Before starting Parallax, I was the President and CEO of The Nerdery, a product design and engineering company. For thirteen years, I was lucky to work alongside some of the brightest people in the industry. Together we grew from just a few programmers to almost 500 Nerds, offices in four states, and over $70M in annual sales.
It was a great experience, and people often ask how we did it. With the benefit of hindsight, I'm able to say that it was our insatiable hunger for learning and, most importantly, the trust we had in each other that enabled our success. Our culture allowed the team to approach every humbling setback or exciting achievement as an opportunity to get better.
The need for a shared perspective
We learned a ton growing the Nerdery, and access to data was a huge reason we were able to scale successfully. We were data nerds, and we shared information openly. We used our understanding of key business metrics (e.g., revenue, project margin, utilization) to inform strategy and to give us the confidence needed to always invest in talent. Like everyone else, we cobbled together data using spreadsheets and homegrown tools. While some ERP systems on the market promised “real-time reporting,” we knew using the tools out there would mean shoe-horning our business into software designed for old school consulting firms.
Since we started building Parallax, we have seen this same story playing out in digital agencies and software shops all over the country. We’ve recruited owners and operators of over 90 companies to our Product Advisory Council (PAC), and we’ve heard they’re all facing the same challenges I experienced. They rely heavily on data, but the data they have sits isolated in sales, resourcing, or delivery silos. What they lack is real-time access to forward-looking data built across those functional components.
So many of our advisors feel that their businesses are becoming increasingly complex, and they can no longer rely on their “gut instincts” to inform strategy or operations. The good news is that the information data provides can create empathy, shared perspective, and trust – helping to restore the magic that we all have experienced as entrepreneurs.
Scaling the magic
As our advisors’ companies have grown, the team who once did everything together, split focus. Individuals become experts, and sales, delivery, and team leaders emerged. Each individual started looking at the business through a lens colored by the information available to them in their respective silo. Naturally, it’s not as easy for the head of sales to know what’s going on in delivery and vice-versa. It’s become clear to us that this is the crux of the challenge for most leaders, and the reason it feels like their businesses are more complex as they grow. Unfortunately, the lack of cross-functional information often leads to emotionally charged decisions that would have been easy as a small team. Our customers continue to show us that giving leadership teams data that spans across the sales pipeline, into resource planning, project accounting, and forecasting brings back some of the trust that came easy when they were small. With some simple business insights, they’ve built back the shared perspective that they didn’t realize they had lost.
So in many ways, we set out on this journey to help digital agencies and software shops continue to scale the magic that made them great. We’re very passionate about empowering teams with information and building a shared perspective across teams.
Helping digital agencies align people and business
In 2017, I left The Nerdery to start building Parallax. My co-founder, David Annis, was experiencing similar challenges at a digital strategy and branding agency. He was running a successful business with a solid culture. But, they too, hit a growth point that they were struggling to grow beyond.
It was becoming more difficult for Dave and his team to maintain visibility into key organizational metrics and align the agency’s talented employees to where the business was going. There weren’t tools available to solve this effectively.
Dave and I decided to fill this gap together. We wanted to help product development and software firms grow in a way that takes into account their business and their people. Professional services businesses are people businesses. Their success depends on their ability to nurture, engage, and empower their people. It’s vital to take a human-centered approach when running these businesses — and that’s especially the case in times of business disruption like we’re experiencing right now.
We built and launched Parallax because we wanted to solve the unique people-problems faced by product development and software firms, while also keeping them operating strategically. By creating a shared perspective with real-time forecasting, we knew we could help these firms run strategic businesses and solve people problems.
With Parallax, we want to help professional services firms create business success by aligning human potential with their constantly evolving business needs.
How does Parallax do this? It facilitates best practices and processes in sales, resourcing, and delivery so businesses can easily plan, measure, and forecast their performance.
Alone, together
Running a product development or software firm is hard. Owners and operators of these businesses often carry the weight of critical business decisions alone and worry about how to provide a great place to work for the great talent they’ve hired. What’s worse, they frequently feel isolated and alone in these challenges. In reality, these are challenges shared across virtually every product development and software firm that exists.
Our goal with launching this blog is to help these business owners feel less alone in their challenges. Right now, amid a time that is challenging both professionally and personally, this matters more than ever before.
Through Parallax’s blog, you’ll regularly hear from various members of our team who will offer advice and best practices that you can implement at your firms. We’ll talk about creating productized services, operationalizing and scaling your sales process, creating a shared perspective across teams, nurturing a company culture that creates better engagement and opportunity for individual growth, and how to approach service evolution.
We want the information we provide you to be therapeutic in the sense that it makes you feel less alone and more prepared. We also want it to be practical enough to apply to your business. Have something you’d like to talk about? Let us know.
Let’s connect
If you’d like us to notify you any time we share a new post, subscribe to our email updates. We’ll let you know when there’s new content for you to check out.
If you’re interested in getting a behind-the-scenes look at Parallax and how it might help your firm, reach out to us to schedule a demo.
Most households have an unsolved Rubiks Cube but you can esily
