Access

5.0

13 May 2018

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

Access is a young, rapidly growing company. It is built of multiple smaller companies that it acquired and continues to grow by acquisition. Until recently, the company operated the branches it acquired independently without integrating them beyond branding and creating new operating units in the various financial and BI systems. Within the last 2-3 years the company grew to a size that doing business like that no longer made sense. Now, the company is becoming more corporate and building more robust back-office support staff in areas like procurement, finance, safety, operations improvement, etc. This creates a lot of opportunities for advancement and growing into larger roles for people working to grow with the company. This shows - it is common to promote internal candidates to VP roles. The CEO himself is one of those promotions and it shows in how he works with new branches coming into the company.

Cons

Along with the ‘corporatization’ of the company, there is a growing bureaucracy, which can chafe with managers who joined the company running previously independent business with little organizational structure and levels of approval. These changes are clearly necessary to for the company to continue to grow and function, but the changes can cause stress to the front line managers. For example, the company as recently entered into the world of forced rankings for P&L managers. It is not a hard, GE-style ranking system where the bottom 10% are gone every year, but rather just for “visibility” so that managers can “see where they fall among their peers” across the U.S. Because the different markets are built from acquisitions with different ways of doing business (different pricing, different contract terms, different service offerings), the stack ranking of branches is more a reflection of those conditions rather than the performance of any particular manager.

Access Response

Thank you very much for such a great and pointed review. You make some very astute observations about our growth and development as an organization. This kind of feedback is very helpful. There certainly have been a lot of changes as we have moved from a general/branch manager model to a more functional model. I, too, believe that it is the right move for the company at this time, but it certainly tests my entrepreneurial roots when I see the development of bureaucracy in certain areas. Maintaining an entreprenuerial culture is important to me and I hope to continue never lose sight of our scrappy, less-corporate roots, while also implementing the right amount of structure to reduce further growing pains as much as possible. Additionally, as you note, there is a lot of opportunity here at Access, especially as we continue to evolve and grow. I firmly believe that growth provides opportunity - and we won't stop growing...so, there will be plenty of opportunity, always. I appreciate your description of the productive and positive intent behind the balanced scorecard and stack rankings. The idea behind the stack rankings is definitely intended to create a clear picture of differences in our operations. We still have a lot of economies of scale to realize and will do so as we continue to standardize our operations and the stack rankings and balanced scorecard are intended to help us focus our efforts and investments in the right areas. Finally, I am in violent agreement on the annual summit. I love the summit and agree more that it is critical to our success. Thanks again for your review - and sorry for the delay in posting a reply. Keep REACHing, Rob

Rapid growth - Market Leader Access Employee Review

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