Industry:  Software Development

• A software development company.
• Their target customers are non-profit and government organizations.
• Their software helps clients manage the details of donations.
• Additional products offered include accounting, bookkeeping and payroll software.

• This company had experienced phenomenal revenue growth consistently for 5 years, then growth went flat for 3 years and they could not explain why this was happening.
• They decided that understanding and resolving the problem was not purely a management function and selected Team Business to provide a company-wide business foundation as a means to achieving their goals.

• To develop a collective understanding of what was happening in the business and why - and what they could do about it.

This program was facilitated by Team Business.

• Running Team Business resulted in business-focused behavioral change. The organization shifted its energy and resources from product development towards selling.
• The management team shifted their focus from technology to the business of clients and their needs.
• They learned that they were devoting too much time to product development and not enough time to sales. By using ‘manufacturing a product’ as a metaphor to represent their software business, their skewed focus became more tangible and obvious to all the members of the team. In other words, in manufacturing, the product ends up in inventory and as such, is obvious – in software development, however this is intangible.
• Using the box as a metaphor, the company came to the following realization: That many of their current clients used only one of their products and were perfect prospects for other software products in their portfolio and no one had thought to sell these to them.
• These business-enhancing insights would normally only be achieved through an extensive consulting process. By using the latent insights in the company staff themselves, facilitated through the Team Business process, higher order results were achieved in a short time frame and, most critically, all staff, having been involved the development of the insights and subsequent strategy, were totally committed to them.
• The resulting profitability improvements will be monitored over the next year.