Contact

Culture

Chris Cali

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Chris Cali is a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits of technology product and services companies.

Most recently, Chris was the co-founder and managing partner of Spark Digital, a technology consulting andsoftware engineering firm specializing in the Communications, Media and Technology industries. The firm served clients like Dow Jones, NBCUniversal, WWE and Verizon and was sold to intive in November 2021.

Prior to Spark Digital, Chris co-founded Panvidea, a venture-backed B2B SaaS company focused on cloud-based video transcoding and distribution. Here he oversaw sales, marketing, product, and engineering, ultimately selling the business to a private-equity owned stock video company in 2011.

Chris is an expert in the media industry, and has held various technical roles at Sony Music, Maven Networks (acquired by Yahoo!) and Music Nation. He has been a Techstars Cloud mentor, is an active investor, a member of the Renaissance Executive Forum and is on the board of the Elm Project – a summer camp for underserved youth with Sickle Cell Disease in the NYC tri-state area.

Why are you passionate about helping leaders of IT services firms?

My passion is in growing people and in helping them learn new skills and realize their potential. People are the largest asset of IT services firms. Creating a collaborative, learning culture where people are rewarded for innovating and putting clients first is what will ultimately set them apart.

When you and your partner founded the digital engineering firm Spark Digital in 2012, you chose to go deep in a specific vertical. What did that look like and how did that contribute to your success?

Having worked in the Media & Entertainment vertical as a software engineer for the years prior to starting Spark Digital, this was a natural fit. It was the easiest path to closing sales given my existing network. Much later we learned that the Communications, Media and Technology vertical existed at many larger consulting firms and this would make a nice fit for a tuck-in acquisition.

My advice around choosing a go-to-market strategy is to lean into your strengths. We’re operating in a very saturated market and any way you can differentiate early on and build upon your proven experience (be it horizontal or vertical) is going to strengthen your position. If you’re looking for a change in your GTM strategy as a more established company, look for the common thread in your portfolio where you have the most successful case studies and build a story around that. Narrow your focus and double down.

From the beginning, you chose to build the core of your delivery team in Latin America – Argentina specifically. What were the benefits of building there? What was harder than you expected it to be?

This was a lucky accident. My mom was born in Argentina and had already worked with teams in India and Romania in previous roles at Sony Music and Yahoo! I decided to explore LatAm first for time zone purposes. I also hoped that I’d have some sort of connection to that country and, therefore, my family there that I didn’t know very well.

I quickly learned that Argentina was an amazing choice given its availability of engineering and education. I then got lucky again in meeting my Co-Founder, Francisco Amadeo. He’s one of a kind and I would still go to war with him if need be.

As demand increased and supply got overpriced during COVID, we expanded our reach into other LatAm countries with much success. There’s no better place to serve the U.S. nearshore than Central and South America. There are some nuances in labor laws and the like that you will need to understand. Make sure you either have a trusted partner, employee and/or law firm located in the region.

Treat them the same as you would your onshore employees. Nobody performs well if they feel like a second-class citizen.

You sold Spark to intive in 2021 for a great outcome. What advice would you give to others that are considering selling their business? Anything you would do differently?

We never built our company with the thought of selling. We operated for cash flow and as a byproduct, built a very healthy, growing, profitable business. The time to run a sale process became apparent through a combination of market conditions and founder interests. Being organized, profitable and having a great management team in place for years prior made the process much easier than it would have been otherwise. A buyer is going to see through your last-minute org changes and notice that you’re scrambling to track down your unorganized data. Run your business well and wait for the time to become apparent.

If you are selling and planning to leave the business, don’t underestimate the mental loss you’re going to feel. It’s comparable to a death. Give it some thought and have a plan for your time. In my experience, the type of people that start and run a business are not the kind that are going to enjoy doing nothing for an extended period of time afterward and nobody has any sympathy for post-windfall depression.

There are a lot of benefits about building with a co-founder, but there will come times when you aren’t always aligned. How did you and your co-founder Fran navigate those times and remain a united team for your employees?

Luckily, Francisco and I mostly aligned on major issues. We gave each other a lot of autonomy and if we detected a misalignment, it always led to a great conversation.

Being caught up in the day-to-day most of the time, I think we both welcomed these conversations that challenged our brains a little more than usual. We were a great team in this regard and these conversations are what I miss most about owning the business.

My advice to anybody having these sorts of troubles is that there are very few issues in this business worth dying on a hill for. If you don’t agree with a direction, but you can see that the damage of going that direction for a little while isn’t unrecoverable, then let the learning begin.

Bob Maller

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Bob is the former President and Chief Culture Officer of Collaborative Solutions, and an expert at growing teams, practices and partnerships in the fast-moving cloud computing space. To call Bob an IT services veteran might be putting it mildly. He started his consulting career in the ‘90s at global consultancies Accenture and Deloitte, before going on to manage consulting teams at PeopleSoft. That experience served him well when he joined Collaborative Solutions as its second employee. Over the years he’s grown Collaborative to more than 1100 employees and Workday’s longest tenured partner. Along the way, he’s also created a firm well respected for its work, culture and dedication to diversity, winning a ridiculous number of Best Places to Work awards. Collaborative was acquired by Cognizant in 2020, and Bob continues in the same role at Collaborative as Cognizant’s standalone Workday practice.

Why are you passionate about helping people-based businesses?

When we developed our core values at Collaborative, the clear first value was People. While it can be cliche to mention People as a core value, it’s the businesses that truly nurture and develop their people who are most successful — especially in services. Real magic happens with collaboration, which is why when you’re building a firm or a practice, teamwork is such a critical trait. The “smartest” or most-skilled person may not be a fit for your organization if they don’t thrive as a member of a team.

