M&A

Chris Cali

May 15, 2024 by

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.

Saideep Raj

March 4, 2024 by

Saideep is a former Accenture veteran with over 3 decades in new services breakthrough and practice scaling. He is now a strategic advisor supporting growth ventures in software and services, across diverse domains. For example, he supports a market linkage platform for global sustainable supply chains in food and agriculture, as well as an ed-tech platform currently used across thousands of schools helping 2M+ children in the US.

While at Accenture, Saideep launched the firm’s software-as-a-service practice, which included growing the Salesforce Business Group from inception to a multi-billion-dollar business. As the Global Innovation Lead at Accenture, he helped clients and entrepreneurs harness and scale innovation, leading a network of R&D, incubation, consulting teams across 92 cities and 35 countries. In these roles, Saideep successfully integrated multiple acquisitions to help accelerate scaling of talent and solutions. He was also active in shaping and delivering digital transformation journeys for clients across industries including High-Tech, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Telecommunications and Utilities.

Saideep is passionate about helping people maximize their potential, in their careers and in the community. He and his wife Shivanee support a non-profit called Sanctuary Farm Phila, that Shivanee helped launch to address health inequities in Philadelphia. It converts abandoned and neglected areas into spaces that promote safety, hospitality, nutrition, and growth. Saideep and Shivanee live in Philadelphia and love hanging out with their three adult children.

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

While technology services are in a constant state of reinvention, the recurring theme is honing a business’ value proposition. I relish working with leaders to help figure that out. It’s always an iterative process where I’m learning at the same time. It’s very cool to be a part of that.

You launched Accenture’s Cloud First practice and established the Accenture Salesforce Business Group, which you ultimately grew to over 18,000 practitioners. What advice would you give others that are pioneering new practices or ways of working within an existing organization?

I’m a big fan of Jim Collins’ book From Good to Great. He sets out a key principle “First Who, Then What – get the right people on the bus”. It’s so true. It took time to find those first leaders on my team. They each brought diverse skills but they also shared some commonalities; they were able to identify a compelling narrative tailored to a client, to an industry, to an ecosystem partner. All excellent story-tellers, they were able to captivate people and bring to life ‘the new’. Consequently, people were banging on our doors to be part of those teams – they were real talent magnets.

Over several decades, you worked with many partners across ecosystems like Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow and others. What were the key success factors for teaming? What were the challenges?

While it’s great to have top-to-top sponsorship across partnering organizations and it makes a big difference to capture mind-share, sometimes the handshake and the press release fail to have any staying power. The strategic relationship fizzles out within a couple of quarters and fragile joint deals start to crumble at the first sign of trouble. At the field-level, they soon move onto the next thing.

I see two of the biggest factors that drive sustainable team success revolve around team chemistry and incentive alignment. Firstly, it’s obvious to double-down on winning early joint deals, but success comes from ensuring strong day-to-day working relationships and trust across those joint teams. Don’t leave those things to chance.

Secondly, you need to find some kind of alignment between the broader strategic goals across both organizations. I would look for a ‘slip-stream’ where there is common ground between teams where incentives can be aligned. It can be loose, but without it – when we’re not in the slip-stream – everything is hard-work. It’s like pushing water uphill.

Accenture is an extremely acquisitive company and you yourself led 7 acquisitions of varying sizes. When it comes to M&A, what is the key to finding the right fit and successfully integrating talent and solutions?

Some of the most challenging and yet most rewarding times in my career have been through major M&A transactions and the multi-year integrations that followed. I’m always in awe of leaders and teams coming together with a multiplier mindset. At the outset, it’s critical to capture that with a bold vision, including meaningful examples for clients, and for individuals and their careers. The nitty-gritty hard work to follow-through is grounded in continual, vigorous expectation alignment and communication every day for months, and years. When it happens, the results are extraordinary.

