Leading Teams through Complex Transformations
In our second fireside chat, FlexPoint Consulting Founder & CEO Michael Daehne talks to Dan Ritch, CEO of SunStream Business Services, about Dan's journey as a technology and business leader and his pearls of wisdom for leading teams through complex digital transformations. In the discussion, Dan highlights the importance of building a world-class team, being intentional about culture and brand, and striving for transparency every day.
You can learn more about SunStream Business Services at https://www.sunstreamservices.com/.
Introduction
Michael Daehne: Hi there, and welcome to our FlexPoint Fireside Chat. I’m Michael Daehne, Founder and CEO of FlexPoint Consulting.
On today’s show, we have Dan Ritch, CEO of SunStream Business Services. Dan has had an illustrious career as an IT leader and took over as CEO of SunStream just about one year ago. We’ve been fortunate to partner with him on a number of transformational initiatives over the years, and I’ve seen firsthand how Dan leads with transparency, trust, honesty, and integrity. You’ll hear more about that in our discussion. I hope you enjoy.
Hey Dan, how are you doing?
Dan Ritch: I’m doing well, Michael. Thank you very much for asking me to do this. This is awesome.
MD: Yeah, it’s great to have you. And, as you know, we’ve gotten a chance to work together on a number of transformational initiatives over the years. I’m so glad to have you on today to talk a little bit about some of the cool stuff you’re doing right now at SunStream, and some lessons learned around driving successful transformations and the role of culture and trust and leadership. Glad to have you on.
Dan’s Career Journey
MD: For those that don’t know you, why don’t you start by just telling us a little bit about your career journey and what you do right now at SunStream.
DR: Sure. It’s been a bit of a lengthy career, but I’m happy I’m still here. I’ve been in the tech industry for a little over twenty-five years or so. I started in Perot Systems and had a chance to work with some other major organizations – Honeywell, Dell, and a few automotive suppliers – all in all, it’s been a great journey. I’ve been really lucky; I’ve had great teams along the way.
Now I’ve had a great opportunity to jump into SunStream, where our vision and mission is all about the farmer and rancher: helping them get access to capital and being the back-office systems to help them do that. I’m really proud to be a part of this now.
SunStream’s Digital Transformation
MD: That’s awesome. Talk a little bit more about SunStream, the work that y’all are doing to modernize the back-office experience within farm credit. Tell us a little bit more about that.
DR: You bet. SunStream was born out of the AgriBank [farm credit] district. A few of our customers have elected to pool in and spin us off into our own tech company. They’ve allowed us, with an allotment of dollars, to build out a digital transformation.
Our mission is to improve the systems, go through this whole transformation, and really build a better experience for our customers. We’re doing that now in the cloud, building an APIM [that is, application programing interface management] model, and moving through [adopting] Agile.
We’re changing the game on anything that we do. So that brings a lot of stress, but I’m thankful they have the confidence in us, and trust us to move this forward. We’ve got a big journey ahead of us, but we’re just getting started, and it’s kicking off pretty well.
Transition to CEO
MD: You’ve been at SunStream a little over a year now. As you mentioned, you’ve had an illustrious career as a technology leader and many CIO positions, but this is your first CEO role. On a personal note, how is being in that role, as opposed to the CIO? And what do you find is different, or has surprised you or challenged you?
DR: That’s a great question. I hope that those that have worked with me in the past feel as if I’ve run the IT departments with a CEO cap on. But certainly, it’s a little bit different now. The opportunity to come in and drive the organization in a different direction was very appealing, and the mission that we have was appealing.
I think the big difference is that I get to dip into areas that maybe I haven’t had the full responsibility of. Usually, I’ve been chartered to get something done, to drive something new, to focus on the operations. Now I need to look at A to Z, across the board. Other differences are: I’m in charge of the culture, I’m in charge of the brand, I’m in charge of everything. And there are areas that I really have to sink my teeth into and learn a little bit more.
I’ve also been responsible for bringing aboard great talent, including being fortunate enough to work with you and your team. In areas where we had some deficiencies, you’ve helped bring us up to speed. Then you’ve allowed me to pivot and look at other employees and FTEs [that is, full-time employees] that I can bring in, so it’s a good combo.
In a nutshell, it’s a difference of having all of it, and making sure it’s orchestrated, versus my piece fitting into a niche. And I’m really excited about doing that. It’s been a lot of fun.
