New Ownership: A Great Time To Modernize Your Workplace

Mitch (00:04):

Everyone welcome back to make others successful a podcast where we do our best to make you successful in your workplace. So you can cascade that down and in turn, make others successful. My name's Mitch Herrema and today's topic is why new ownership is a great place to look at modernizing your workplace. Joining me is Matt Dressel and Ashley Jolman. So please enjoy the conversation. All right, last time I got to interview Mike about low-code.Now we have Matt in the studio today. We've had kind of a busy day of recording things. We, we did a video already. We did role-play exercise with the team that was fun. Now we're sitting down end of the day, gonna do a podcast. Matt, what are we talking about today?

Matt (00:54):

So I just got through working through an article about what hap, what happens when new ownership takes over an organization and why that might be a good time for you to look at modernizing your workplace.

Mitch (01:05):

What brought up this scenario?

Matt (01:09):

So we've been actually talking a lot about some of the marketing that we do at Bulb Digital and how we sell our services. And one of the things that I noticed is a lot of the organizations that we work with when they come in and engage with us, there's a fair number of them that are either, you know, I would say within a year, year and a half, maybe two years of having either new ownership, new leadership, you know, some sort of organizational change that's, that's pretty extensive or significant.

Mitch (01:40):

Yeah. So we were working on some personas in marketing and we said, Hey, it's pretty common for, if someone is new to owning a business, or maybe there's a change in ownership. It seemed like a good time that we could encourage them to kind of change their ways. And that's, that's great.Real quick. I forgot to say Ashley was here too.

Ashley (02:04):

Yeah. Special guest.

Matt (02:04):

Yeah. So Ashley is joining us today because in her former life, before Bulb, she was part of an organization that did quite a few mergers and acquisitions. And so she has an extensive background in what happens when new ownership takes over a business, how, how that happens in a lot of different ways. And through when I was writing the blog, when we were talking about it, like I value her knowledge and experience with that. So we wanted to bring her on so that she can provide some insights.

Mitch (02:32):

Yeah. She was a good gut check during the, for sure. The blog. Yep.

Ashley (02:36):

All right. Hello everybody.

Mitch (02:37):

Did we describe you well, Ashley?

Ashley (02:38):

Yes, I think so. So my background in project management and it used to be primarily for acquisitions. So yes. I definitely always perk up when I hear about acquisitions.

Mitch (02:51):

Yeah. Okay. So let's dig into this a little bit deeper just to give people a little bit of a background on what we do and kind of the angle that we're, we're talking about here. Do you want to give kind of a lowdown of why the things that we care about fit into when a business is going through a transition to a new owner?

Matt (03:10):

When I think about the organizations that have come to us and asked us about our help within their organization related to modern workplace, it really falls into a couple different areas. So one of them and some of 'em are related. So it's not like this is a hard, like hard lines, but you know, one of 'em is when ownership changes just in general business goals and business objectives change pretty dramatically sometimes. And those changes can have a lot of impacts within the organization, but effectively communicating those changes in the way that the, the organization is changing, becomes really important, right? An organization that has been doing the same thing for 10 years, 15 years doesn't necessarily need a robust communication strategy. You know, maybe they can get away with sending an email to all of their employees with, you know, a couple articles once a month, right? If your organization is just going into rapid change, either in focus in where, what you're trying to do, or in other areas, you really wanna be able to communicate why that's happening, what's happening on a more frequent basis. So that's one area is communication changing and, and all of the communication aspects around that. Right?

Mitch (04:21):

Yeah. And you know, when people hear rumblings of being acquired or something like it causes a lot of questions and, you know, people are wondering what is going to happen. So communicating well during that time is super, super important.

Ashley (04:38):

And in getting ahead of any fake news that starts to starts to circulate amongst employees and cause anxiety and false rumors.

Mitch (04:47):

Yeah. That goes to say, we help a lot of organizations with communication.

Matt (04:51):

Yeah. So we can help make that better, no matter what happens, whether or not you use a modern technology or not, you're going to be trying to deal with that right now, you know, without some modern tools, that's gonna be emails, personal meetings, those types of things, you know, Ashley, I'm sure that you're very familiar with ways that people have tried to do that without any sort of, you know, real systematic approach to dealing with it. Yeah.

