Why Building a Strong Team is Essential for Post-Merger Success: Our Experience
Jon, in some of your strategic planning, now that the merger has fully taken place, as Joe mentioned earlier in the conversation, it’s always a challenge to expand your team, grow your team, and it’s, yeah, there’s a financial burden there. Was there a roadmap for you that was provided? By your buyer that said, look, once we do this acquisition, we’re gonna give you the ability to hire on three, five people.
So we’re not only gonna allow you to add more clients in the DC area, but we’re gonna allow you to better manage your existing client base. I wanna say, yeah, but the answer was no. All right. So if that’s the answer, then yeah. How does that feel where you’re not driving the car anymore, right? Somebody else is driving the car and you’re in the front seat though, because you’re right vice president and they tell you, we’re gonna go down this road, and if you were driving, you would’ve gone down the other road.
Metaphorically speaking, how does that make me feel? That happens all the time. It makes me feel great. That must be a tough thing to negotiate. Yeah, I think that there’s the deviation of the direction. I wouldn’t have made that choice. There’s that. Then there’s also just working in an environment that’s conducive the any work environment with a large number of staff is going to be conducive to some sort of office politics.
So add a little bit of that into the mix as well. And then add a lot of. Uncertainty in terms of who’s supposed to be doing what, tricky, that sort of, yeah, it’s very tricky to navigate and so we’re all trying to figure out that we’re all contributing to and advising on the best course of action. There’s a certain amount of trust that you just have to make in the organization at large where it’s okay, you’ve made it this far, you’ve been successful.
You’ve made mistakes and I’ve seen you make mistakes even while I’ve been here and I’ve seen failures, but it’s how do we recover from that as a team? Are we learning and growing? Are we in general moving in the right direction? We’re not moving backwards. I think all of those things combined still leave me with a fairly positive outlook, even if it’s not exactly how I would’ve done it.
I think learning. To work as a team means learning to let go of your own perfection around how you would have done things.
Very good. That’s very hopeful even in the struggles that it’s in service of that learning you’re paying a learning cost, so to speak. And I think a lot of times we don’t really factor in the learning cost, the true cost of learning the lessons and growing and improving, and especially in.
In that collaborative way when you’re merging three fully operational companies and trying to mesh the various ways that this is done and agreements with the clients and expectations clients have and things like that. And shifting the role, your role as the owner, calling all the shots to a member of the team.
Where those calls are made in different ways. So it’s really interesting as a case study. I’m sure a lot of our listeners will really get the benefit of hearing you describe this process, and you’ve been so candid in what you’ve been able to share.