Building a Winning Team
MD: You hit on something really interesting and important around talent and having the right people on the team, whether it’s folks that have been at SunStream and are stepping into critical roles, or bringing in folks from the outside.
What do you look for when you’re building out a winning team for a really critical program?
DR: That’s another great question. I love to find the experts in their realm, but I really think it’s all about the attitude and having gratitude about what you do. We’ve found some folks where their background may not have been in technology, but they’re excited about the mission and where they want to go. I think when we find the right people and get that right mix of expertise, passion for what they want to do, the thirst for knowledge, and wanting to make things different, we’ve got a good combo of all those folks.
When I’m talking with folks, I mention our mission, how we want to make the world better for farmers and ranchers. If you’re excited about the mission, if you’re excited about tech, if you’re comfortable with working in ambiguity – because some of the things are new here. You’ve got to be a pretty good storyteller as well, I think. If you’re just talking the tech buzzwords, some of our customers will look at you and say, “hey, can you make that a little bit different?” But if you don’t understand where we’re going as a business and helping the customers, that doesn’t help as well.
It’s a lot of combinations, but I think the passion for wanting to make a change, being excited about it, is number one. And then the technology. If you got it, that’s great. If you don’t, I think we can bring people up to speed.
Building a Winning Culture
MD: That’s great. I think it relates in a lot of ways to culture, which is something I’m really passionate about, and I know you are as well. Particularly in more technology-centric realms, it’s easier to be dismissive of the soft tissue stuff, and just be like, “hey, it’s all about the tech.” I love that you’ve always been very focused on what kind of culture are we building and what does that lead to from a results perspective?
Tell me about what you and the team are doing at SunStream to evolve and build out that winning culture.
DR: I saw early on, you’ve got an organization that has a great legacy, great people that have built the technology we have in place, but we’re making a big change. So I’ve found that you have to anchor yourself in a culture that helps drive things forward. Build in trust. Make sure you’ve got the right vision to put the right things in place. Empower your team.
We’ve partnered with other firms, obviously the good folks in your organization have helped us there. We’ve brought in a brand culture team, Envision, that’s helped us think about where we want to go different. We’ve tried to focus around: what’s going to make a big difference? What really rallies people to want to be here and gets our customers knowing that their trusting us with their technology? They’re giving us the opportunity to build something better.
So, we’ve anchored around this one-word why, that Envision helped us build: (in)trust. And that (in)trust capability is both how we trust our team members to go out and get the work done, how we hope our customers see us as trustful in working with their technologies. And we’re a managed service provider, so we’re putting some trust into some big partners with Fiserv and Infor and OneStream, and we trust that they’ve got the best technology, and we meld that all together.
I think we’ve also enabled our teams to help make good decisions. Part of that culture is really about getting the right people and enabling them to have success and take chances and fail forward, if you will. It’s okay if you make a mistake but learn from it. I think when we mix that all together, we’ve got a nice atmosphere for people. I’m really, really excited as we’re starting to get a name in the industry and we’re starting to have folks come over from other places – the war on talent is definitely there.
You have to have that brand. You have to have that culture. And you have to trust your people to get things done. I think that combo has helped us build a place that people are excited about being a part of.
Bringing Culture to Life
MD: When you talk about both culture and trust, one of the things that you’ve experienced, and I’ve seen in a lot of different organizations, you can put that on paper – “here’s what our culture is going to be” – and you can say “we trust you, we need our customers’ trust.” It’s a whole different ballgame to live that and feel that. What are some of the teams you and the team are doing to bring that culture to life, and take it from words and aspirations to really living it out?
DR: When I first got here, and you were a part of helping me do this, we went on a roadshow to understand the customer, and really think about what it is that they need to be successful. In order to help figure out what that culture was going to be, what that brand was going to be like, I needed to understand the customer and where they wanted to go.
Then when we started making progress and moving forward and laying the foundation. We started bringing in different folks to build out the talent spectrum that we have here. We spent a lot of time doing a lot of extra communication, if you will. We are very transparent – that’s part of our culture – so we communicate weekly, monthly, semi-annually. We have a leader-to-leader message that we send out to all our customers, keeping them informed on what we do.
We do a diagonal slice meeting where we go out and buy some pizza and get a cross-section of people from our organization to come in and just get to know each other. I think that getting on that human level and understanding what’s motivating people – the intrinsic value that they see, that makes them successful – helps them buy into the culture. Those have been pretty important for us.
