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The ink had barely dried on our first acquisition deal, and we were ready to celebrate. As my business partner, Joel Pearlman, and I headed out to dinner at a local cafe in Detroit, I was excited about what was ahead for our company.
We had just closed the deal on buying a small, local IT services company that we believed would be the perfect complement to our managed print services business, imageOne. It wasn’t a particularly risky decision, we were bringing on the former owner and a technician as team members and we’d be able to market new IT services to our customers. That evening, we talked excitedly about how the move would expand what we could offer to our customers.
It didn’t take long for the first signs of trouble to appear. As we began to implement the new services, the differences in our two processes became more pronounced and started to affect how we served our customers. For example, when servicing a printer, we normally dispatch a technician, they would arrive on-site within four hours, and they would usually complete the job within an hour. With the new IT services group, we were dealing with PCs and servers that needed immediate attention. We would dispatch a technician and they would often need to be on-site for a half-day to a full day to fix the problem, sometimes longer. In those days, there was little crossover in the skillset of our managed print technicians and IT services technicians — they were two entirely different skillsets.
Did we pause, take a step back and reevaluate what we were doing? No. The change was still fresh, and we assumed that if things weren’t working, it just meant that we needed to work that much harder until it did. I’ll admit there was also an element of ego at play — and if we simply continued to ignore the warning signs, then we wouldn’t have to admit that we had made a mistake.
So, we stayed the course. It wasn’t a disaster — but we certainly weren’t operating with the efficiency and cohesion that we knew we could. Instead, we were investing our time and energy into a service that we simply weren’t cut out for, and it was distracting us from what we did best: managed print services. As we were learning to manage this new business, we were also struggling with the change in the size of the accounts we were servicing. imageOne typically works with mid-sized to enterprise accounts, and the new clients we acquired were significantly smaller.
About three months into it, Joel and I were casually talking and he asked me, "Does it feel like this isn't working?" I admitted that yes, it did feel like something was off. But I insisted that we just had to keep trying — these things take time and if other companies could do it, so could we. Joel agreed and we pressed on.
The next obstacle tested us on an even more personal level. After months of attempting it, the two new employees we brought on simply weren’t fitting into our culture. Culture is the leading driver at imageOne, and we’ve learned (often the hard way!) that when an employee doesn’t get it, want it, or have the capacity to do it, we need to make a change. A decision had to be made — would we continue to push and try to force the new business to work? What would it mean to admit that this was a mistake?
Looking for answers, we decided to do what we perhaps should have done months ago and turn to trusted individuals in one of our business networks, EO, for guidance. We were vulnerable and transparent with those we spoke with, and one person introduced us to Gino Wickman, telling us that he was an entrepreneur who had just sold his family business and was starting a new company that would teach entrepreneurs how to better run their businesses.
Joel and I met with Gino and the three of us hit it off right away. We shared similar ideas about what is important in business and leadership, and the conversation flowed naturally as if we were all old friends. We shared our situation with Gino, and he recommended we read the book Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It by Al Reis for guidance.
We read the book and immediately realized our problem: we were no longer focused on our core business. As the book explains, companies that stay focused on their core businesses are more likely to be successful than those who don’t. Instead of focusing on our core services and dominating that offering, we were getting distracted by “shiny stuff” — new opportunities that appear more exciting than our existing service offering. That sense of unrest and incongruity we had been feeling came not only from our operational issues, but also from a deeper awareness that this wasn’t the right move for us. We swallowed our pride, checked our egos, and closed the IT services business.
Oddly enough, this turned out to be one of the best business experiences I’ve ever had. It could’ve been terrible, but instead it led us to better decisions that ultimately would change our business for the better and in a much more impactful way. We had an open and honest meeting with the two individuals who joined our team from the IT company, one of whom was the owner. We offered to hand the company back to him, but he wasn't interested. Instead, we helped them look for full-time positions with other companies. They both landed on their feet — years later, we even ended up doing business with the former owner, who had become the IT Director at a local school district.
We got to know Gino and started working with him, and he helped us implement the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), an approach that dramatically improved our culture and the way we do business. We began focusing on our core services, using EOS to better operate the business, deepened our investment in people and culture and we were able to sell our business in 2004 to a public company. Now, that’s another story.
