New Leaders

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of Life Ingredients, an educational program that teaches mindfulness, calming techniques, and other life skills to children.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with New Leaders?

I had an idea for a web-based educational platform and needed a team to help me build and launch it. I hired New Leaders to develop a website and the product itself, while also providing branding and content strategy. Both the site and the platform needed to be professional, clean, and attractive.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked together to design the platform and identify key features. They developed the website and the web-based system, which included an audio and video resource library that is categorized by age groups. They also provided logo design and content strategy for the website.

Their team also implemented financial tools on my website. These products expedite the subscription process and facilitate donations to schools and other organizations that use my service.

What is the team composition?

Robert (Managing Partner, New Leaders) was my main point of contact throughout the project. During the development and design phases, I worked with Cesar (Senior Creative Director and Web Designer, New Leaders), Christian (Software Developer, New Leaders), and a handful of other developers.

How did you come to work with New Leaders?

I had previously worked with Cesar, and he referred me to Robert. I spoke with Robert and found him to be exceptional. He was also supportive of my idea, which is the main reason why I chose New Leaders as my partner.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $50,000–$200,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in October 2015 and ended in March 2016. They provide ongoing maintenance and updates.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We have 300–500 users, and we’ve successfully piloted the platform at five schools. The website is polished and effectively shares my message and story. We’re ready for a wider release of the product.

How did New Leaders perform from a project management standpoint?

We frequently communicated via email and occasionally held in-person meetings to design features and discuss potential updates. They kept track of deadlines and were flexible when I wanted to make changes.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They took the time to comprehend my vision and ideas and incorporated them into the site and the product. Their team was much more collaborative than the developer I worked with previously.

Something else I appreciated was Robert’s open-door policy. I could call him at any time, and he was always happy to chat about our progress.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t identify any improvements they should make. We’ve been able to fix every issue and make adjustments when necessary.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Create a visual that communicates your project or idea. This will help their team understand your goals and save you time and money. They’re amazing and can build anything, so it’s up to you to be clear about what you want.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there. 

I’m VP of marketing and sales for Bright Event Rentals. We supply temporary tables, chairs, flatware, tents, flooring, and air conditioning for corporate events, weddings, and social events. We've grown to eight locations in California and Arizona.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with New Leaders?

We had purchased assets that were the intellectual property of another company. We initially hired New Leaders to port the website over from the old location and to rebrand it. They also helped us with SEO efforts on our current website. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

After the website, we asked New Leaders to work on a delivery notification system for our clients. Up until now, our truck delivery routes live in an ERP system called Alert. Clients would have to call their sales representative on the phone to get additional information on delivery times. It’s a manual process, so we wanted to find a way to get route information to our clients in real time.

Part of the challenge was that we stored our contracts, inventory, and accounting information in Alert. Our truck tracking system, however, is in another web-based software program called Samsara. We wanted to integrate those two systems and find a way to communicate information in both systems to our clients. 

New Leaders served as the data collector from those two systems. They built an app that pulls information from Alert about the contract and requested delivery window. It also pulls information from Samsara about the truck’s location and the number of scheduled stops. They integrate various information into the app using APIs. The app shares the data to the clients through push notification, email, or text message. The app was built for both iOS and Android.  

What is the team composition?

Robert (Owner, New Leaders) was our lead. He had several people working on graphic design or writing code but served as the go-between for his team and us. 

How did you come to work with New Leaders? 

They were already working with the other company from which we acquired the intellectual property. Since they were the incumbent on the project, we decided to see if they were a good fit for us. We liked the work they did on the websites, so we approached them with the app development project. They gave us a proposal, and we went from there.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement? 

The app project took place from August 2018 to April 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The app is in beta testing. Client feedback has been that the app is super cool and helpful. It hasn't yet impacted our internal processes. We're still getting phone calls from the majority of our clients when they need a delivery update. Those phone calls will dissipate shortly, and we're hoping eventually go away altogether. We're just in the beginning phases, but the most significant success is that New Leaders was able to piece all the data together. Now the app can show in real-time exactly where our trucks are for a particular route. That's very exciting.

How did New Leaders perform from a project management standpoint? 

Their team is great. We had a call every Tuesday and Thursday with Robert to talk through progress and set milestones. Then he'd go back to his side and start working on those pieces. Robert also worked with the Alert coders who were doing that portion of the project. He communicated any issues that came up. The team was flexible and adapted to working with multiple vendors and third-party contractors. Timelines were generally met. Any delays were usually the result of having to wait for all parties to finish their work. 

What did you find most impressive about them? 

New Leaders was thoughtful about our business. They always came up with good solutions to our problems. They focused on what's best for us and not necessarily what's best for them. Their team was professional and knowledgeable, and their ability to solve problems was wonderful. 

Are there any areas they could improve? 

No, I can’t think of anything. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers? 

Speaking as someone with limited technical knowledge or coding ability, they could do better at explaining the project in layman's terms. I could generally understand the little pieces, but a more in-depth knowledge would have helped me give them direction or explain what I was asking for. For example, they could help me better understand that if I ask them to do X, it requires much more time and energy than if they do Y. Some of that responsibility falls on our team, recognizing that they can't spoon-feed everything.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Classic Party Rentals is a national event rental company. We have offices in 30 locations around the country. I’m the CIO. I support all of the applications and the infrastructure.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with New Leaders?

