Notes

Here is the business case, all names are changed.

Mark is a 35 years old CEO of software outsourcing company called “TriangleSoft” located in eastern Europe. Mark used to be a software engineer himself for a 7 years working in large companies and eventually back in 2009 he started a company “TriangleSoft” with a partner Tim who is also software developer.

Initially Mark and Tim were doing all the work themselves, developing software for US and Europe customers, but as times go 25 more engineers were hired to the company. Usually employees working in small dedicated teams directly with customers managers. “TriangleSoft” specialized in a niche software technology, there were not enough people available on the market with the required skills, so Mark was hiring smart interns and train them.
Mark was the only sales guy, doing sales in work auction sites like Freelancer.com

After company worked for 5 years, the niche software technology started to die and decision was made to transform engineers to other more popular technologies. But since Mark had not much management experience this transformation process went badly. 2 years later around 7-8 engineers managed to train for a new technologies and others left the company.

Now is 2017, company has 30 employees in total, 10 is a core team who worked for a long period of time and 20 are young developers. Mark doesn’t develop software, he is managing engineers, doing sales and customer care. Recently Mark hired 2 new project managers who help company to handle projects better when there is not a managing team on customer side. Current profit margin are very low comparing to the industry, floating between 10-15%.

Mark still hire interns and train them, over the years he become good at training process. But he feels that there is not enough experienced employees.

Also Mark started to think how to organize sales department, how to introduce new sales channels, how to implement basic marketing processes and eventually how to transform from people outsourcing company to a service company.

“TriangleSoft” has a lot of experience in video streaming software solutions and Mark actively thinks how to transform that experience into base product that company can sell and then highly customize for specific customer needs.

In the last year Mark started to study Management and Leadership. Now he is implementing new internal processes in the company like regular employees performance reviews, creating shared vision and values, changing organizational structure of the company. Now company has 5 team leaders who work directly with engineers and report to Mark.

The goal is to grow to the company to 45-50 employees during 2018 and get the profit margin to 40%.