The Back-Office Surprises Nobody Warned You About When Going Global

One of the things that you mentioned in a prior conversation is this term, like, fully absorbed.

What does that mean when you actually talk about integrations, deals that you're working on at ECI?

As I mentioned, I joined ECI about seven years ago, and at the time, ECI was twenty years old.

And it's my understanding that up until that point, ECI had more of a holding company perspective.

They'd buy companies and allow them to operate independently.

And I'd say roughly two years before I joined ECI, they realized at some point you hit a tipping scale, and that's no longer scalable.

You can't effectively run a company if you have, for instance, six different HRIS systems and six different ERP systems.

It just makes reporting and operations really difficult.

So about two years before I joined, they took the initiative to introduce a single ERP system and a single HRIS system.

And then the next logical step in that process was to bring someone like me on board, whom they never had anybody in that role before, to oversee the integration of their acquisitions, because now instead of them being separately run more or less as their own holding company or as their own standalone company under a holding company, they needed to fully integrate them, including moving all of their data into our ERP system, which is predominantly what I mean by full absorption.

Literally full absorption.

And that was, it sounds like a pretty transformative model from what the organization was previously doing.

It certainly was.

And in addition, while I have emphasized the data migration element of it, there is the people side as well.

So all of the individuals that we acquire from our acquisitions are in a myriad of different functions, HR, marketing, accounting, finance, product development, et cetera, and they all end up reporting into their respective functional leaders under ECI Software Solutions.

That's a big change.

Can you give me the playbook on how you would make that kind of transformation for another organization in that same situation?

Certainly.

It starts before close, and we take a look at the employee census and spend a lot of time on the org chart and trying to understand really the roles and responsibilities of each and every person that we are acquiring.

And that's more or less doable if you're acquiring a company of about, say, up to fifty to a hundred people.

Getting that level of detail when you get up to three hundred, it's a little bit more challenging.

But literally, if we can, we have a call or several calls with the leadership and ask them to walk us through exactly what all of these individuals do.

Then we'll have a follow-up call really to test the waters and make sure that we fully understand and ask questions about what the roles and responsibilities are of each of these individuals.

And then what we do is we go back and we develop what we suggest is our reporting structure on day one.

We run that by the leadership of the target before close.