Ashley (05:18):

I've seen on day one, the date of closed having an all hands meeting. So the entire organization is put in a room and they can either call in or, and it's literally one brief speech, if you will, for lack of abetter word and then handouts and that's it. And then everyone goes off to come to their own conclusions about what was said and what wasn't said. And we've got our little paper with our new benefits or whatever. And you know, a lot of things can change after just that one in person meeting. Yep.

Matt (05:44):

Well, and if for organization, if that's the only way they either plan or have the ability to communicate, that's a huge problem. Right. And so then share what we do back to what you said, Mitch, right? Like what we do is we can help organizations. We have organizations that come to us and they'll say, Hey, because they don't actually come to us when the merger, when the acquisition is going on, or when, when ownership is changing, what happens oftentimes is they start and they have that one big meeting, but then they start to have problems for people, problems, you know, like I really need to be able to communicate what's going on or what my goal was and how our, how our pro, how we're progressing towards that goal. You know, when we acquired the business, we wanted to, you know, do this and do this and do this. And we're, I wanna be able to communicate that, okay, cool. Let's send out some emails, right. Or let's have another organization meet, but that's so much work and it's behind. And it's, you know, it's really a lot of work for all the staff involved. Now I need to hire more people. These are the complaints that people start having and they come to us and they say, I really need a way to solve this. Right. And we, then we talk about an intranet, right.

Ashley (06:45):

In this case, right. It could be a highly emotional time for those, for everyone involved. So people exit that meeting and come to different conclusions about what was said, and there's no central place for employees to go, how do you go back and review yeah. Review what was said, maybe FAQs, like exactly what the plan was, what important dates are. Yep. Things like that,

Matt (07:02):

Which the solution to that in a lot of cases, when, when they come to us is you need an intranet, you need a common place to manage these, these things in a way that people can refer back to that information. Yeah. So you can go to that or that first meeting say, Hey, here's a place you can go to find the most updated information. Then you can go update the information on a regular basis. You can do things like send out regular communication about, Hey, this is what's going on. I've seen, you know, this is what, what happened. You can post video recordings about, Hey, this is the meeting we had with all hands, but I'm gonna do a weekly or a monthly maybe message from theCEO or, you know, message about the transition. Right. You have a platform to do a lot more communication, but what's interesting is that's the catalyst, the big thing that, that is, I think enlightening to me is that's, that was the catalyst maybe to get a new internet, but the thing that it can do to solve the problem, it solve so many other things like where do we go for HR benefits?

Matt (07:59):

How do we do, like, not related to the, an acquisition or a, or a new ownership? How do I communicate about organizational change? That's going on in, within the business? Yeah. Oh, the internet. That is our new place across the board where we're going to be to corporate communication.

Ashley (08:15):

Yep. Any initiatives like new and benefit season. Yep. And that really helps build employee trust as well, because if they feel communicated to, they're gonna feel more positively about the entire transition. Yep. And that's extremely important to keep employees engaged and feeling on board with the new direction or ownership that is in place.

Mitch (08:36):

Yep. Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about some other common things that we see when businesses change hands and then we'll come back to kind of more modern workplace thinking and approach and benefits and, and all that. One other thing you noted here was what happens when two businesses have to join together, right?

Matt (08:54):

Yeah. Yeah. So that would be like a cultural change. Right. So if you're just getting new ownership, it's, you know, a lot of times the owner might be able to come in and, you know, adopt some of the culture that was already existing there. If you're taking two organizations and merging them into one, there's a lot of things to go onto it. The two things that I'll bring up is culture is one, but then the other is systems, right? Each organization has their own distinct culture. They may be similar. They may have lots of things in common. You know, there might have been a lot of work to try to determine whether or not there's alignment, which between the organizations, but even in when there's alignment, there's still differences. Right. There's going to be changes in how that works. Again, that comes back to a communication and a cultural thing.

