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Over 2 years ago, when Gans — a seasoned IT consultant with more than 25 years on his back — reviewed the state of his industry, he thought there still was space for helping customers understand digital transformation from a backend perspective. With the trend of SaaS and AI automation coming in, he and his two partners noticed that the big consulting places didn't have the energy nor the right structure to take this approach for the type of customers they wanted to cater to.
That's how B-TRNSFRMD was born: an IT consulting and system integrator that helps mid-market customers understand and implement processes of digital transformation.
This boutique-type business helps with everything: from strategy and design to identifying the right technology to use, or evaluating whether their customers can implement the solutions by themselves, and if they can’t, they help look for relevant vendors to get things implemented. Today they target 4 broad areas, including omnichannel customer experience, cloud contact centers, business process management (BPM), and analytics.
B-TRNSFRMD owns its success in part to the culture the partners have instilled across the company: they don’t have any products by themselves, instead, they’ll sign up with partners for their products and help implement them; they have a trained team across the world of certified experts in different stages of the transformation process to help manage the project from end to end.
They’re a remote-first startup, with “hub” offices in Boston, Mumbai, and Dallas, while their team is spread mainly in India (in smaller cities), with a smaller percentage of people in the bigger cities or in the US.
Something that has played in their favor is the increasing population of highly educated workers who value remote work, but due to personal reasons do not want to move to big cities where tech hubs usually reside. That has allowed them to recruit top talent organically that enjoy their working conditions and thus feel less inclined to go somewhere else.
💡 A curious fact B-TRNSFRMD found out from their recruitment is that, over time, they’ve accrued a female-led workforce with over 80% of their workers being women. The company culture hasn’t suffered from this. On the contrary, the team feels positive about working from home and maintaining a work/life balance wherever they are. They get to live close to their families and develop meaningful careers from the comfort of their city.
In terms of competition, being laser-focused has been part of their success. While different competitors own too much or too little of their customers’ processes, depending on their type of business, B-TRNSFRMD has maintained a simple approach to customer success: work with the tools and the people you know. And they know mid-market company processes very well. As such, they focus on US companies with 500-5000 employees, within $100MM to $1B in size, in the industries of customer experience and business process management.
Gans found DailyBot on LinkedIn over a year ago, and start using it for daily stand-ups with their team inside Microsoft Teams. For him, DailyBot is a part of a system. After having implemented the practices of Full Focus for almost 3 years now to keep his goals in line, he devised DailyBot’s standups as a framework to share his mental model with the team — he thought:
They could always do calls for this, but it seemed a waste of time. DailyBot’s daily standups allowed him and his team to go through their 2 or 3 things for the day to maintain focus and increase visibility for everyone.
It seemed priceless for a young company like B-TRNSFRMD to know what any of its employees were doing every day, including their CEO. Daily check-ins embedded a sense of accountability to the culture that naturally trickled down to the rest of the team — by example.
And as the team gets bigger and bigger, they realized they could use check-ins to start looking at blockers to track efficiency and get problems out of the way as soon as possible. They naturally went from promoting visibility through standups to maintaining a channel for documenting what help everyone needs, or what things the team should focus on next.
Every Monday, the team starts their Monday kickoff meeting with a Weekend Gratitude check-in. It gets the flow of the meeting going as they move towards a more synchronous format to keep in touch with the people on the other side of the screen.
As a hybrid and mostly remote team, they keep two centers (or “hubs”) in India as well, and they hire newcomers around them so workers can show up once a quarter or so and collaborate in person with their team.
Also, besides daily check-ins and asynchronous communication, they do 1-week off-sites twice a year, where they pick a fun place (like The Himalayas) so everyone can work while they enjoy the change of scenery.
