On the Edge

Stephen Brown (00:01.44)
Welcome to On The Edge brought to you by Elite Sales Edge with your host, Stephen Brown. In the series, Getting to Know Your CXOs, we'll be diving deep into conversations with various C -level executives. We'll explore the formidable challenges they encounter, the critical decisions they make, and the lessons that have left a lasting impact on them. Sit back and prepare to gain some insightful knowledge from the leaders who shape the business

Stephen Brown (00:38.914)
Welcome to On the Edge. I'm your host, Stephen Brown, and today our guest is Dan Mondor, and our topic today is business transformation. Dan has extensive C -suite experience in the technology industry, having served as an executive chairman, CEO, and president of global public and private equity companies. Dan is a business transformation expert known for developing winning business strategies and dramatically increasing shareholder value. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Stephen.

It's a pleasure, Dan. Today is going to be an exciting topic, so let's get right into it. We're talking about business transformation. So can you share with us your leadership philosophy and how it's guided you in turning around companies? At the outset, you're getting your arms around many, many things, understanding the current situation of the company. And externally and internally, there's nothing more important than getting out, spending

with customers or in the case of a channel model of partners, strategic partners, VARs, et cetera. And you've got to do that. You have to be in person. And what I call that process is getting the voice of the customer, voice of the partner, understanding how the company is situated from a customer perspective, how are the products doing? How's the service and support? How are the people you interact with?

And that external input is fundamentally important in understanding where you should go in developing your go forward plan. Dan, can you talk to us about your decision making process? There's a lot of decision making clearly at the sea level. Can you talk to the audience about your approach when making tough decisions, especially when facing resistance or high stakes? Well, I think first and foremost, it's having a clear understanding

corrective actions you need to take. On the other side of the coin is the decisions you need to make to drive growth and the profitability in the company. I think the other aspect of that is you can't just do this in isolation. Now, depending on the company, if you're a public company, you can't share absolutely everything far and wide because they are material changes that you can't communicate publicly, at least at the decision -making phase.

Stephen Brown (03:05.569)
Decide the things you need to do. Don't wait on the things you need to make tough decisions on. Don't wait for an instrument amount of data to get it perfect. Be directionally correct and communicate. You should communicate with all stakeholders about the decisions you've made, why you've made them, why it's the right thing for the company. Because you need to get everyone aligned to it. If you try to do that in isolation, it seems like you're doing, you're not sharing.

your thought process and the why. And it's very hard to get people on board with fundamental changes that you're going to make. So a lot of your career, most of your career, would say looking through is has been in high technology. So with that in mind, what role does innovation play in your strategy for company transformation? Yeah, great question. Well, the go forward plan has to incorporate not only your strategy,

financial objectives, the people aspect, but how are you going to innovate going forward? And especially in high tech, the life cycle of technology product, for example, is quite short. You're almost always working on the next generation of product while you're developing the current generation. But innovation isn't just technology. There's innovation in sales and marketing. There's innovation in HR. There's innovation in finance and accounting. There's innovation across...

So you shouldn't just think one dimensional, one dimensionally around technology innovation. How is the company going to innovate to compete in the market and be successful? So building on these two questions, making tough decisions, thinking about innovation and the role it plays across the organization. Decisions get made, choices around innovations are made. Once that's done, what mechanisms do you use to communicate broadly?

all stakeholders to ensure everybody understands the mission and gets on board with the plan. Yeah sure. Well let's start with what are your objectives? And the communication of those objectives should be company -wide. And those objectives should be cascaded down to everyone in the organization, down to the individual contributor. What I believe is once you've established objectives and communicated them, everyone in the organization not only wants

Stephen Brown (05:31.969)
but deserves to hear what's your progress to plan. So what I've done is I established monthly quote unquote all hands meetings that you talk about where the company is and how it's progressing towards these objectives. So everyone has an understanding of what the plan is and not only how it's going, but that doesn't mean it's rigid. There's always gonna be changes in directions, adjustments to market realities.

So communicate the changes that you needed to make to re -vector the direction. So that's for everyone. Amongst the leadership team, it's what I call weekly business performance reviews. And what it means is how is the company progressing to plan on a weekly basis from the standpoint of the fundamental objectives. The reason for a weekly cadence is monthly is too infrequent.

