Summary

brox is characterised by its family atmosphere and does not want to lose this perk during processes of growth. The vision is to combine organic growth with the brox-identity. Various challenges must be overcome on the way, such as a close integration of new locations as well as the integration of externally regulated processes. To ensure this, new personnel must be recruited who not only have the necessary experience but also share brox’s values.

Initial situation

The beginning of 2018 marked the start of a change for brox. At that time, brox has already been an established consultancy for well-known DAX companies. Under the roof of brox, consultants who mostly worked independently but still wanted to enjoy the advantages of being employed had joined forces. The hierarchies were flat and the identity of the company was characterised by a familiar and friendly atmosphere among colleagues.

While consultants were concentrating on the core business, tasks relating to finance, controlling and marketing were outsourced to external companies. The acquisition of new projects has mainly been characterised by a strong network with partners and the successful completion of projects.

New locations

Until 2018, brox was located only active in Wolfsburg. In 2018 and 2019, a new company site was opened in Stuttgart and a virtual site in Mannheim. The site in Stuttgart brought new projects in the sector “IT Architecture & Infrastructure” and the Mannheim site added the competence of “Information Management” to its portfolio.

Both of the new locations enabled brox to expand its consulting portfolio and to position itself across Germany. However, the physical distance between the locations also brought new challenges. brox now had to be managed across several locations. Therefore, it was necessary to create structures that would maintain high quality within the new company structure.

The mission

Energized by the growth that the new company locations entailed, the company wanted to maintain its pace. The goal was to create the structures and processes required for organic growth. At the same time, special attention was paid to ensuring that the identity of brox, characterised by family-like cooperation, freedom and room for creativity, was not negatively affected. To ensure this, a balance had to be found between flexible and fixed processes and structures.

The individual locations also had to be more closely integrated with one another. While they already functioned very well as independent bodies, the communication between the locations was now to be significantly improved in order to extend the sense of community to the new structures. In addition, it was intended, that this would enable expertise spread throughout the company to be utilised for all projects.

Furthermore, the growing size of the company meant that processes that had previously been outsourced to external companies could be partially re-integrated internally. To avoid this being an additional burden to the consultants, suitable personnel had to be recruited.

Consolidation

The first step was to consolidate the existing consulting services in order to focus on the core competences. Four core areas were finally consolidated from the many small consulting packages that were offered at the various locations: “IT Sourcing Management”, “Information Management”, “IT Architecture & Infrastructure” and “IT Lifecycle Management”. This focusing made it possible to specify internally which areas brox can serve best and at the same time to offer a well elaborated portfolio to customers. With the intention of creating clear structures, the topics were allocated to the company sites. Wolfsburg consulted on “IT Sourcing and IT Lifecycle Management”, Mannheim on “Information Management” and Stuttgart on “IT Architecture & Infrastructure”.

To ensure the desired flexibility despite this fixed distribution of topics to locations, employees always had and have the opportunity to work on topics of other locations. For this to work well, the locations must be closely interlinked and productive communication channels must be brought in place.

Interlinking the locations

To strengthen the communication between the locations, an internal position was created to act as a central point of contact for cross-locational issues.

A quarterly newsletter has already been introduced and established as part of QuickWins. It contains various news from all the company’s locations, e.g. presentations of new colleagues. In addition, cross-site team events and meetings are organised so that employees can regularly see each other in person too, despite the physical distance.

We have already been able to see an effect of these measures: Colleagues from Stuttgart and Wolfsburg are jointly leading their customers to success.

Integration of externally managed processes

An essential part of the growth strategy is to integrate processes that were handled by external companies so far into brox by creating internal structures. This involved finding suitable personnel.

In this context, a new resource was recruited who is responsible internally as the central contact person for the topic of “Finance and Controlling” and works together with the external accounting department. Although this means that many processes are still handled externally, the internal resource can exert more influence on the execution of processes and their conformity with the company’s own strategy.

In addition, an experienced sales manager has been recruited who is responsible for acquiring new customers and projects. This has taken the burden off the partners and consultants, who can now concentrate more on their core work.

Juniorisation

For marketing and HR tasks, we specifically looked for juniors and working students who could take over the tasks of external companies in these areas. On one hand, this gave us more control over these processes and, on the other hand, working students were directly given challenging and significant tasks. This gave them the opportunity to grow with their tasks and later work on larger projects independently.

The first initiative was the social media team, which has been led by working students since the start of the project last year. They are organised as an independent team and report regularly to the management. Their tasks include fostering the social media channels, developing the website and finding and implementing new ideas in the area of marketing. In this context, for example, the ‘blog’ category has already been introduced on the website and a specialised webinar has been planned and implemented.

Conclusion

Brox has managed to grow steadily thanks to numerous named measures while retaining its identity at the same time. All of our new employees are welcomed into the family atmosphere and benefit at the same time from the new structures, which make it easier for them to join the company and their day-to-day work. They can also take part in internal initiatives and contribute to shape the company thanks to the flat hierarchies. The scope of creative action has continued to grow and the integration of external processes has made it easier to make the very most of it.

However, we are not done yet and so it is important to continue working on the tasks mentioned and to constantly work and address potential for improvement.