Matt (09:32):

Like how do you communicate whatever culture you're going to build, that's going to be the new culture. How do you help communicate that?Organize that, you know, all of those types of things. So similar kind of stuff to the, the intranet discussion and the communication discussion, then the other one is systems. So you have two different entities. They likely had a system to do order management. And they likely had a system that did scheduling or sales or, you know, inventory management, what do you do now? Right. Like how do you approach that? And one of the things that I talk about doing is taking those things and really looking at them, not in a very myopic way.Right. A lot of organizations help

Mitch (10:11):

Help me with what that means. I'm not sure

Matt (10:13):

<Laugh> myopic means shortsighted. Right. Okay. So when you, when you think about, we've gotta merge these two organizations, there can be a focus on cool. Our goal is to BGE these organizations. So that's all I care about. And then

Ashley (10:24):

I'll just have one big organization and it's just that

Matt (10:27):

Easy well, and well, and how do I, how do I get, like, I'm just gonna stop using this tool and start using this tool. Yeah. Right.Everyone will use it. We're gonna make that happen. Right. But they may not godown to the next level to think about thinking about this organization as a whole, what's the best tool for both organizations for the new organization.Right. Which maybe is a third tool. I like, I don't know. But a lot of times they don't think about those types of things and that's one of the things that they could miss. So culture systems and integrating systems and joining systems together choosing one over another. And then, you know, in both cases, stepping back and thinking about what your goal is as the new organization and not just we bought you. So you use my system or right. This has, we spend more money on this system than that system. So let's, sometimes those are the things that people try to start making decisions based on. And they're, that's what I would consider be myopic if you're choosing a system, because this one's cheaper than that one. And you've never even talked about the, what it actually does or how it fits in the business. You're, you're not looking at the right things.

Mitch (11:25):

Yeah. Setting themselves up for failure in some regards, if, if they make a bad decision. Right. Yep. One other thing you talk about is focus on growth. Right. And in regards to like onboarding new employees. Yeah. What are some of the struggles in that regard?

Matt (11:41):

Yeah. So another big thing that can happen is when an organization gets new ownership, we actually, there's one particular one that I can think of that we've worked with recently, when they got bought out, there was a, a big focus on doubling tripling in size, putting, you know, the there's a lot of investment coming in. You know, we love what you do as an organization.We love how it works. We're gonna take you into seven other markets and, you know, make you grow, grow, grow. Right. That is a difficult thing for an organization to do. Even if you have a very well established recruiting and hiring process, right. If you're an organization that maybe hires five people a year, that's gonna be next to impossible. Right. And again, back to what, what a lot of times will happen is there'll be a focus on, well, do we hire recruiters?

Matt (12:33):

Do we, do we just hire some more people to do recruiting internal recruiting, right. Rather than thinking about what does the experience look like for a new employee from recruiting them all the way to the first 30days, 90 days up to a year, right? Like what does it look like? Because these employees, if you want to grow at that rate and really have a successful organization at the end, you need to be thinking about it from a long term perspective and you need to be putting a team together and tools together to make that work. Right. It's not always the best thing to just work harder.Right. Like just throw

Mitch (13:10):

Money at it,

Matt (13:10):

Throw yeah. Throw money in people at it. Right. yes. You're gonna have to, like, if that's your goal, if to triple in two years, like, you're go, that's gonna happen. Right. But you definitely want to take that step back and not look at it. Very shortsighted and, and think about like, this is the, the easiest way to get there. Let's think about how this looks over 10 years. Right. What does it look like for an employee that's gonna be here for 10 years in this organization. Right.

Mitch (13:35):

Ashley, do you have any thoughts on, on that? Like obviously there's many different ways a business can go when, when it gets acquired, is there one you've seen more than the others that you feel like, you know, fits what Matt's talking about?

Matt (13:48):

This is a question I have is like most of the time, what was, what was their, what was the goal of the, when they bought consolidate?

Ashley (13:55):

Yeah, I would say a lot of times what I would see is a parent company of some sort, just looking to increase you know, their revenue numbers. Yeah. So, and a lot of times I've seen acquisitions happen where we want everything to be friendly and comfortable for the first year to make sure everyone is engaged and feels good. And then they start putting on that pressure to grow. So it does seem like a lot of times in the merger and acquisition world, the goal is to grow eventually. Sometimes it is aggressive at the beginning, but a lot of times I feel at the beginning, it's just to, you know, increase that top line for the parent company. And then from there, we're gonna see what we can do slowly over time.

