What was the company’s journey like to get to where it is now?
My company’s journey is one of personal suffrage and successes. I started in 2006. The original plan was just to help sales marketing teams to work better together through normal business consulting. More and more people started to ask me for this other skill that I had developed which is helping them to implement Salesforce. By 2012 I was just slammed! I had too much work and I had a really hard time keeping it up. I brought on, one short-term temporary employee developer in January of 2010 and that number has grown to 350 people as of today.
The journey’s been crazy, I have undergone many phases of change. Once we hit 40 people, all of a sudden I had to learn how to lead managers. Once we hit 100 people, I had to learn how to drive a full reorganization and rethink how we organized our entire business. We used to be able to go in and set people’s expectations in terms of what the business can do for them. We can walk into a room and customers have done enough research to know what we’re capable of doing. I would say that I have kind of lived through 7 or 8 generations of business change since 2010.
What is it about your company’s culture that drives success?
Culture is a product of collective values shared within a community of people that drives collaboration and team building. The more transparent and open you can be within the company the more sincere and authentic your culture becomes. It is our single most powerful differentiation. When it comes to leadership, my goal is to bring the best out of those around them and give them an opportunity to thrive, fail, and learn from their failures. It is also creating an environment where they can truly realise their potential and that’s what being a leader is.
What is it about your office environment that creates success?
When I actually met our leasing agent Blair Quinn from CBRE, Blair opened my eyes to the opportunity to be more strategic with space. I think space is a tremendous tool to reinforce the culture and help enforce the core values of Traction. Our culture is to be flexible, entrepreneurial and open to change and that is exactly what our office feels like.
What’s next for Traction On Demand?
We are going through a really interesting change, where our customers are beginning to ask us “how” – not just what.We’ve launched a new business called Traction Enable where we help our customers build their own internal sales force capabilities. A big part of our strategy is to help our customers be as competent on a salesforce platform as our competitors are. The other big part of our strategy is this notion of a 100 companies in 10 years and follow the will of the team and see where it takes us.
Traction on Demand
Traction on Demand is one of North America’s largest dedicated Salesforce consulting and application development firm delivering cross-platform solutions and standalone SaaS products. As both a Salesforce.com Platinum Consulting Partner and Salesforce.org Premium Partner,