Mike Epner

September 22, 2023 by

Mike has more than 25 years experience building and scaling professional services organizations, from early stage startups to global organizations. He has a gift for mentoring and motivating global teams, and has generated more than $1 billion in value across multiple services organizations. As the former President and COO of Traction on Demand, Mike grew the Salesforce consulting partner from 200 people to 1,500 people, overseeing sales, delivery and operations until the firm’s acquisition by Salesforce in April 2022. Prior to Traction, Mike was SVP of Consulting Services at Appirio, VP of Services at Borland, and CEO at TeraQuest Metrics. He has created deep partnerships with cloud pioneers like Salesforce, Google, and Workday, and is an accomplished photographer. He is on the board of the Texas Photographic Society and Zennify, a Salesforce and Databricks consultancy.

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

One of the most gratifying aspects of being a leader is watching members of your team achieve things that they didn’t know were possible. When helping leaders in IT services firms, there are personal, economic and social achievements that can alter the course of many lives. For me, that is legacy – and why I do what I do.

You have a lot of experience as a leader, and a strong ability to mentor and motivate large teams. What factors are important when it comes to successfully leading large organizations?

Trust – a large team can immediately sense if your words don’t match reality. Building and maintaining trust in leaders and the team is paramount.
Communication – the “indirect network” becomes very important as companies exceed the 500 person mark. Leaders need to plan for this shift and change their approaches to recognize this – the founder-driven ways of influencing may no longer work.
Predictability – as a business scales, lots of things will change and leaders must alter course in response. Having real information when making these adjustments provides more certainty to decision making – and allows smart risk taking to capitalize on the opportunities that surface along the way.

What advice would you give founders who are just getting started in a highly competitive ecosystem?

Take the time to get the foundations that you will need to grow in place. These include your market differentiators, your economic models, your processes (sales, delivery, operations, etc.) and your strategies around people (who, where, key roles, etc.). Stay focused on what you will need as a business to establish ongoing advantages and evolve. The requirements of the company evolve every time you double your revenue and headcount.

Rich Lyons

September 22, 2023 by

Rich is an entrepreneur and growth expert with 30+ years of experience in IT, professional services and business development. Rich was the founder and CEO of Lyons Consulting Group (LYONSCG), a $50 million eCommerce digital agency and service provider that worked with global customers like GoPro, Patagonia, Herman Miller, and FootJoy. When LYONSCG was acquired by Capgemini in 2017, Rich went on to hold multiple roles across the company for the next four years. He served as EVP, Digital Commerce Experience Leader for North America, defined the firm’s global commerce go-to-market strategy, and led hyper-growth initiatives for Capgemini’s most important partners (Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Google and others) with the goal to grow $1B+ practices.

Rich now serves on advisory boards, and advises business leaders on how to improve sales processes and accountability. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University and founded the Lyons School of Transformational Business, teaching courses on sales, entrepreneurship, and leadership. He is currently finishing a book on Life Is Sales, has been married for over 30 years to his wife Dr. Gertrude Lyons, and is the proud father of two daughters.

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

I’m passionate about helping others to not make the same mistakes that I made. Having worked since 1995 in IT services and eCommerce (Whittman-Hart, marchFIRST, divine, LYONSCG, Capgemini), I have seen a lot and have a great deal to share in terms of what was successful and what was not.

You founded the Lyons Consulting Group in 2003 as a digital commerce agency, and ultimately grew it to $50M+ before being acquired by CapGemini in 2017. How did your strategy evolve over those 14 years?

I had a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to be a $50M IT consulting firm by the time I was 50. Before selling to Capgemini, we started as a staff aug firm, and we pivoted and changed strategy many times over the 14 years that I ran the company. We got into eCommerce in 2005 and became the first implementation partner of Dewandware, now Salesforce Commerce Cloud. We shed all of our other IT consulting services in 2009 during the financial crisis and focused on only eCommerce. We added full creative capabilities, digital marketing/digital strategy, Magento (now Adobe) and Hybris (now SAP) as other platforms, and expanded internationally.

M&A in services isn’t easy, but Lyons Consulting Group has been a successful acquisition by CapGemini. What advice would you give to founders to help ensure a smooth integration for the team and customers?