Matt (14:42):

So the first year it's really just by having them and making sure that nobody leaves and we have the same kind of revenue, the bigger business is just bigger and

Ashley (14:50):

Okay. It's just bigger.

Matt (14:51):

Yep. But then in year two through five, they're like, no, now it's now it's time to grow. Exactly. We need

Ashley (14:56):

To grow more. Exactly. And we wanna keep, you know, it is partially a strategy to keep everyone happy at the,

Matt (15:03):

Well, give them time to get used to the

Ashley (15:05):

New world, get integrated and new processes and things like that. But that would be more where there's a larger quote parent company that's, you know, integrating a smaller company into their world. Yep. And so then that year is for integrations. I think it is different when you have a single ownership change of a business, like you own a business and then I purchase it from you. Maybe someone just needs an exit strategy and then the goal might be gross right away. Or the growth or the goals might be more on just the current business and seeing what can be done with that, you know, increasing margins, through process improvement or marketing, things like that. Yeah.

Mitch (15:44):

Okay, cool. Let's shift over to that modern workplace. You know, what's the, the perfect picture in, in this scenario, one of the things you call out in your blog is, you know, as we're encouraging these, these modern workplace perspectives of there's a holistic way to do it, you ask the question, are you saying we shouldn't improve until we fix our modern workplace? How do, what order do they do things then? How do you figure that out?

Matt (16:13):

So that's the biggest, honestly, I think that's the biggest problem when you have these big changes, like this is, there is no one answer, there's no right thing to do. There's no wrong thing to do. If the organization that you're getting involved in or that you're involved in, doesn't have an internet. You shouldn't hold off on the day. One meeting where you tell everybody about the, the merger and or the, the acquisition or the change in ownership to have an internet like that would be ludicrous. Right?The thing to do is that once that meeting happens as an example, right, you're gonna be ex you know, working on a, as actually pointed out like a year long, maybe even a two year long process of becoming this new organization. If by the end of the first year, there's not something in place to, that's better than having an all companies meeting in handouts to do some of that.

Matt (17:00):

You're probably failing, right? Like there's something wrong, right? You should be identifying where it's valuable hiring growth, right. As Ashley said, there's lots of different ways to grow, right. Process improvement, cost cutting. Like there's lots of different ways. People could think when growth of revenue, right revenue growth or, or profit growth is more precisely. There's lots of different ways to do it. Right? Some of it could be short term hiring. And if that's all it's gonna be, maybe you don't need to figure out all of the different hiring things you need. Right. You don't, you don't have to do all of these things and make these, all these things way better on day one. What you do have to do is start thinking about these when they do come up thinking about them in that broader perspective of what does this look like over the next five years, right. Rather than how do I execute this combination of two organizations today, immediately.

Ashley (17:51):

Yes. And just to add on that, and you mentioned this in your article is I think it's important to view this time of disruption as an opportunity yes. To improve, you know, in any of these areas, whether it be with your communication, with your process improvement, how do you take this time of disruption and use it to your advantage, which would be implementing some of these changes. Yeah. And modernizing the work, the workplace.

Mitch (18:12):

Yeah. If, if the apple cart's getting upset, you might as well write it maybe with some new wheels on it or

Ashley (18:19):

Something. Yeah. Especially when it's something we know that will improve the employee experience, it's gonna help this new business reach their goals, but it's also gonna help employees and hopefully make their jobs quicker, faster, you know, easier to do

Matt (18:33):

The most important thing is that you're asking that question exactly what you said is, is this an okay time to do these, to make these other changes, right? Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, if you're never even asking that question, you're missing probably tons of opportunity that to make, not only the, my, the transition better, but the whole organization better on the other side of it, when you're all done.

Ashley (18:55):

Yeah. And we see a lot of hesitation just from our regular clients to do modern workplace projects is the hesitation comes from the disruption and not knowing a good time to do certain types of projects. So, and acquisition or a merger is a great time to implement any variety of modern workplace projects.