We’re also showcasing what we do, both from a talent perspective and the product we’re building. As we’re trying to move to more of a product-oriented business, we have demos of what we do and distributing things. We’re also putting a spotlight on our people and giving them a chance to shine and talk about what they’ve learned about our customer, what they’re building, and where we’re going. That combination’s been pretty helpful for us to drive where we’re headed.
Blending Culture and Brand
MD: Excellent. And the related thing that you touched on, and this has really been brought to the forefront by Envision, the branding partners that you brought in, is the relationship between culture and brand. I think a lot of people think of them as distinct things – one’s external, one’s internal – but, as you know, the culture comes to define your brand, whether you like it or not. How are you and the team focused on that brand piece and taking that culture externally?
DR: Blending culture and brand, I think Envision’s helped us think about the idea that your brand is your culture, and your culture is your brand. And your words mean something. Helping us get better with that in understanding our people, talking more with our customers to figure out where we want to go has helped us infuse that a little bit better. I think it’s evolving.
Probably in my early days, I would put a stake in the sand and say, “this is where we’re going to go” and you just drive right to it. But I’ve noticed now, in my career, there’s a little bit of twists and turns, and there are some adjustments that you need to make.
And, if you think about our organization, we have folks that have been with us for over 20 or 25 years. We’ve got to make sure that we cherish what we’ve built, and then have them help us go where we need to be and make the changes. Moving from the mainframe to the cloud, doing things a little bit differently these days, these are meaningful changes. As long as we can maintain the communication flow between everybody, that’s going to help us build where we want to be.
Again, fourteen months into it, we’ve got a long way to go, but I think we’ve started well. This year has been the year of building the foundation. Next year we look at the year of delivering and operating the way we want to be.
Leading Blended Teams
MD: That’s great. One of the things that comes to mind: I’m a lifelong consultant, I’ve always been in a consulting role, good or bad, and I’ve come to learn and be humble enough that sometimes folks are not excited when consultants walk in the door. It’s always something that our team strives to overcome and build really good, collaborative relationships with the client teams and work in harmony.
You have a lot of consultants and contractors with your full-time employees, which can certainly present a challenge. How are you managing that, and building a cohesive team and culture?
DR: You’re right, we do have quite a few consultants involved with us. We’re just over 100 FTEs and just around 50 consultants across the board. We’re doing that with intent. Over the next three years, as we build out this transformation, we need to bring in folks that have the experience of being where we want to be. And we embed them into areas where we had some challenges, some weaknesses, or some blind spots, I should say, that haven’t we haven’t done before.
I think building a culture of respect and letting our FTEs know that we want to bring folks on board and treat them with respect, bring them into our discussions. We try to give them as much information as you can to keep everybody on the same wavelength, so the strategy is clear for everybody. The inclusion in discussions involves both FTEs and consultants. And we try to be mindful, you’re right, I think as an FTE you can feel a little threatened that these folks are coming in to take your job. And I look at it as someone that’s helping you advance where you are in the organization. Imagine that, in your day-to-day job, if you’re being taught and learning on the job from folks that have done this before.
A good example is when we moved to the cloud. We obviously haven’t done that before. We’ve been a mainframe shop, with a data center downstairs, and we needed to move to the cloud. Embarking upon that vision and bringing folks in that had done that. People can build up their skills eventually – I still have to manage the cloud when the consultants leave – so this is a great on-the-job training for them.
Then some of the consultancies, namely some of the folks that you’ve brought on board, you’ve worked with me before and helped us build a digital transformation. I have the faith that you have my back, so to speak, and you’re there to help empower our people to get better. The folks you brought in in program management, leadership, and change management have helped us get involved with the customer and partner with our FTEs so we’re one face coming to the customer.
I won’t lie, it’s been challenging up front with a lot of newbies coming on board. But I think as long as we keep that trust and respect, honor the commitment we have with our FTEs that they’re the primary source of driving this, but letting them know that these folks are there to help us get better, not to replace them, I think that’s helped us move along.
And you and others are going to be with us for a little bit longer, so the more we get to know each other – we’ll include you in our dinners, we’ll talk to you about the vision of where we’re going – so there’s no mistake that your path isn’t this way and our path is this way. We’re all on the same SunStream path. More importantly, we’re all there for the customer. I think that’s starting to see some benefits and bear some fruit.
Building True Vendor Partnerships
MD: You’ve mentioned this often, the difference between a vendor and a partner. I think over the years, we’ve built a true partnership, which we’re really grateful for.