My intention was never to sell, but the market changed rapidly. When we decided it was time to consider selling, we looked at both strategic acquirers and PE firms. It’s important to know the culture you’re going into, where you fit, what the future looks like to the best of your ability, and to ensure that your customers and employees will be well taken care of after the transition.

When it comes to a successful integration, communication is KEY – early and often, with clients and employees. We visited all of the customers that we could, and reached out to the others with phone calls. We held all-company meetings for the announcement, with many follow-up meetings to answer questions. Through all these, we tried to reassure our customers and our employees how they could benefit from the acquisition. For customers, it meant access to additional offerings and services. For employees, it meant additional training and other resources and opportunities that only a larger company could offer.

With more than 30 years of sales, alliance and business development experience, you’ve seen a lot. What are the biggest mistakes that services companies make when scaling sales?

Hiring saviors is the biggest mistake I see services companies make. Be sure to vet new hires, especially sales managers. I am a firm believer in metrics, so I believe that metrics and activity tracking should be a part of every sales compensation plan. Also, Alliances can be a huge channel for sales and leads – don’t undervalue this channel. And don’t undervalue a good alliance manager who knows the ecosystem.

Companies looking for that next phase of growth often decide to “go up market”, but it’s not always easy. What are the biggest challenges sales teams face when trying to break into and win business in the enterprise?

I always wanted to serve the whole market, so I believe it is a natural progression. Get happy clients and references in the midmarket. This will naturally lead to larger clients in the enterprise space. The key is happy, satisfied customers. Earn the right to be in the enterprise space. Everyone likes to hear a story with measurable results. Sales teams need to learn to tell these stories, with the results and benefits.

Asna Jadeja

January 9, 2023 by

Asna has spent the last 15 years solving tough business problems, from her early days as a technical consultant and scrum master, to more recent roles leading growth operations and acceleration practices at early stage tech services firms. Currently, she leads Sales Operations at Anduin where she uses her ability to synthesize complex data, analyze problems and develop actionable insights to drive revenue, top tier client service and competitive advantage. She has experience optimizing processes and results across a wide range of organizations, from large companies like Cigna and INFOR to medium sized firms like Envoy and Entera.

The teams she supports have increased their automation and capacity by more effectively using existing assets, and by establishing interlocking procedures that improve team alignment and results. Her ability to improve data accuracy and transparency across teams has driven improved decision making, ultimately leading to increase profitability and new revenue streams. Based outside Orlando Florida, Asna enjoys spending time in or near the water with her family and friends and taking advantage of all the live sporting events the Florida sunshine has to offer.

Why are you passionate about helping people-based businesses?

At the core of every business are people. If you focus on your people, you get better results. You naturally attract the right talent. You motivate people to perform and deliver exceptional results to customers. And the business thrives. I’m passionate about this cycle, and helping companies optimize the processes and solutions that make the employee journey a positive and fulfilling experience. Because people, more than ever before, are considering not only where they work, but why they work.

When companies are growing fast, alignment and prioritization can suffer. What can leaders do to increase cross-functional alignment without slowing down the business or becoming too bureaucratic? What is a common mistake you see people make?

Leaders need to provide their teams with a guiding “north star” that can help them prioritize their time and efforts. When everyone clearly understands what the organization is trying to achieve, they are equipped with the decision-making framework they need to say no to the things that do not deliver against those goals and move fast against the things that are important. This is why KPIs are so incredibly important, but setting them and communicating them once a year isn’t enough. I recommend that leaders ensure they’re continually clarifying and communicating the organization’s core goals, and empowering teams to deliver on them.

One of your superpowers is identifying and solving business process inefficiencies – from sales forecasting to services estimation to partner management. If you could pick one or two areas where services leaders should dig in to improve performance, where would you direct them?

