So, I do a fair amount of work talking to and helping startup owners figure out their go to market and product launch challenges; I like the challenge of figuring out their business and how to help them out. I do this my lurking in the subreddit /r/startups and answering questions from the folks who work at startups.
Most of the time, it's a quick chat and things move on and I'll get a note a year later or such thanking me or, sometimes, much quicker on more questions. I hope it is usually helpful, as I enjoy the thought exercises.
I met one startup leader about 7 months ago who had hit some desperate straits; he had, like a lot of folks, poured way too much of his personal capital and his own energy into making his vision for automating a lot of the difficult work on running a consulting firm; he had a strong point of view on how to build and deliver a solution in this area, but like a lot of technical leaders, was struggling to communicate the value of the product and had created a platform where the UX, to put it politely, was hiding the power of what he had built.
This company had red flags galore - a founder who was technically brilliant, but a poor communicator who had built a great team, but struggled with balancing his personal life and his startup. Adding to this difficultly was a war occurring next door in Ukraine and the uncertainty of the region. Normally, a dozen reasons presented as to why this was a bad investment.
But his vision and persistence to connect and seek some advice got me to pay attention as I had worked with the customers he was targeting my entire career - his target is the IT services firms I've been partnering with my entire career. His use case resonated with me - I knew that fast growing services firms often had the "shoemaker's children" problem of many different application silos, between accounting, HR, task management and talent management there were all sorts of gaps to be automated and closed.
His vision for EmployPlan is broader than the current offering; we are first focusing in on being the "missing loop" between systems that track who knows what skills, systems that track who has done work putting those skills to work and systems that manage the projects that are being proposed and delivered.
By capturing every training and every delivery event, we build a skill and delivery experience profile for every resource and automate the process of building the right team slate for projects automatically. We build skill paths for users, directing them to training to close capacity and bench gaps before new projects close, and most exciting to me, it does it across connected suppliers and subcontractors.
Melody and I decided to take an equity position in the company to rebuild their go to market and customer success functions to help the market see this really valuable platform the team has built. Recently, I went to Łódź Poland to meet with the EmployPlan team and found a vibrant city of developers and engineers who have a deep technical capability, but are missing the critical go to market capabilities that are common to us in the west.
The team I met has a burning desire to help customers solve this problem and to build the AI-Automated consulting management platform; now to help them get a global stage to accomplish this goal.
Roch, Kuba and Dariusz
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