Summit High Points and Leading a Professional Services Practice

This article is relevant if you value the leadership reflections about a practice dedicated to NetSuite systems integration.

Background

I just wrapped up an adventure holiday with two close friends in the Lesser and Greater Antilles region of the Caribbean. My friends have the ambition to “bag the peaks” of the highest points of sovereign countries. When the high points are under 10,000 feet, I am invited to join them to hike/climb each summit. During our adventures, most of our discussions are about transport and climb logistics to ensure we plan all matters and be ready to act. However, this particular adventure has greater logistical challenges due to Covid-19 entry, movement, and quarantine restrictions.

I enjoy spending time with these two friends because I need to push myself beyond my perceived physical limitations to accomplish the summit goals. When we are together on these adventures, I am the junior while they are the seniors.

These two individuals are accomplished in many dimensions of their lives. They are both highly competent managers and lead full lives. When we are not talking about the trip details, we sometimes discuss career and life ambition. Upon reflection of our conversations and action, I saw an opportunity to draw parallels between reaching the high point summits and producing professional work with our team members for our clients.

Growing a NetSuite Systems Integration Practice

In the 1990s, I grew a small eCommerce firm and sold it in 2000 at the tail end of the Internet DotCom era. That eCommerce firm was valuable because it offered me an education in professional services fundamentals. In 2003, I founded Prolecto Resources as I recognized that I have a passion for producing database-driven business systems applications. In 2008, I decided to focus on the NetSuite platform because it reflected three areas that closely aligned with my previous professional experience:

1. Accounting: the NetSuite platform is fundamentally built with the notion of transactions and accounting. Because I was educated and became a Certified Public Accountant at the global professional services firm, Deloitte & Touche, I naturally think about business systems with double-entry accounting in mind.
2. Cloud Platform: In 2008, it was still novel to consider hosting your accounting and business systems by third parties on the internet. I was always very comfortable with this architecture as I led training, as early as 1996, for fellow Deloitte & Touche professionals about the coming IT architecture. Today, it occurs to me that only the largest organizations consider managing their own IT infrastructure versus trusting third parties to provide hosted business services.
3. Fully Integrated: as I developed software solutions for clients as early as the 1980s, I intuitively saw the benefit of consolidating all information into a central database. The benefits allow you to avoid building and maintaining system integration, you have one version of the truth, you experience no latency information updates and you likely can avoid building a reporting data warehouse; bottom line: you lower your cost while increasing your application capacity.

See a previous article on this matter.  How does this background connect with the high point summits? Consider that NetSuite is at the pinnacle of leading global ERP systems. Hence, the move to focus solely on NetSuite in 2008 proved to be an important strategic decision. This strategy is similar to the opening move to decide which peak to climb and to not just choose any summit — we want the summit of that country’s highest peak — nothing else.  Let’s also not forget that NetSuite has named versions of its eCommerce, SuiteCommerce Advanced, after high country summits (e.g., Mont Blanc and Denali).

While these were positive reasons to choose Netsuite as a platform, I also learned important practices for leading an organization of highly competent professionals. Here are some key considerations:

1. Talent has Choice: individuals that have the background to understand business concerns and who can act to help organizations configure, enhance and support their information systems applications (e.g., NetSuite) will have many choices about where they can find employment. Understanding our team members have a great many choices means to respect market forces and to keep this front and center in the nature of the relationship dynamic. It’s important to trigger recurring assessments of value in the relationship. Connecting this to my two friends, they too have choices about who they ask to summit high points. I too need to demonstrate that I will push myself and add value to their adventure.
2. Valuing Competency: In our work as a NetSuite Systems Integrator, at the end of the day, our clients really only care about the production of the situations they care about. Given the nature of the domain we work in, the pragmatic capacity to listen to concerns, translate them into requirements, and then produce the supporting software configuration is primary. This pattern for listening, synthesis, articulation, and then ultimate configuration within the NetSuite toolset is scarce and has to be developed through experience.  The production of the end goal is our success criteria. Related to the summits, I too had to interact with my friends to be in a mood of willingness, develop my own listening, gain a full understanding, and produce sufficient training to reach the top. Reaching the summit produces satisfaction.
3. Professional Development: To run a successful systems integration practice, we need individuals to hold roles. Roles represent the recurring capacity to make promises to deliver specific situations. As the founder and leader, I am responsible to design these practice roles. To be brief, these roles vary to include an analyst, a project manager to marketing and selling. Under an apprenticeship model, I personally work with our younger team members to help educate and guide them to meet our firm’s standards for care. This connects to the summit in that I do feel that I am an apprentice to my two colleagues — their confidence, experience, and real physical capacity mean I need to carefully listen, think about the meaning of their requests and guidance, and ultimately act to ensure I don’t put them in danger as we reach the summit as a team.

Setting Challenging Attainable Goals

During the 12 years of focusing on the development of Netsuite expertise, I have tried to be reflective on my own personal and professional capacities and what is needed relative to our firm’s ambition. The primary consideration has been to not overreach — almost a conservative approach toward competency development. Why a conservative approach? Because it was important, in the development of a meaningful professional career, to build a valuable and sustainable capacity that can be trusted by our clients; likewise our team members must also trust that our configuration will help them take care of professional ambitions which support their families’ existing and anticipated future concerns.

The manner in which to steer the Firm’s growth is to set meaningful but attainable goals.  All of our accomplishments are a function of the work we do to make offers, set standards, use distinctions, develop skills, improve practices, and ultimately deliver client satisfaction. Thus it’s important to make frequent and regular assessments and adjust as we go.

Back to the summit climbs with my colleagues. I am always amazed at their discussion of terrain, the use of specific mountaineering equipment for different situations, information gathering to gain intelligence from what others have learned, and ultimately their specific practices and support during the actual climb. I see why they recurrently produce success. They are conscientious, intelligent, committed, pragmatic, and responsible.  I am grateful they sufficiently trust me to join them to be their junior on appropriate summit adventures. Likewise, each summit is similar to the ultimate situation that our clients seek.  We too work to perfect our craft and thus are willing to hold the leadership required to help our clients realize their goals.

And just as you summit a country’s high point, you are not finished. You must safely get down to the base camp or trailhead. There can be danger in descent.  I like to think of the downhill aspect as the help we give for our clients to own their new configuration and capacity once we produced the project deliverable. If our clients are unable to hold the capacity, then they ultimately will not be satisfied.

In Gratitude

I am grateful. I appreciate Oracle’s leadership to bring an amazing platform to their customers which creates a space for a community to exist. I am grateful for each client that has trusted us to help them get the most from their NetSuite investment. I am grateful to each member of our team to align their career development with my own.  Of course, I am thankful I have a supporting family that recognizes the demands I face to lead the Practice. Finally, I am grateful that my two friends believe in me and invite me to produce fantastic memories of our great adventures.

If you found this article valuable, feel free to sign up to receive notifications of new articles as I post them. If you have thoughts about leadership, let’s have a conversation.

Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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