Matt (19:14):

Yeah. So you mentioned our other customer, other, other customers that I think this is where my epiphanies probably a bad word for it, but where this thought process came to for me is like, we were talking about personas, like Mitch said, and I was thinking about what the difference. We had a couple different personas. And I was thinking about what, what's the difference between customers that come to us and they really have something that we could help 'em with. We could help 'em a lot with mm-hmm<affirmative> but they aren't ready right now. Yeah. Right. Why aren't they ready right now? Well, one of the biggest reasons is many times they come to us and they say, I need to fix this email problem. Right. They don't come to us with, I need to transform my communication with my organization.

Ashley (19:55):

I have this employee that gets so many emails. They're bogged down. That's

Matt (19:58):

What I need to, we need to fix that problem. Right. And our answer to that, the right answer to that is you need an intranet, which isa project. And it's a, and it's a, a bigger, bigger thing. Right. But I'm not ready for that. I just thought I would have something that would fix this email problem. Right. Whereas someone who has a change in ownership is already experiencing lots of disruption within the organization. And so those people are more open to having the conversation about, Hey, like you probably need an internet and they go, okay, that makes a lot of sense. Right? Like, okay. And it's, and to be clear, when I went through this, it's not, this isn't the only reason, right? Like changing ownerships is one. We have another customer we're working with right now where they got a huge contract that is gonna double, triple, quadruple their business.

Matt (20:48):

Right. And they need help making that happen and making that work. They already have something that's already instigating a broader change within their organization. And that's the, that's the thing that seems to align really well with someone who goes, I can get, I can actually get good value out of it because honestly, customers who come to us and say, I've got a petabyte of, of file stores data, and I need you to move it to one drive intoSharePoint. Like if that's all we're doing for them, they're not gonna get a lot of value out of it. Right. Unless their CU their users are rock stars.Every last one of them, they're not gonna get a lot of value out of it because it's, yes, they're gonna save some money on file servers and whatever. There's just not gonna get a lot of value out of the transformation in their business.

Ashley (21:32):

Yep. Or they had a process that worked just fine when their business was a certain volume. But now that their business is a different volume, that process is, is not enough a problem. Or it's becoming a bottleneck. Yeah.

Mitch (21:42):

So this isn't in your article, but I want to ask when we're entering an organization at a strategic level, we try to take as many inputs as we can to create the best

Matt (21:52):

Outcome. Yep. Roadmap, what

Mitch (21:54):

Struggles might we encounter because of the upset applecart.

Matt (21:58):

Mm that's a great question. Probably our biggest struggle is when, cuz oftentimes we're talking with leadership, right. And leadership, usually isn't just one person. There's a number of people involved. And our biggest problem is when one person gets it and is a champion for us and understands what we're doing and has a clear vision within is in align with us.But everyone else isn't quite there. Right. And the reason that is such a problem for us is because they will either a come to meetings where we schedule to go through things and they have in their mind a perception of what we're gonna talk about. And we talk about something very different, right? Like they're ready to talk about all the links they need from their old portal on the new portal. And we want to talk about like, what is it that you guys are trying to do?

Matt (22:47):

And what's your pain points, right? Like day to day, where do you have problems related to communication or collaboration or, you know, the other areas of our, of, of, of modern workplace that we kind of deal in.And so, because they don't have that alignment, it takes a little bit longer than it should. Right? Like it takes maybe an extra meeting or it takes, you know, an extra part of the meeting to get them to go, oh, I get it. You guys are asking these things for this reason. But yeah, I would say that's probably our biggest challenge. Sure. Is that misalignment?

Mitch (23:16):

Okay. Yeah. The reason I ask is because we look at it from an objective perspective, always outside looking in, if someone is dear listener, hearing this and saying, oh, I wanna do this. What hurdles might they encounter? And how do they help those people that might

Matt (23:33):

Not

Mitch (23:34):

Get

Matt (23:34):

On board as it, as it relates to that, this is, this is great topic because if you are a person who is maybe not in charge of the, the transition, right, or maybe not close to the leadership team and you go into a, a meeting where let's say the, the discussion is about transferring or integrating between the sales systems in, in two organizations as an example, I think that's a simple example. There's lots of other ones and you wanna start talking about that's all well and good, but I really think we should use this other system, right? Like let's say I I'm in a, I'm picking radically different things, but let's say somebody's one organization has a homegrown sales system that has really not a lot of features, but a lot of they have a lot of customers and then you've got another one that's got, you know, they're using maybe on premise CRM, ver solution, right.