As the second employee at Collaborative Solutions, you grew the firm from a niche PeopleSoft federal contractor to a ‘crown jewel’ of the Workday ecosystem with more than 1000 employees. What was the most challenging part of that early journey and what was it when you reached scale?

In the early days, the challenge was to differentiate ourselves. As we became a Workday partner, the fear was that we would build a practice and the large SIs would swoop in to hire them away. This is why hiring the right people and building a sustainable, employee friendly culture was, and is still, critical.

Our first acquisition (a Workday consultancy in Australia) was also an interesting milestone. Integrating them into what was then a North American-centric business and making them feel a part of the Collaborative family took real work.

At 500+ employees, I no longer knew each employee, which was a very weird feeling. We needed ways to stay in touch with each other and keep engagement high. So we launched the Collabie Convos series (intimate video calls with 15-20 employees) to discuss a variety of topics. We also put a lot more emphasis on developing the people in the firm to become leaders and great ambassadors of our culture. It cannot just be the senior leadership team who sets the tone for the culture.

You’re a huge advocate of culture and inclusivity. What is the key to scaling culture as the company grows, expands and evolves?

It starts with formalizing and promoting your core values. In the early days, it’s about defining and discovering those values as a founding team. As we got larger, it became very important that every employee around the world knew what our core values were and why we had them. We reinforced them daily and worked them into our processes. They weren’t just words or phrases on a wall in an office.

Selecting and developing the right leaders within your practices is also critical, and should constantly be reviewed. These are the leaders that new hires will look to, even more than the executive team. Do you have the right leaders? Do they exemplify our core values? Did we promote people into areas they cannot handle and would be better suited as individual contributors? We, as leaders, cannot be afraid to ask these questions and make adjustments along the way.

When it comes to inclusivity, it simply needs to be a priority – a focus from the top down. I’d also highly encourage instituting a buddy and/or mentoring program to indoctrinate people into the company and to ensure that they have someone to help navigate their careers within the company.

Keeping employees engaged is never easy, but it can be even more challenging during rapid growth and downturns. What are some things leaders can do to keep engagement high throughout a company’s lifecycle?

The first thing is to survey your employees, but just as importantly, do something with the results. Show your employees that what they told you is valued and, if it needs work, that it’s being addressed. I am a big believer that surveys are anonymous and people understand that improvement is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. For trust to flourish, leaders need to be vulnerable and transparent. Talk to your people more often than you think, through a variety of mechanisms. Use video as much as possible when communicating important things (as opposed to a flat email that no one really reads).

Darshan Deshmukh

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Darshan grew up as a leader across a number of supply chain services and consulting organizations. He has helped global service organizations of all shapes and sizes improve their efficiency and effectiveness, and scale up their operations and customer success processes. Darshan started his career with IBM in various global leadership roles and managed service delivery in the US, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia. In his tenure at IBM, he built large delivery centers focused on globally integrated operations. He also built and led the Global Delivery Organization at Denali, a procurement services firm that was eventually acquired by WNS in 2017. Here he led the post-merger integration and integrated procurement services operations within the company. Post Denali-WNS, Darshan built and led customer success and professional services organizations for OpenGov and Icertis, both hyper-growth SaaS software organizations.

Why are you passionate about helping people-based businesses?

I am passionate about building sustainable people-based businesses. For any people-based business to grow and be successful in the long term, I believe they need to build a balanced three dimensional system focused on people, process and technology. I am a big proponent of building organization capability organically while building scale, and I feel a strong sense of fulfillment when an individual within the organization grows as a professional within a system I helped develop. It’s ultimately all about people and their ability to drive incremental change to build a business with long-term value.

As a services organization scales, having global delivery centers becomes more important. What should founders consider before expanding into a new region?

As founders look to develop global scale through international delivery centers, they need to transition to a “Communities of Excellence” model that is focused on efficiency, effectiveness and innovation. The intent of global delivery is to capitalize on talent globally and to scale productivity, but it’s also about adding customer value. When founders are thinking about expansion, they should ask themselves, “does my decision lower the center of gravity closer to the customer?”

From there founders need to assess:
1. Is the talent pool available?
2. Do I have a corporate culture that embraces globalization for growth, profitability, efficiency and effectiveness?
3. Am I willing to invest in the initial curing period so my organization, and ultimately my customers, will realize the benefits?

You’ve grown delivery organizations from the ground up with Denali, at a mid-sized organization with OpenGov, and in later stage companies like IBM and Icertis. What’s consistent across different size organizations, and what changes as you grow?

What makes any size delivery organization successful is the ability to meet and exceed the implied promise you’ve made to customers. Most organizations focus on written commitments, but when you change the organization’s DNA to assume the statement of work is table-stakes, and incentivize everyone in the organization to meet and exceed that customer implied promise, it drives incremental change quickly.

Simplifying goals is another key learning from my experiences building organizations. If a leadership team can agree to 3 or 4 goals for each functional organization, with one shared goal, it takes care of most of the organization tradeoffs and debates in a fast growing organization. I realized that this exercise is much harder than we think once you start implementing it though. Humans have a tendency to complicate decision making.

Later stage organizations have a much bigger internal change management issues (aka bureaucracy). It’s always important to be mindful that balancing faster decision making with quick adjustment can be more disruptive than spending time driving consensus. But getting the “goals simplification” strategy right can take care of these lifecycle challenges.

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