Growth Is Hard! (Update)

As I recently alluded to, we've had a rough couple of weeks. We've found ourselves as a company in a position I always promised I would never let happen - being overcommitted. Fortunately, most of our customers remain well-supported and happy, although there's a segment of our implementing customer base that is admittedly not getting the attention they deserve or expected. This is nothing more than bad planning on our part, and we've spent the last couple of weeks focused completely on how to resolve the bottlenecks, quickly.

Some of the steps we have taken include redistributing the project load among implementation managers, bringing on Keith Roberts as VP of Operations, significantly accelerating our implementation team hiring plans, instituting some more efficient process changes, and expanding our software development team. These steps, among others not mentioned, will fully address the implementation capacity issues in relatively short order. The result of all these changes will be to effectively double our implementation launch pace, from the 4.2 go-lives per month we averaged in 2007, to over 8 in 2008. That should let us get back ahead of sales this year, and give us the foundation to crank it up even further if sales outperforms expectations again this year, like they did last year.

Some people ask me why I'm so open about things like this. As I pointed out in my very first blog post a couple of years ago, I want this to be an open forum for me to display our blemishes as prominently as our accomplishments and accolades, and I hope this balance helps signal our commitment at least to doing the right thing. I know posts like this could (will) be exploited by our competition, but all I can say is that by the time they get the message out that Andera is overcommitted, we'll have already solved our problems, and they'll still have theirs. Although they won't be talking about them.

The offer is still open for any clients (or potential clients) concerned about this to call me, any time. I'm at 401.621.7900 x11 or ckroll@andera.com.