By any measure of success, 2017 was a great year at HingePoint.

How was your 2017?

In this article, I thought I’d share our experience of what worked and what didn’t! My hope is that some of these ideas will benefit your company, career, and projects. Our purpose at HingePoint is to guide people through technology transformations so that they can grow and make life better. Hopefully, one of these examples will help make your life better.
What Worked?

  1. We implemented the 4 Disciplines of Execution (book). The main idea we adopted is having 1 “Wildly Important Goal” (WIG) per quarter. Prior to that, we had 4 elements of our strategy (or what Gazelles and EO call the 4 decisions every business must make): Strategy, Execution, People, and Cash. Instead, we made only 1 WIG per quarter and the entire company focused on that.
  2. For every WIG, you accomplish it by winning the minimum number of strategic “Battles,” or “Rocks.” Each employee takes a piece of the Rock, and we make those our personal quarterly goals. These are backed by weekly scorecard reporting to stay focused, accountable, and on track. This is our “performance framework” to help every win at the game of work!
  3. Mentors – I joined Biz Owners Ed, a group of fast-growth entrepreneurs being mentored by serial entrepreneurs, led by Jay Rodgers. These mentors taught me how to create real value for owners, employees, and customers, and how to scale and grow profitably.
  4. Q1 2017 Goal – Define exactly what we are experts in and what we sell. I had received criticism (not a bad thing!) from my mentors that it was confusing what HingePoint does and what exactly we sell. So, we created solutions and packages and rolled it out across the website and marketing collateral.
  5. Q2 2017 Goal – Create HingePoint 2.0! As systems thinkers, a company can scale and grow with strong systems, processes, and automation. So, we moved all our systems to SharePoint and Office365 and created tools, templates, checklists, and dashboards for all our processes from Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Execution, Finance, and HR. Boom! 100% cloud, mobile, and analytics across the enterprise!
  6. Q3 2017 Goal – Alignment. We added a new 5th decision to our strategy: alignment with industry software products and systems thinkers. We added Procore (the world’s largest construction cloud operation system) as an integration partner and created a product for the Procore marketplace that integrates Procore with SharePoint document management. It has been our single largest source of leads and new clients since the launch on September 24th, 2017.
  7. Q4 2017 Goal – HingePoint 3.0! We took our platform to the next level and for productivity, optimization, and scorecard analytics, we took our internal tools up a notch. We built out “sandboxes” for over 20 of our solutions and products, which are the ingredients for our 2018 strategy to scale and grow with software as a service solutions (SaaS). (Read my next article on 2018!) We now have well-defined solutions for construction; from sales and estimating, to project management and collaboration, and financial dashboards. Working at HingePoint, you truly have all the tools you need to excel at work and to strike a good work-life balance (since we are 100% mobile friendly and you can work from anywhere, on any device).

(See our 2016 article on what we tried in 2016)
What Didn’t Work in 2017?

  1. We implemented a strength survey tool called “Culture Index.” Every job has an ideal strength profile, which we use to get the right people in the right seats on the bus (see Jim Collins’ book Good to Great). Basically, you hire by the “dots” or your profile. The problem? Some people didn’t have the right strengths and are no longer with the firm. We thank them for their service and pray they find a career where their strengths can flourish.
  2. Rocks and Battles not always were won in a decisive battle. For example, in Q3, we had a Rock to write a book! After creating a draft of over 20 chapters (many of the ideas we blog about), I never did finish the book! I shelved the project temporarily. I guess writing 100 blog articles, free eBooks, and technical papers a year has me finding it hard to write just 1 book!
  3. Videos – We are honestly struggling to get high quality, affordable video content to help our clients and prospects have a better understanding of how we can help them with what we offer. If you want to help us with this please, step up and email Contactus@hingepoint.com.

I Challenge to You! Are You Still Reading?
Are any of these ideas interesting? Want to learn more? Email Contactus@hingepoint.com and ask for Bryce. I’d be glad to share more detail and hear what your plans are for 2018. And if you want to transform your company, team, or career, let us know how we can help (that is what we do and we love doing it)! Our “Why” is our deep passion and belief that people and companies can transform, grow, and make life better. Those problems are how we grow and find a better way.

Do you believe what we believe? I’d love to meet with you and interview you for a future blog article on transformative leaders. Email Contactus@hingepoint.com.

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About HingePoint, LLC

HingePoint offers cloud and mobile applications for construction and real estate that are easy to adopt and employees love. Specializing in the systems that run the construction and real estate business including SharePoint, Salesforce, Procore, MS Dynamics, and Autodesk. Scale and grow profitably with Financial and Project Management Dashboards, document management, and workflow automation for field to office collaboration.

HingePoint
8105 Rasor Blvd.
Suite 241
Plano, TX 75024
(214) 301-0000
www.hingepoint.com