I’ve used New Leaders over the past 3 years developing our website. When I joined the company, we had gone through a series of acquisitions and acquired 17 different companies. The primary challenge was that each company had their own individual website. We wanted to develop a simple web presence and build out a consolidated website as well as a lead management platform.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, the scope was to help us develop an overall design. They built out the framework, selected all of the technologies that will underlie the website and did the user design. Then, we went through a series of interviews with our internal folks to finalize what features were most important and then basically built out a roadmap

They started implementing different features. It was like a series of smaller releases over the last three years, but we got some initial functionality and then we just continued to enhance the capabilities that we have. They did the design and development for a brand new website, brand new platform, and brand new back end. They built out the database. I had my team working on all of the data attribution. We have about 30,000 products that are online and a lot of the internal work was around topography and data attribution. We had an internal team doing all of what I would call content development and the New Leaders team did all of the application’s development.

They would develop a prototype and then I would work with our internal business users to present different options, especially some of the more interesting features that went through several iterations. Initially, the site was all around the product catalog, but because we have so many different stores and all of the stores maintain different products and a different inventory, we had to make the system flexible enough to display certain products in one store and different products in a different store. They built the entire product catalog and filtering and search capabilities within the website.

Later on, we added online payments, a customer portal, and featured events and galleries. We’ve added custom landing pages for some of our larger customers that have repeat orders every week. We’ve got shopping carts and different sorts of inquiry forms and consultation requests, and these are basically what I would call the heart of the system. It’s allowing us to receive leads from consumers, B2B and B2C, and then those leads get routed to the nearest store. That store then has a process internally where they handle each lead. They can communicate with a lead and then push the lead into our ERP. We added some integrations to our Oracle ERP so that the ERP would handle all of the order management after the customer receives a quote.

Their lead guy is Robert Bousquet and we have one lead programmer. We also have a couple of supplemental programmers, one UX designer, and one person that helps us with our Google AdWords campaigns.

How did you come to work with New Leaders?

We evaluated three different providers. We chose New Leaders because of their capability and previous experiences. The rental industry is very unique, so there isn’t going to be anybody who has done a custom site similar to what we have, but their experience was similar in nature in terms of product catalogs and some of the features that we’ve got. Then, as we went through the platform selection, technical experience was really important, and obviously cost becomes a big factor as well.

How much have you invested with New Leaders?

We have spent between $700,000 and $900,000. We have them on a monthly retainer where they continue to support us.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in October 2014, and the work is ongoing. They do all of our production support and we also do some feature enhancements.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We take all of the leads that are generated and we track how they translate into orders in our system. In the last 12 months, we’ve generated roughly around $14 to $15 million in invoiced dollars. It wasn’t possible previously because we didn’t really have a good website. We weren’t generating leads. We didn’t have the SEO. We just got selected by Oracle in March as a finalist for and Oracle Markie Award for the best lead management program. They had probably 400 or 500 entries, and we were one of four finalists.

How did New Leaders perform from a project management standpoint?

We have a weekly agile type of release methodology. At the beginning and end of each week, we meet. We review what the project priorities are. We use Pivotal, and everything’s assigned a point value. That’s essentially how we manage their hours and the budget. I help prioritize from a feature set and then they manage their work load internally, scaling up or down depending on the current scope of work. It’s been working out really well for us.

What did you find most impressive about New Leaders?

They’re very flexible in their design approaches. They’ve had experience with a variety of different tools, techniques, and technologies. They always have good suggestions for features. Payments was a feature that we built from the ground-up, and it required integration with our ERP vendor. It consists of semi-auto payment requests to the customer directly from the ERP system that funnels through the website and sends the customer to a landing page on the website where they could process payment. It has APIs and some complexity in terms of how we calculate the final payment due. They handled all of that with what I would call really good technical capability. They also have a lot of good suggestions on user experience. They have different skillsets within the team and they’ll bring in a skillset as needed. That’s what I would value most from New Leaders, their capability to bring in expertise as required by the feature enhancement at the time.

Are there any areas New Leaders could improve?

Part of our requirement, on occasion, was rolling out features on a more aggressive timeline. One of their limitations is that they’re a fairly small team. We went through some valleys where we weren’t getting enough of their time and we had to correct that. They were able to bring on some additional folks. That would be their biggest limitation if you want to do a really large project. They’re probably not equipped like a bigger player would be to do a large-scale development. For us, this was the right sized team of three to five people that we could consistently count on. But if you need a team of ten or 20, they’re probably not capable of supporting an effort of that size.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with New Leaders?

I would say make sure you have the commitment. Obviously, they’re a small team, and now that we’ve had that experience with them, we get their time. But if you’re a new client, you have to push for getting more of their time. Make sure you know exactly what you’re getting and the timeframes you’re signing up for.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and president of a small aviation navigation content management system. We’ve been around since 2008.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with New Leaders?