It is critically important that services leaders evaluate the right set of metrics in order to drive strategy and execution. So often, services teams are told to “live” by a single metric – utilization. Teams become so concerned with meeting a utilization goal that the focus is purely on the number of hours worked, rather than the quality of the work or how profitable that work truly is for the company. By widening your lens to a broader set of metrics – for instance, measuring your margin on fixed bid projects to evaluate your effective bill rate and accuracy of your estimating model – you can better evaluate the quality and value of the hours delivered to your customers and for your business.

You’ve played a number of operational roles within companies, including the Chief of Staff (CoS) role. At what size does a role like this make sense, and why should service leaders consider a role like this?

When evaluating the need for a Chief of Staff (CoS) role, the answer is dependent on the problem you are trying to solve versus a specific point in time in an organization’s growth or an organization’s size. The CoS position should be put in place in order to drive efficiency across multiple areas, including decision making, information flow and time. The CoS should be able to support the creation and execution of a system that allows the leadership team to stay more focused while ensuring that day-to-day items are completed. The nature of this role is that its function can evolve day to day and even hour to hour – moving from implementer to strategic advisor to administrator, etc. to best serve the organization’s needs.

Graham Seddon

March 29, 2022 by

Graham is the co-founder of Altitude Accounting, a UK-based accounting and financial advisory firm specializing in founder-led, high growth businesses in Europe and North America. Graham has more than 25 years of experience in professional services and technology, and advises CEOs and senior leadership teams on financial strategy, reporting, preparing for investments and how to use data to drive business goals. Prior to founding Altitude, he was a managing partner at Menzies, a 450-person UK chartered accountancy, where he was responsible for the firm’s largest office, developing its digital finance strategy and creating a new service line offering part-time CFO services. Graham currently lives in London but is often in the US working with clients and attending any live sporting event he possibly can.

Why are you passionate about helping high-growth, founder-led businesses?

My passion to elevate business owners was born out of my own family experience. My parents ran their own business as a newsagent and postal office for their entire lives. Like most entrepreneurs, they were great at some aspects of business but needed support in others. Knowing what you are good at and how to use your gifts to help others has proven over and over again to be the most rewarding element of the job I do. I’ve been able to use my accounting and strategic skill sets to help people just like my parents achieve their goals and aspirations.

As the youngest partner at Menzies, a 100+ year old chartered accounting firm in the UK, you developed their digital strategy for finance. How has the cloud and digital tools transformed finance?

Technology has driven huge changes in accounting over my career, but cloud computing has had probably the biggest impact. The ability to see, manage and collaborate on the financial picture anytime, anywhere, on any device has made it so much more efficient to work across multiple businesses. One of the biggest areas it has impacted is forecasting. The tools available now make it so much easier to look ahead and plan for future growth. The ability to scenario plan, adjust as actuals unfold and report in real time have transformed how business leaders can operate in real-time.

You have been an interim CFO and advisor to a number of founder-led businesses over the years. How do you help them establish the right processes for growth?

The most important thing for me is to know the business and what makes it tick. There are many similarities across services businesses but every business is different. Taking time to really understand the key drivers to revenue and profitability are vital before you build the right process and systems. Once you know those drivers, you can make better decisions on the technology and data needed to run the business and look ahead to where the business is heading. How those systems can and should integrate with other elements of the business is also vital. Scalability is key to ensure that implementations are going to stand the test of time as the business grows and evolves.

As a services company looks to accelerate growth and scale, the move from cash to GAAP accounting becomes more important. What advice would you give CEOs looking to make the transition?

The move from cash to GAAP accounting is a necessary step for companies looking to maximize value for investment or a potential exit. Without the benefit of GAAP accounting, a business may be undervalued and the time spent in due diligence can be a distraction from focusing on the business.

Doing the work upfront will deliver real value and help create better business decisions, but it will be a transition and it’s important to understand the impact the move will have. For example, some of your fundamental KPIs may change and you will likely need to update certain metrics to reflect the new approach. When making the switch, I always recommend shadow accounting the previous 2 years, and re-modelling budgets for the current year based on GAAP accounting. This will provide management with greater clarity into how models will shift before it becomes the primary view for managing and reporting on the business.