Why Smaller Teams Build Better-Fit Solutions

People are sometimes surprised when they find out how small our team is. They figure a company supporting enterprise clients across hundreds of locations must have a huge sales floor and a few layers of management behind it. We don't, and I think that's a big part of why we win.

I understand why large providers standardize everything. When you have thousands of customers and a lot of people touching every account, a one-size-fits-all process is easier to manage, since every deal goes through the same steps and every client gets the same playbook.

The problem is that the process is built to make life easier for the provider, not the client. When it doesn't fit how the client's business actually runs, the client is the one who has to bend. Over time, the client experience gets lost somewhere in all those steps.

We Start With How the Client Works

Being smaller means we don't have a rigid playbook we have to follow. When a client brings us a problem, we can look at how their organization operates and build around that.

That doesn't mean we show up without opinions. We've worked with a lot of large organizations, so we know what tends to work and what tends to cause headaches down the road, and we'll tell a client what we've seen. At the end of the day, though, it's their business. We work with them to figure out what makes the most sense for them, not what's most convenient for us.

That flexibility shapes several parts of the engagement that a standardized process usually locks in place:

• A solution design built around how the organization actually operates.
• The rollout plan sequenced to fit their priorities rather than ours.
• The timeline set against what's realistic for their team.
• The way we communicate along the way, matched to how they like to work.

Because each of those pieces can flex to the client, the whole engagement stops feeling like something being done to them and starts feeling like something built with them.

What That Sounds Like From a Client

Adam Smith at TopBuild put it better than I could:

That's the whole idea behind what we do. Organizations bring us a problem, and we solve it in a way that fits how they already run things. Nobody had to rewrite their processes to work with us.

Win With a Partner Who Adapts

If you're a partner, you know what it's like to recommend a provider and then watch your client get pushed through a process that doesn't work for them. That reflects on you, even when it isn't your fault.

I want partners to know we're always willing to sit down with you and your client and design something that fits. That goes for the solution and for the process of getting it in place. Our job is to make it easier for you and your clients to get where you're trying to go.

If you have a client who doesn't fit a cookie-cutter approach, let's talk. Get started with TailWind, and we'll figure out what works for them.