Along this session. So hi, everyone. My name is Trish Martin, and I am the regional managing director of Monstar Lab Americas.And today, we're gonna be talking about leading a purpose driven organization. Just a quick background, about me. I have been in tech for over twenty years. I actually started out in education, and, I was a middle school teacher outside of Washington DC and, then became a teacher leader, did a lot of professional development work, and, then so lucky to be, to, get exposed to tech early on in EdTech, and so I have spent many years building EdTech products before coming to Mondstar Lab where, we work across many different industries.

So, I'm so excited to be here and tell you a little bit about my story and hopefully be able to, help you if you're interested in kind of building up, your organization to be more purpose driven. So let's get started. Okay. So today, we're going to be doing I'm going to give you a quick backstory because if anyone knows me, they know that I am very transparent. I'm very authentic. I tell people anything they want to know because I'm a teacher to learn. And so I'll talk to you a little bit about the backstory, and then, I'll talk about what it means to be purpose driven, the five traits that organizations that are purpose driven often, show. And then we'll do a q and a session because I really I'm hoping that our numbers are gonna be really, you know, nice and conducive to a good conversation.

So, hopefully, I'll get through everything, and we'll have time for q and a session. Alright. So the backstory. Last summer, it's like that's that song. And then suddenly last summer, this was how I felt at the beginning of the summer. This isn't me, but this is how I felt. Fresh, ready to go. I was a VP of product. I had a great team, just kinda in my little world, you know, existing, and then everything sort of got thrown up and, turned on our heads. We had an international, division that financially sort of went under, and, we had to lay off 40% of our organization. It was just a nightmare. And I found myself in a position where people were asking me for help. And so that's what I did.

I spent those years of being a teacher and dealing with crisis and managing just, you know, one of the hardest jobs, used my I did my doctorate research on leadership and really tried trying to figure out how do how do you help people through change management and turnaround transformation of schools.

I pulled all that together, and I was also the one of the oldest in the organization. So I stepped up and said, okay. How can I help? And after a month, we said, we can do this. We as the we can be our own region in The Americas and be autonomous, and we can we can make this this happen. Now this is actually, at the June, how I felt. It was hard. It was really hard. But in the end, it was important. As you know, leadership is about recognizing when you're needed and stepping up. And so I knew that I was needed to help us to stay together. Staying together was the one thing that we all knew we wanted to continue to do.

In addition to being employed, how do we keep our US team and our Columbia team together at a time of turmoil and uncertainty? And so I went on a listening tour. I went down to Columbia, and I met with our wonderful team, and I asked them, what do you need in order to stay here? What do you want more of? We have a golden opportunity to shape the organization how we want. So really flipping it on its head to say in the other way, this is a great opportunity to to create an organization that we want to that we look forward to going to every day. And it was hard, but after doing a lot of listening, this is what we heard. Not only did everyone say, we just wanna keep working together.

We wanna stay together as a region, but they wanted to have more connections with each other and with clients. They wanted to have they literally said it. I have a picture of it written on the on a whiteboard. We need a shared purpose. Like, what makes us special? What is it that we're working toward? We need to have more clarity, more transparency. We don't wanna get caught off guard again. We want to know who we are and what we're about and have a good elevator pitch and be able to know if we can do things or not, because of, you know, with transparency around financials. And then finally, they wanna have opportunities to grow. They don't wanna leave. They wanna stay, but they wanna grow in their career. And they wanna have an opportunity and the training to know how to lead. They didn't ask for raises.

They did it it was it was a wonderful experience to hear, so it got me really fired up. And so I wanna share with you what happened once we decided that we were gonna be a purpose driven organization, and what does that actually mean. And so if you look at what does purpose led mean, it's what an organization's reason for being is all about. And nobody's told me that they wanted to be a part of, an organization that made a lot of profit. No one even asked to be a part of profit sharing, though we have talked about it. It wasn't the reason for staying. And so purpose is about what is your reason for being? It's your why. Why do you matter to the people around you and to your clients?

And then what do you stand for? What are you willing to take action on that's bigger than just your products and services? And this is a great time to talk to you because I it's been not quite a year, but now I can share with you some actual specifics on how, we've been tested by, you know, sticking with our purpose and what we've done to try to build it into what we do. So to let you know, our purpose is around empowerment. How do we go beyond just building products and services for people and actually create a lasting change? Because that's what folks told me they wanted. They wanted to know that they were making a difference for each other and our clients. And it's it really involves how do we empower each other, how do we empower the client to improve their processes, to foster a culture of improvement? Even after we leave, our clients should still be able to sustain the change and sustain the innovations.

