Small Team Management Portfolio
Roger Coulter
Some people's passion is software, some get excited by hardware, or finance, or manufacturing, or energy, or doing good works. I like how small teams, and systems, and data can come together in hyper-effective organic machines. Finance (planning), accounting (measuring), human resources (finding an motivating a team), the data they collect, and the common processes they use to get work done are the grease of a virtuous cycle. Simply following the conventional wisdom, standard operating procedures, or a vanilla implementations is like substituting tar and for the grease and wondering why your engine runs slow. In the case studies and white papers below I share some examples of how I bring clarity, focus, and agility to small and medium organizations. I've used agile software concepts to organize a manufacturing floor, I've used manufacturing inventory algorithms to bring a key insight to a leasing operation, financial tools in non-profits, and economic analysis in human relations and in every case I've developed solutions that are right-sized, scalable to the next stage of development and directly relevant to the organization's overall strategy and needs.
Organizations typically start with a generic set of accounts and they evolve ad hoc as needed. This paper shows why those systems grow increasingly opaque and lead to management discussions about "what's in a number?" rather than "What can be done to improve the numbers?"
Buy-in, and accountability starts with managers narratives of what they want to accomplish - the budgeting and forecasting process must start with that narrative.
Employees generally hate performance reviews, but say they want more feedback. How to break the paradox and create a high-performing culture.
A story about how I used agile computing concepts to build a proto-ERP system that gave a growing organization space to develop and most of the benefits of a full ERP.
General Biodiesel couldn't get it's new chemical plant to work right. The solution came from an unlikely source: we needed to think about who we were hiring.
Congress enacted various programs to support biodiesel - the benefits went straight to big oil. Understanding policy, industry pricing, economics and unanticipated consequences of government programs.
Auxiliary power
General biodiesel raised over $20M in debt and $20M in equity over 10 years and we built a trusted relationship with the ownership group. The company developed extensive banking relationships. (TBD)
How can we get that done?
Level Technology was a fintech making small merchant cash advances to people at the bottom of the income spectrum. They'd built a system to track current balances, but couldn't create a traditional ledger for their customers (or themselves).
What do General Biodiesel and Goldman Sachs have in common? They both thought they needed a storage solution to a vexing problem. And they were both wrong. General Biodiesel was was running out of a raw material almost every day, the two obvious solutions would take years to implement. Goldman Sachs was buying a parking lot to placate the mayor (and the public); what they need was 5 traffic cones.
The Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, a trade school teaching boatbuilding and marine systems thought they were on the verge of a crisis. In fact, a redesigned set of reporting and tools showed a remarkably vibrant organization proactively tackling a few manageable issues. (TBD)