We needed an industry-specific CMS. It was an entrepreneurial event, where there was an untapped need in a highly-specialized marketplace. We wanted to get moving quickly. We wanted someone who could get into the weeds of the business itself, as it’s a pretty odd business and highly technical. They needed to be able to understand the aviation industry attributes and characteristics pretty quickly.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They were asked to build a pretty significant content management system. We didn’t have anything; it was just me and an idea. We decided to go the contract route rather than hiring directly once we were comfortable it was the right move. We didn’t even have a company when we started, so we needed everything.

We needed a name, a brand, a logo, a web presence, a content management system, legal work — everything to start a company. New Leaders didn’t do the legal work, but they directed in some good areas locally. I was really looking for a company-in-a-box — all of the components to get a company launched — including the build of the actual product. The scope was pretty large, and we leaned on them heavily for the foundation of the business.

First, we worked on getting a minimum viable product out there quickly. Then, once we had some user feedback, we went through the various versions and refinements. I’d bring folks from New Leaders into client meetings and they represented us. They got through the qualification and early deliverable phase of the product, brand, and name, and then I took it for a while. We waited for more feedback from users, and then I decided to keep them involved with the product to iterate going forward, and we still do that today.

The CMS had to work on the web and various devices. The input had to be a pretty robust area that allowed for a lot of different data types and a lot of sloppy stuff coming in from uninformed users. It had to be standardized and normalized on our side before we could do anything with it. Once that became user-facing, it was a totally different experience altogether. There were two very different stakeholders in respect to the audience for the product itself.

There was stuff that had to be printed because of the industry we’re in. There were things that, typically, wouldn’t be used for a product built today. The whole business model is a subscription model, so there had to be a billing system in place. It didn’t matter whether it was just a tiny company or a massive corporation — there were still all the components of a massive company that needed to be there. It’s an aviation thing, so there are all sorts of different searches. People are used to Google, so we wanted our product to look like that.

We had a lot of folks that wanted to access our data, so the database had to be structured to allow for an API to be published. It all works so well that I don’t worry about it much anymore.

New Leaders has scaled its resources as needed, which was the whole point of bringing in contractors. It keeps our costs down and allows us to be either a big or small company. On average, we’ve had about five people, including designer, database folks, frontend folks, all on an as-needed basis. Initially, as a small company, we weren’t able to hire the whole staff and there were times we couldn’t utilize those resources. New Leaders flows resources in and out as needed.

How did you come to work with New Leaders?

It was through a personal reference when I was asking around. I was interested in hiring someone local. I was new to the whole game myself, so it was important that I could be face-to-face with folks for a while. At first, I didn’t think I would find anyone local. We don’t live in a large town, and I think New Leaders was a bit of an early player in our area. When we first interviewed, they understood the industry very quickly, which was helpful.

How much have you invested with New Leaders?

I’ve invested between $150,000–$200,000 over the years.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in 2009, and our relationship is ongoing. They still play a critical role. They’re like my acting CTO. They’re the people I bring into meetings when clients want to meet our tech team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The business wouldn’t exist without them. People are incredibly happy with our product because it works so well. If there are any additions or fixes, it happens quickly. Our users think we have a much bigger tech team behind us than we do. It’s a small industry, so I tend to know a lot of the people and get a lot of feedback directly. Universally our customer satisfaction has been extremely high.

How did New Leaders perform from a project management standpoint?

It’s been good. That’s actually my background in a previous company, so I definitely drove them pretty hard. Once we had the relationship established, it just went on autopilot. The project management on the first project was my responsibility, and then they took over. I could just tell them what needed to be done, and it’d be their responsibility from that point on. Since 2009, it’s been on autopilot. I tell them what I need, and it gets done, so they must be quite good at it.

​​​​​​What did you find most impressive about New Leaders?

They built the technology foundation for my company. There’s no doubt that, when I hit strategic roadblocks, I would go to them. Like any startup, you’re going to pivot a few times as you learn things. They were pretty integral to that pivot due to their experience with so many other clients. They’ve seen it all before and give me suggestions of what to try. Being a startup company, we didn’t initially have a board or anything. It’s a very lonely position, and I leaned on New Leaders for a lot of that. That was one of their greatest assets. The guy that runs New Leaders would give me books on business model generation and things like that. It was all very helpful, a very coach-like atmosphere. I definitely wasn’t expecting that when I hired a bunch of technical contractors.

​​​​​​Are there any areas New Leaders could improve?

I can’t really think of anything. It’s been a really low-friction relationship over the years. There’s never been a technical thing they haven’t been able to do. I think their other clients give them exposure to a lot of different skills, and they get involved in a lot of technologies that they can apply to our business fairly quickly. They’re diversified and up-to-date on everything.

If we’re looking for something specific, the right resource, or something like that, they can be a little resource-constrained. It’s never hurt our business. I suspect that finding good people is hard, and they definitely get busy. That’s a challenge with any growing company, and they’re not immune to that. I’d still rather work with them and get a good result than get a bunch of C-minus players in there. I suspect their utilization stays pretty high, but I doubt if that’s different from any good firm. If they have endless capacity, then they’re probably not doing a great job for their clients.