Back in 2008, I wrote a series of posts called Growth Is Hard in which I put some context around the growing pains we were experiencing at the time. You can see the posts
here,
here, and
here. At the time, we had grown quickly from 50 to 200 clients, and from 20 to 50 employees, and for a few months experienced some well-publicized capacity (both system and support) issues that thankfully were resolved.
Since then, we have not been perfect but have generally executed well and grown steadily. Yet here I am writing a new post called Growth Is Hard (Part 4)--so what gives? Several trends have emerged recently which could all be filed in the "good" category. Our pace of customer adoption has increased significantly (see
my last post on reaching 500 customers). We are seeing great traction on some new products in the pipeline. Transaction volumes are increasing as a result of an improving economy and financial regulation causing higher levels of bank switching. We have expanded our team significantly with world-class people. All good, right?
In the long term, absolutely. But in the short term, we are going through some growing pains again. Some clients have experienced several brief periods of downtime over the past few months, including two partial outages on March 29th. Over the same period, our turnaround times on certain implementation and support projects have increased, in some cases to frustrating and frankly unacceptable levels. We've seen this movie before and should have recognized the signs earlier--always easier in hindsight--so I wanted to use this forum to describe what's happening and what we're doing about it.
To provide some context, we just reached 500 financial institution customers, and it was only eight months ago that we surpassed 400. To support this type of accelerating growth, we have been making very significant investments in people and infrastructure--for example, we:
- Are growing our headcount by more than 50% (from 60 to 90+ people), particularly within Client Services and Engineering
- Made major commitments in our roadmap to configuration tools, scalability, and a modular architecture
- Recently raised $10.5 million of fresh capital for future investment and to keep our balance sheet strong
- Are developing tools to turn around common change requests in days or hours; Later this year we will be running a pilot program to put these tools directly into our customers’ hands for instant turnaround
- Added or promoted several new key managers recently, including Ken Young as VP of Client Services, Fred Engel as Chief Operating Officer, Alayna Cohn as Director of IT, Alex Abramov as Chief Architect, Shawn Brandt as VP Engineering, Jamie Verdi as Director of Account Management, and Suzanne Reynolds as Director of Channel Accounts, all of whom have flawless execution as a primary objective and are focused on this every day.
Based on these steps, we expect steady progress and a return to normal service levels within the next 60 to 90 days, followed by constant improvement to new levels over the course of the year.
I know it's risky to talk about these issues in public and that some will choose to use the information against us. But transparency and trust are key values in our culture and we believe customers prefer knowing the real story and to know there are great people behind the scenes taking the issues seriously and working hard to make things better.
As always, customers and partners are welcome to call me directly at 401.574.4770 any time.