And daily is obviously too frequent, but you have each functional organization reporting on their objectives, how they're progressing to plan. What are their roadblocks? What are their issues? What help from the, what help do they need from other organizations? and so what I found is that kind of cadence is very, very important. And there's another aspect, which is like what I call quarterly sessions. And that's where you break down your strategy and objectives into.

the technology objectives, the sales and marketing objectives, the people objectives, and when it's time for fiscal year planning, the budget and operational objectives. So you break it down that way and you keep the plan fresh and in front of everyone. Every business transformation has a plan and it's actually not that dissimilar in terms of plan. The things that you're having to change, the corrective actions you need to take.

Once you do those, what is your growth strategy? How are you going to go forward? But it is a similar process across the board. And what I've learned after doing a few of these, there is a process to it and you must communicate that process. thinking back, Dan, over 30 plus years of doing this in technology, what were the most challenging problems you faced as a CEO and what did you do to overcome

Stephen Brown (07:57.003)
Yeah, well, there's many, many challenges and it depends on the kinds of changes and the fundamental corrective actions you need to take. But one of the comes to mind is my first time as a CEO, as a public company, and it was the period of time where the global financial crisis happened. And it was about a year into my tenure. I had had my growth strategy ready and we were going forward with

And that because of the global financial crisis, our customers really slowed down spending a lot. And it was about 25 % of our revenue that I'll use the word disappeared practically overnight. And so it became, okay, let's put the growth strategy to the side here. Don't lose all elements of it, but it became what's the save the company strategy. So that was a big about face because of that crisis.

And the important thing that I learned there is you have to keep, because of the tech cycles and the rapid change of new product cycles, you have to keep fundamental parts of the business active. You have to fundamentally keep fueling R &D. You have to have people on the front line to sell the product. So, in so much as we needed to make downsizing actions to reduce the cost of company and help the company survive, you have to keep the leading edge.

important. I call it the power ford of company. Now it's not that HR is important, legal, finance, but without in tech, without new innovative products and without people out there selling them, you're not going to be successful. So we did that. It was a balancing act. And once we came out the far side of that, we actually hit very strong financial metrics. So it was that preservation of those key areas that you could have easily decided to cut.

And that was a big lesson learned.

Stephen Brown (09:57.677)
So once you go through something like that, you go through a big change, you're coming out on the other side of it. What measures do you put in place to ensure long -term sustainability and prevent regression? Well, it kind of goes back to the discipline and structure of how you drive towards objectives. Fundamentally important that you have a regular cadence of understanding

What is the objective? What's the current status? What's the next steps? And what's the time into completion? And you track that rigorously across all functional areas of the organization. And what I found is if you keep on top of that, you'll understand where you are, you'll understand where you need to do course corrections, and you'll understand what is your progress and what you need to do next to be successful. And that is a monthly...

step I take or monthly process I take to ensure you stay on plan.

Stephen Brown (11:04.382)
Well Dan, I only have one final question here for you. I really appreciate your time with us today in the audience. Dan, what advice would you have for current and future leaders who aspire to take on the challenge of transforming struggling companies? Yeah, I think on top of establishing the way you want people to think and act towards being a successful team,

There's a couple of things that come to mind. One I call the Nevers. And one of them is never hide bad news. And that's probably the most important one. You've seen organizations that have leaders that just want to hear good news. Well, guess what? That sets the characteristics of the company. You don't want to elevate bad news. Well, if you don't do that, how can you take corrective action? And it starts to create weakness of the foundation. Other aspect

back to the people, never lose top talent. Fundamentally, the flip side is you have to make hard decisions so don't keep poor performers. So that's one fundamental area I would say. The other is the active listening and what I've conducted with each organization and smaller teams is what I call is the intake meeting. So ask them what you most like about the company and what do you want to preserve?

Ask them about the things that you think need to be changed. Ask them about what do you most hope I do? And then also ask them what do you most hope I don't do? And then what other advice do you have for me? So I call that the five things and have those intake meetings with broken down the small teams in every organization. And then report back. Here's what I've heard company -wide. Here are the things

we need to change in the near term. Here's the things that we need to change, but we can't do it right away. And then here's the things that we just can't do. But communicate all of that so everyone understands where you are and what you're thinking in the things that you're going to do. Great. Dan, thank you for that. I really appreciate you spending the time with us today.

Stephen Brown (13:20.587)
on the edge. It's been extremely valuable for me and I'm sure the listeners are going to get a lot out of this. So thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate your time. Great. Thank you, Stephen.