When John first joined Ness Financial, his task was to help the organization’s revenue growth by streamlining the CRM and Sales processes and to develop financial reporting for Senior Management. A year before John joined, the Board had replaced the CEO. The former CEO’s use of Mergers and Acquisitions to grow the business did not result in much success. Three smaller companies were procured over five years, all of which had failed to grow revenue after the initial merger transaction.
John D. Hoxie, Senior Financial Management Executive Officer
Upon John’s first day, the company was hit with ransomware causing a complete shutdown of the enterprise. It took several weeks to recover the systems and restart operations. At this point, the CFO was forced out of the organization leaving John reporting to the SVP of Finance and direct interaction with the CEO.
“This opportunity gave me the ability to implement several initiatives in the organization, such as implementing the Power BI tool that gives the financial organization visualization tools and dashboards, as well as implementation of an M&A integration team to assess the redundancies in the organization and implement changes to ignite growth.”
Power BI was straight forward, allowing John to create a dashboard showing concisely how the organization was performing each month in terms of Revenue, profit and cash flow for each business unit and total enterprise. The dynamic reporting gave senior management insights and performance differences between divisions, with the new ability to amend processes and business strategy.
“M&A integration was a tougher nut to crack but made valuable changes to the organization,” said Hoxie. The team was comprised of all the direct reports to the CEO and the goal was to identify redundancies and inefficiencies caused by the failure to integrate the M&A companies. “I created workstreams around each operational area with action items and specific due dates. This executive team convened weekly, and I ran the meetings with the focus of driving integration items to conclusion.”
“I changed the sales team focus by changing the reporting structure and incentive packages. Without the M&A integration team consolidating the sales organizations, each of the different sales teams were focused on selling Net New business. Because none of the sales teams were focused on growing existing business, I instructed each of the organizations to develop incentives to sell new business.”
John changed this by first reducing the number of CRM systems to 1, then implementing a reporting structure with three types of sales: 1) Renewals, 2) New business within existing clients, 3) Net New business. Then he changed the incentive to concentrate the sales organization on the eroding renewal business and new sales to existing clients. Only a small number of highly talented salespeople were tasked with Net New business opportunities.
Upon his departure from this organization, John’s approaches grew revenue from $250M per annum to $330M, a 24,2% gain.
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