One of the things that gets lost in that conversation over time is that the client organization has to do things to be a true partner, too. It’s not just what the vendor does. And I think some of the things you alluded to around including your consultants in town halls, team dinners, sharing goals, and being transparent about where the business is going – those are all things that help make all the team members, regardless of what their badge says, makes them all feel part of the SunStream team. I think that ultimately helps ensure better results from the work you’re doing.
DR: Yeah, and I think one of the examples – I’m proud to say – not that we’re stealing talent from our consultancy teams, but we’ve had some conversions [from contractor to FTE] as well. People that have been included and see the vision and see the change, and they want to be a part of SunStream. I think that’s a healthy sign of a great partnership relationship.
As long as there’s a good period of time in between –it’s a buy and try, so to speak, for us – and folks are excited about the mission. Everyone says they come for the mission and stay for the people. And some people want to convert over, and we’ve had that as well. I’m pretty proud that consultants have felt that this is a place they want to continue their journey and help us get stronger. That’s good results.
Coaching through Transformation
MD: The amount of change and transformation you are leading right now can be overwhelming for sure. I know your team and our collective teams feel that sometimes. But I also think it’s super exciting, and that’s what’s enabling you to assemble such a rockstar team – the opportunity to tackle decades of modernization work in a short period of time.
DR: I mean, who wants to join a place that’s standing still? You want to have these challenges. We’ve said it before: we have a lot of challenges, but we have more opportunity. Again, sometimes you deal with that ambiguity – “sheesh, we’re not sure how to fix this” – and you pull in the customer and you pull in the consultancy and you solve the problem. That’s pretty exciting. You’re a part of that.
And then the long-term benefit, starting with the endgame in mind. I can see where we’re going to be in five years. I can see what we’re building. I can see the benefit to the customer. I can see the value we bring with data, the value we bring with APIs, and then these awesome tools that we’re bringing together. SunStream has a lot to offer, and being a part of that is pretty exciting for me.
I think that’s the other piece about being the CEO – the tone at the top. I’m always like this, so I’m pretty excitable, probably too much coffee, but I think that enthusiasm is the force that creates momentum, as my high school football coach was always saying. I think we’ve got that here.
MD: It’s funny you bring up high school football. As you were talking about the intensity with which you lead, I was thinking about football coaches, and coaches of all kinds. It takes a special mindset and approach to drive results and unite people toward a common goal while also loving them and nurturing them. It’s a balancing act for sure.
DR: You learn a lot as a kid in team sports. You and I have talked about your opportunities of playing basketball, and my son is playing now. I think the team sport atmosphere: you win as a team, and I hope to coach that way and help drive where we want to go. And you get some star players, and sometimes they’re out creating and doing their own thing, and you’re like, “wow, I never knew we could do that.” Excited about the level they take us. Other times they need coaching to make sure they reinforce the message of where we’re going. I appreciate you noticing that, and I think it’s making a difference. I hope so.
MD: Yeah, it definitely is.
Pearls of Wisdom
MD: We’ve covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. We’ve talked about culture and trust and brand and blended teams. Before we go, any other advice or pearls of wisdom you would share for others that are leading through times of transformation?
DR: First and foremost, put the right players in the right spots. Take some time to think about your team. Talking about football, Bo Schembechler used to always say, “the team, the team, the team.” I think that’s the most important, and we’ve built an awesome team here. So, I think finding the right team is first.
Second, setting the strategy and being relentless about it. In a world of change, change management is pretty important. Don’t give up on that message. Yes, you’ll finetune it as you go. But don’t give up. It takes time to make this all work. I wish we could faster each and every day, but fourteen months into it, you look back after another complete year, and I think we’re making a lot of change.
Third, the transparency. You are going to make mistakes. You’re going to learn a lot from your board and from your owners and from your customers. Listen to what they have to offer.
If you put that all together, you’ll build a winning brand. You’ll build a winning culture. You’ll bring the right talent on board. You’ll get partnerships, such as we have with you and your organization, as the icing on the cake that gives us that extra expertise, folks that have been there and done that. I really appreciate having you here with us, Michael, and your team.
Closing
DR: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about it, and I hope folks can learn a little bit from our conversation.
MD: Thank you again for taking the time. I know you have a lot going on. We’re very grateful for your partnership and grateful to have you on today. I’m going to ask you back in a year or two to tell me about how successful this whole transformation was. Can’t wait for that.
DR: Same here. Thanks, Michael. I appreciate it.