Matt (24:27):

You might say, Hey, we shouldn't do either of these things. We should either move into dynamics. So in the cloud off dynamics 365or Salesforce, like we should do something completely different cuz neither of these things were very good for the businesses in the first place. Sure. And this is probably a great time to do something different, right. When you're in that meeting and you say that if everybody else in the room is like, we got two months to make this happen, this is ridiculous. Right. That's the same kind of thing. Right? Like they don't have the same expectation at the same time, how we can manage some of that is if you are, if you come into that meeting and you're saying the only solution is to go to Salesforce, right? Yeah. That's abridge too far to start with. You can't start with that conversation.

Matt (25:07):

Right. You need to be having a conversation about what things make sense from both these sides. And does it make sense to think about a third option, right. Is there another option? Should we be considering that?And maybe that is we, we wanna move to dynamics 365, right? Like let's say that that's really where you wanna be. Maybe it is, Hey, that is the right thing todo. We should take it from the homegrown system into the CRM system then fromCRM into dynamics 365. Right. So maybe it's a combination, right. You need to be open to those things, but also you need to figure out how to get them onboard with maybe there's a, maybe there's a third option. We shouldn't just bethinking about how to make this happen as quickly as possible.

Mitch (25:47):

Sure. Okay. Yeah. I think that's a good, you know, form of encouragement or thought process for those people to help get everyone onboard. I, I thought you were gonna say, we should just have them listen to this podcast and then they'll get on board. So Hey, if someone shared this episode with you, you might be that person that they're trying to get on board

Matt (26:10):

Mitch. This is perfect for you. For me. Definitely raise, raise the viewership.

Mitch (26:14):

Right? Okay. Can we kind of finish off with maybe some quick hit, what are some common modern workplace solutions that we recommend when someone's going through this transition and just maybe not go too deep into them, but just give someone an overview.

Matt (26:29):

Yeah. So probably some of the biggest things that people need to be thinking about is communication is a big deal for this type of stuff. So we already talked about it quite a bit. Communication and collaboration is huge within an organization even before a purchase or an acquisition has happened.

Mitch (26:44):

We, we talked about intranets. One thing we didn't talk about is like

Matt (26:48):

Collaboration teams

Mitch (26:49):

Or slack, some chat tool, right? Yes.

Matt (26:52):

But communication, collaboration is huge. You've got two ends of that. The intranet, which we, which we've talked about quite a bit, the other pieces like teams or got other tools, other tools for doing collaboration. So team SharePoint sites like traditional SharePoint sites, there's lots of different tools out there that can help planner like all of these things that you can use to help collaborate within an organization, which are also very helpful in this, in a time of transition like that. So that would be one category. The other one would be,

Mitch (27:22):

I'll say, if you're stuck with internal emailing, emailing around is the only way that you talk. You're probably missing some,

Matt (27:29):

The way I end the blog is really one of the first things you can do is looking at your organization. It would be, we have a download that we provide called the modern workplace scale and it is geared to help you to identify areas where you could potentially be looking at for improvements.Sure. Like what you just said, like are, is email your primary communication.If it is for internal communication, you probably have some work to do, right.You need to be using some of these other tools to, to see some of these benefits. So looking at something like that, that scale that we provide can really help identify like some hotspots that if you're gonna have to do some work in that area anyways, as part of this transition, why not try to make it way better. Right? Yeah.

Mitch (28:12):

We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yep. If anyone's

Matt (28:14):

Interested, but I think that's, it's a really good, valuable resource for that. I think

Mitch (28:18):

One other download resource thing that we've had, we talked about onboarding a little bit. We have a whole like previous podcast on it and a whole guide of like, Hey, what does onboarding look like in?

