When Alex Triplett is asked to explain where and how he began acquiring his operations knowledge, he tells us that his ops focus began to sharpen as more and more roles demanded greater “specificity” of him.
Back in 2006, Triplett had just completed a stint as an investment banker with Citigroup when he was hired by private equity firm TA Associates as an associate inside the firm’s enterprise software and fintech realms.
“Fintech forced me to get closer to the product itself because I couldn’t be credible otherwise,” recalls Triplett, who notes that very often the company founders across from whom he sat at meetings had other options when it came to sourcing investors, so the ability to demonstrate some depth when it came to product knowledge became essential.
“I got used to it being about product, product, product,” continues Triplett, who tells us that even today, his TA years bring to mind volumes of product literature and a steady stream of software demonstrations.
Read MoreStill, Triplett reports that the specificity that he was able to nurture when it came to actual product knowledge was of little aid to him when discussions turned to the different operational challenges that certain founders were confronting. He attributes this void to what might be deemed the familiar investor–operator gap.
“They were great investors, but they didn’t always know how to give specific advice to a company that was trying to understand whether to pivot right or pivot left,” remarks Triplett, who says that it was his growing appetite for operations knowledge that ultimately led him to leave TA and join the corporate development team at financial services software company Ion.
In the years that followed, Triplett was at times tasked with being general manager of various newly acquired businesses—a succession of assignments that eventually would empower him with the specificity required to emerge as an operations troubleshooter.
“It’s great to be able to analyze the shape of things from 10,000 feet and glean insights using pattern recognition,” Triplett observes, “but do you actually know how a business works?” –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about Appfire … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Triplett: We are the leading global provider of next-generation apps that enhance, augment, extend, and connect the world’s leading platforms, such as Atlassian, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Monday. We have a vast knowledge worker base that is using these platforms. They could be using them because they’re developers and using them for workflow. They could be IT service management using them for Help Desk support, both internally and externally. They could be in development operations, focusing on the tool chain that the product and development teams might use. All of these knowledge workers use these platforms every day, but the platforms can’t always do all of the specific things that the users want them to do—so there all of these little pain points.
Read MoreWe have apps that come in and delightfully solve these pain points. They’re very specific. They do what they say that they’re supposed to do—no more, no less. They allow our knowledge worker base to work in the way that they want to work and to tweak and customize a platform to be the way that they want it to be.
The big things for us right now are preparing for 10x scale and upgrading corporate hygiene. Both of these can make the underlying foundations of our business hum much more efficiently so that we can focus on all of the juicy stuff—which is growth, growth, growth. For me, this means completing core system implementations across the board. We’ve been putting in not only NetSuite but also Salesforce, Workday, ADP, Coupa, Greenhouse, and Jira for all of our development and client support. Basically, we are setting up one global system that we will never have to touch, at least for the next decade. This will just alleviate so much time and complexity and waste, particularly as we grow, add people, and maybe make acquisitions.
The second level to this is that now we need to automate as many systems and processes around RPA as possible in order to make the organization really, really efficient. These things will be priorities over the next 12 months. Accomplishing them will set us on a very strong foundation so that I can then spend a lot of my time thinking about growth drivers.
jb
Appfire | www.appfire.com | Burlington, MA