So we wanna be known for a group of people that leave places better than we found it. Then we came up with some guiding principles, and it really reflects the kind of, quirky, smart, creative people that we are. That the number one thing they said was we wanna build cool tech, and we wanna do it for cool clients. And, ultimately, our success of what that vision looks like is for us to be able to go, that's not really an interesting client to work with or not really but to pick and choose the projects that we work with so that we can continue to be engaged. Because I should stop to tell you that MonsterLab is a tech consulting company. Sorry. And we build software. We design software. We do integrations. So, and we're about 50 people total.

There's about, 15 in The US and the rest are in Colombia, and then we have a sprinkling all over the country that we pull in as needed. So with that said, we wanna keep building cool tech because that's how we learn. We also will hold these hold ourselves accountable and take ownership. Now that we are not part of a huge, you know, top down organization, there isn't anyone else to blame or to give credit. It's on us. So we wanna take ownership for for what we, take on. We also wanna earn our right to grow. This one was really important because it gets companies in trouble. It got, you know, some some other folks in our organization previously in trouble. Is it when you scale too fast without paying attention to profitability, you know, growing and scaling is fun. Hiring and, you know, investing, that's all really fun.

But you need to be able to stand on your own two feet because that means that you can have autonomy. And in my opinion, that is worth its weight in gold to be able to have autonomy as a collective group to make decisions that we feel good about. It's also important if you're purpose driven because you're no longer, you know, beholden to to another, set of people. You you can you can make your own decisions. So profitability, we talk about a lot. I know sometimes people think that purpose driven organizations are, oh, where they're just warm and fuzzy and squishy and the, oh, it's not about money. It has to be about money. That's what makes the world go around.

We have to make sure that we are lean and that we are, nimble and we can adjust and we're not too top heavy. So we wanted to make sure that we will grow when we have earned that right because we've shown profitability. The next thing is, fostering high standards in everything we do. We wanted to make sure that we're proud of our work and that if we're telling a client, hey. This is how we would do things, that we've done the work to make sure that it's best practices and that we hold it ourselves to higher standards. And the last one was something very specific to where we found ourselves, which is what do we do? And do people even know what we do? How do we how do we celebrate that? And, also, how do we communicate better? How do we tell our story better?

So we put these principles in place knowing that we wanted to celebrate them as we are, you know, developing our organization. And since that time, I've looked more into being purpose driven because I don't know if I necessarily knew that we were purpose driven when this was all happening. It was more about this this is just the right thing to do and what people told us they wanted to have a purpose. So since that time, I've done this talk with other executive teams and done some research, and there's five traits that seem to be common across purpose driven organizations. So I wanna walk you through those, and when I'm doing that, I'm gonna give you some real world examples of how we did it. And, hopefully, you are thinking about how you might be able to do it in your organization because it doesn't matter if you've been around for thirty years or three years or three months.

It's never too late to incorporate what I'm gonna be sharing with you. So here are the five, and we're gonna start with the first one. Integrate your purpose into your business strategy. It has to be a part of what you prioritize, what you plan for, what you measure. So when we came together, once August, you know, was solidified, we said, okay. We're gonna create a strategy for 2025, but it's not gonna be me to do it. It's gonna be all of us. So we did this approach that I did when I worked at Globe Inc. Called strategy in a nutshell. And it's okay. What is our current diagnosis? In other words, where are we now? And really understanding our numbers and our people and our process. Where do where do we wanna go? Like, what do we want our culture, our offerings, our clients? What do we want to where do we wanna be, and then how are we gonna get there?

So what are these very specific actions we're gonna take? So we did this, by breaking up first into the whole team, but then into specific teams that said, okay. Once we came up with this strategy in a nutshell, now let's create our objectives and our key results. And then we're going to ask folks to take ownership of one or more of those. And that's what we did. So we refined it, and then we did a budget around it. That's the other important thing is if you're going to prioritize something, you have to make sure that you put your money where your mouth is. And so making sure that you've got funding for it and not, you know, compromising that. And then we did a little blast off.

And so in January was when we rolled this out. This is just a a copy of what that looked like because even though we're an independent organization, we have a parent company. And so, occasionally, they they check to make sure that we're on the right track. And as long as we're, as long as we're profitable, then we have a lot of autonomy. So we put this together for them, but really it was for us because this is how we run our company. And so we came up with four objectives, and then they each had a monetary, key result that would tell us that we've succeeded.

