation of time in your business it completely changes the relationship you have with all of your stakeholders. It's hard work for sure, but when you structure your business, instrument it and run it in real-time you remove any excuses for not addressing delta's to your expectations (anyones). When I was learning to fly and earning my commercial pilots license earlier in life, IFR certification was a huge wall to climb. IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) trains pilots to operate high performance aircraft without visual reference outside the cockpit, you are 100% reliant on information provided by a myriad of flight instruments to operate the aircraft. You must rely entirely on your ability to interpret data and correlate trends cross referenced from disparate sources of real-time information to fly the aircraft. Leading, scaling and operating a real-time business is really no different.

Certainly, building and running GoFor consumes the leadership team, we run at 100% and love it because it is responsive to our control inputs. Our business lives on an event horizon measured in minutes, hours and weeks and it’s not going to change as we scale. Our R&D feature velocity is astounding, we live in Slack, share 360 visibility & transparency to each and every stakeholder, functional accountability is known, owned and trusted. When a decision needs to be made the data and evidence drives it and we don’t navel gaze, we don’t call a meeting, second guess a colleague or form a working-group.  We react to new merchant opportunities in minutes, not in funnel stages. We live in Power BI and our own platforms BI dashboards. The efficiencies we learn in operational art are coded into software every sprint and the binary world of data driven performance metrics leaves no dark corners to hide in. You gain confidence in the data and learn to trust it and act on it so naturally that it becomes second nature and your stakeholders see it. 

I would challenge anyone who’s still living in a business where you’re not instrumenting for hourly, daily, weekly performance management to examine those places where you can start. Perhaps it's at the front of the business, gaining faster and better insight into customer satisfaction or in building a basic management dashboard that tells everyone in the business how many leads you closed to win last week, but start somewhere and begin the journey, you won't regret it.

Richard Lalonde

Executive Leader in Business Development, & Strategic Partnerships | Driving Revenue Growth and Operational Efficiency

5y

Tyler, great article and couldn't agree more.  It's time businesses stop saying they are agile and actually become agile.  How many meetings do we need to sit in to say we are going to do something.  Make a decision based on sound facts then get out of the way and let your team do the magic you hired them to do.  

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