Matt (28:30):

Yes. So I was gonna talk about onboarding is a second thing. So we've got, this is not, there's not really a tool in office 365 that we deal with directly, but there is a whole suite of tools that can be used to improve onboarding. It's creating like dedicated portals for onboarding, for both pre-boarding onboarding of specific organizations or departments within the organization. Also within the hiring process, there's a bunch of stuff you can do. And like you said, we've got some downloads, we've got some other podcast articles and actually blogs, et cetera about this topic that you can go catch up on. But that's primarily just using office 365 tools or modern tools to kind of leverage to accomplish some of those tasks. And then the last thing it's, it's similar, but it's not as specific to change in ownership. It's just process improvements. There's gonna be areas where you try to improve process.There's a lot of tools out there, modern tools that you can use to do things like integrations or automations approval, automations, you know, messaging automations.There's a ton of tools out there that you can use.

Mitch (29:33):

Yeah. So if you're inheriting two different tools and maybe you pick one, but one, I use it with something else that exists. Maybe you can connect to the two. Yeah.

Ashley (29:41):

Or, or in the new ownership example, someone, you might just need fresh eyes on current processes to be like, oh, Hey, that looks,

Matt (29:48):

We could do that better

Ashley (29:49):

Archaic or this isn't, I, I know there's gotta be a better way. Yep.

Matt (29:52):

But which some of those things can be handled with some of the new modern tools, which when I talk about the new modern tools, one of the most important things that you can do is also look at the tools that you have today, you know, do an assessment like, and where's their overlap. Where can you be simplifying that, that ecosystem that you have, right. Maybe that you can be doing more things in one of the tools or be, be more prescriptive about what it is. Some of our customers come to us and they say, you know, when we, we discuss with the leadership about what's going on, you know, we think, oh, teams is the best thing, you know, collaboration. We should be using teams more. Sometimes it's not. Yeah. Somebody, you, sometimes you already have a tool that you're using, but you just aren't using it very well for that.

Matt (30:34):

Right? Like, so if you have a, if you're a, a company that has a dedicated system, that's managing projects for you, right. That's helping you do that. And its industry specific. Maybe you need to leverage that more.Yeah. Maybe you need to do more with that. Right. it's not just about office365. It's not just about doing more with office 365. There's lots you can do with it where, you know, that's what we do all the time. We help people with those things all the time. But when you think about the overall process and you're improving your process, what it's really about is identifying where you need to make improvements and then stepping back and say, what's the right tool to help that, like, as she was saying it, is it integrating two systems and using power automate to do it? Is it using a system more completely? Is it stop using this system start using this system? What is it? And not just, what does it look like to fix the problems that were caused by the merging or the new purchase or the new direction the organization's taking. But how does that lookin the end state that the business wants to be in, in 12 months, in two years,

Ashley (31:36):

Right? Like are our current tools adequate in the new world mm-hmm <affirmative> or in our vision of the new world? Yep. Or does something need to be leveraged in order to drive us forward? Yep.

Mitch (31:45):

Okay. Do you wanna end us off with just a quick recap of what common scenarios we see and then kind of the thinking the, the inspiration that we're trying to, to cast?

Matt (31:56):

Yeah, sure. Really the three areas that we see is really internal communication hiring. So onboarding and hiring, and then also just business process automation. So those are the three areas we see the most change when change in ownership happens. And those are also the primary places that we see the most value. If you take those and, you know, take a step back and really approach them holistically within the organization, you can see a lot of change and benefit across the organization over the long term, not just, you know, fixing what's going on as the, as the ownership changes. Okay,

Mitch (32:31):

Great. So it's more than just checking growth off the list. Checking. We figured out which tool to use check. Yep. It's it's more of a thought process approach it holistically. Don't just try to

Ashley (32:45):

Think more long term.

Mitch (32:46):

Yeah. Yep. Cool. Well, I think that's all we have for today. Thanks for listening. And thank you guys for being here and yeah. ThanksAshley for joining us.

Ashley (32:54):

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's fun to special guest here and there.

Mitch (32:59):

All right, we'll see you next time. Hey, thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already subscribed to our show on your favorite podcasting app. So you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of Bulb Digital. Special thanks to Eric Veeneman for our music tracks. If you have any questions for us ahead to makeotherssuccessful.com and you can get in touch with us there, you'll also find a lot of blogs and videos and content that will help you modernize your workplace and get the most out of office 365. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.