So we had one about clients' satisfaction in our offerings. We had one about remember that visibility? How do we be how do we tell our story better? We had one about being lean and profitable, and then we had one about how do we help people to learn how to grow and lead. So the next thing is, how do you weave that into the day to day, and where does it exist? If somebody were to look around, you know, how would they know what your purpose is? And so sometimes we've invited some folks who are contractors to our biweekly all stars, and they always say to me, like, that was really upbeat. That was I'm very clear on what matters to you. And so that feels really good that in our biweekly all stars, we review the OKRs.

I don't do it as a leader. Our committees present their progress. We show our finances. We've taught everyone all about, like, SG and A, about, cost of sale, about, operating profits. So now everyone is educated on the important financials, and we just show it. We show that both the good and the bad. We say, here's an area we're working on. And so if we have to say no, here's why, which is really important because, it helps with buy in and that division of, like, the higher ups. We just say, here's where we are. And if I have to say no about buying that software, here's why, but let's keep working on this. Let's brainstorm, and we'll revisit. So it's in these all stars.

During the all stars, we also do shout outs where based on those the guiding principles, we shout people out based on the principle that they are, really showcasing, which is another way of, you know, you if you celebrate things, they're more likely to keep doing it. And so we we have everyone, really, celebrated for those. It's also found in our calendars. I think your calendar says a lot about really what you value and what you prioritize. And so having our one on ones means we're connecting, which remember that was something they really wanted to have. So we we prioritize one on ones. We prioritize project health meetings to make sure that our projects are satisfactory to our clients, that they're profitable. We, you know, prioritize client time, and so our calendars really show that.

We also how we speak to each other really shows who we are and that we live our purpose and that we connect, we learn from each other, we ask each other for help, and that comes through in the conversation so much so that the client I've had clients actually say to me, wow. You guys really really like working together. And it's an informal we don't, like, have two separate personalities, one in front of the clients and one without. We are who we are, and so it's genuine. We it also comes through in our hiring decisions. Who you bring on, you know, it's everything. Our people, we're consultants. That is our business. So when we hire, it's a big deal. And the first interview we do is a culture fit to make sure that this you know, the person that we're considering aligns with and would also celebrate with us. And it also shows in our partnership choices.

We want want to partner with people that will make us better, but also share our purpose, our values, and our guiding principles. So I think these are all ways that you can incorporate your purpose in the day to day work. We also put on the purpose mindset in order to track our goals. Meaning, it's easy to say, well, we we don't really need to worry about tracking these KPIs because we we're too busy. But having but that's part of our purpose. So, you know, having those OKRs front and center means that the way in which we're going to measure that needs to be important, which means that if we're not tracking our leading indicators and we're not tracking that, we're gonna not know that we're off track. And the last thing we want is to be off track because we all decided as a group that these were the four most important things that we need to do this year.

So we go down to the very fine KPI, and we track those so that we're more likely to hit our goal. We empower employees to innovate. Right now is so critical that if someone has a curious mind and an idea, particularly when it comes to helping our clients, we need to let them do that because there's no way that we're gonna be able to keep up with the innovation, the speed of change right now as, you know, in a really heavy way where we all have to decide the one thing we're gonna innovate.

No. We need everyone out there finding ways to in to add value to the clients and add value to advance our purpose. So we do a ton of round POCs, and sometimes they're for us, sometimes they're for the client, but everyone knows that they are allowed to bring an idea forward, and it's encouraged. We also have tech every other all stars meeting. We do a tech showcase where we ask a project to talk about the innovations that they're working on. And that's, again, a way for us to be empowered and knowledgeable about what's going on. And finally, engage in partners for positive impact. This is a picture of so I think this is also a good sign of culture and that Cody on the right used to work with us, and he went to work for our partner. And but we still see each other all the time, and we celebrate, and and it's wonderful.

But partners can allow you to keep your purpose while also accelerating your client's success. Like and what it means is you have to be humble enough to say, you know what? We do that, but they do it even better, and they can do it faster. And right now, that's what matters. And so having people that you can lean on to say, can you guys take this part of the project? What we found is then when they get a lead or they have a project, they'll say, hey. Can you guys take this on? And that's how we've been able to grow in a in a steady, nice way because they know the kind of projects that we wanna work on.

How am I doing on time? Okay. I'll speed this up. Okay. Good. So there we are in Bogota and Colombia with our team having fun cooking pasta. But the end result is we've been profitable since January. So we're we're really doing well, and I just can't say enough about the team and how good it feels to be purpose driven and financially successful.