Ollion’s First Year: When Reality Meets Your Brand Promise
If you’ve ever been part of the launch of a new company, you probably remember the excitement, the nerves, the thrill that you are on the cusp of something great, and the pressure to actually deliver on that promise.
2024-11-18
Lauren Dettloff, chief marketing and growth officer
I felt all of those things one year ago as we officially unveiled our new company, Ollion, with the vow to deliver a groundbreaking kind of consultancy.
As Ollion reaches its one-year anniversary, we are reflecting on what we promised—and what we’ve delivered. It’s rewarding to take stock and find where our reality is actually meeting our brand promise – and humbling for us to note where we still have work to do.
We pledged that we would be a different type of consultancy. We weren’t looking to embed ourselves in organizations just to receive a steady paycheck. We weren’t promoting technology for its own sake. We weren’t interviewing everyone in an organization and then dropping a weighty report—or lengthy slide deck—and moving on to the next thing.
Instead, we aimed to partner with companies looking to truly transform their business – in a substantive, pragmatic and incremental way. We wanted to work with clients to think not only about their own customers, but their customers’ customers. We wanted to help put the cloud to work in service of real business objectives. We wanted to create elegant, iterative, enduring solutions.
And—imagine this—we wanted to have fun doing it.
What the Clients Say
Whenever we complete a project with a client, we want to know: How did we do? Some of what we’ve heard has been music to our ears.
Clients and partners have told us:
“You aren’t afraid to push back.”
“You take the time to get to know us and the business and therefore avoid problems down the road.”
“You aren’t waiting for things to fail. You are proactive.”
And, perhaps my favorite: “You guys are also just …FUN!”
You might think it’s just lucky that people have fun with us, but we actually teed that up in designing our brand personality. We evaluate new hires not just for their experience and know-how, but would we want to spend time with these folks?
But we are serious about our work. Here’s one example of what constructively pushing back looks like: A client issued requirements for a project and invited us to bid on it. Our team took the time to get to know the client and then, very clearly, told them, “Anyone who responds to this RFP is not someone who you want to work with. The way that you have framed this out isn't actually what you're looking for.”
We reframed their issues so the work would have a greater impact on their business. And when we won the business, we asked, “When did you decide to hire us?” The answer: “In that initial conversation.”
In another instance, Ollion dedicated significant time working with the CIO of a regional bank to understand their long-term strategic objectives. When the bank issued an RFP for assistance with their five-year IT roadmap, Ollion adopted a radically different approach as compared to other vendors. While other consulting firms focused on how to replace the core banking system and implement new digital banking, Ollion concentrated on the capability enhancements the bank needed to develop its own five-year strategy. We emphasized clearly defining business objectives and linking them to an architectural vision, translating this into a series of actionable initiatives designed to enhance capabilities, processes and talent for future digital transformation.
In another instance, we helped steer a client through a challenging but much-needed transition to the cloud. Everything went just as we told them. Anyone would consider it a success. The client was initially thrilled, but then said, “Wow, we’re spending way more on the cloud than we thought we would.” When we checked, they hadn’t implemented all of the recommendations properly.
We came back in, providing additional free consulting to get them to where they needed to be. We had done our part, and could have left. But we were not going to leave our client hanging. We said: “We’re here for you. Let’s make sure you’re genuinely happy and going to thrive. We’re not just ticking a box. We want you to have success long term, past us.”
That’s Ollion in a nutshell. We’ve developed a culture, a voice, a personality. It’s one that lets our clients and partners know that we’ll always take their business seriously, but we also have enough perspective to know that we are meant to enjoy life.
It’s notable that our global team has delivered this type of forthright counsel and enduring, iterative work across both legacy clients and new clients; small and mid-size businesses, as well as enterprises; private and public sector; and with the support of established offerings as well as those we modernized or reimagined as Ollion. (Check out OllionOnDemand as a great example of that)
Room for Improvement
One of our big, ongoing goals that we’ve talked about publicly is our tagline: Multiply Humanity’s Potential.
Individuals have the capacity to achieve extraordinary feats. When supported by a well-organized enterprise and equipped with the right tools, their potential isn't just enhanced; it can be multiplied exponentially.
We have a clear vision that's aligned to our mission and values, but also a detailed plan and are now executing on that plan. But it takes time to achieve that vision - especially when we have set a very high bar. We recognize that we have room to improve.
We have seen great success in our client work. Equally, we’ve done some excellent things internally.
We established a giving program and have rallied staff around particular projects championed by individuals.
- We have formed a DEI Council and outlined our firm's goals and priorities. We are actively increasing our hiring of women and diverse candidates to ensure that Ollion accurately reflects the markets we serve.
- We’ve also taken the giving ethos into our work, contributing to open source software. Open source is our way of saying we don’t have to monetize everything, but we instead can try, as a global company, to help the world of applications and cloud computing grow and evolve.
However, we have not yet fully or comprehensively achieved the fulfillment of our purpose statement as we aspire to. It remains a work in progress. Now that we are a year into this journey, we can devote more of our time to these kinds of things that are so vital to the core of who we seek to become.
Our Brand Manifesto
“To give you a better sense of the goals that we set for ourselves at our launch, I’m going to share an internal document that we haven’t made public before, though the gist of it could be found on our home page or even in earlier posts. We called it the Ollion Brand Manifesto, and we used it to serve as a big, bold reminder to every employee in our enterprise of what we aimed to accomplish.
It said:
Businesses in our line of work are known for big promises. That’s great—we’re thinking big too. But while they’re off revolutionizing this and transforming that, we’re focused on solving the kind of challenges you can actually put a name to.
Like helping our clients create new and better ways to work. Uniting organizations around a common goal and growing from there. And making change that lasts.
We’ve got our head in the cloud and two feet on the ground, channeling the cloud’s endless potential toward a single goal: making a world of difference. We don’t just do this because it’s good for our clients. We do it because it’s good for their customers.
We’re Ollion. And we’re here to multiply humanity’s potential.
That’s ambitious. Yet practical. (For a good example of the nuts and bolts of how we anchor your cloud transformation in the practical, I’ll refer you to two pieces from my colleagues Jordan Windebank and Ben Steward.
The Scorecard
In one year, we achieved a lot, failed quickly in some areas, and learned a ton as an organization.
Now that the anniversary is here, we’ll celebrate everything that went into our successes— our incredible people, working all over the globe.
Yet we’re not taking a victory lap. It’s still early days. And we have a lot more to do to meet the lofty goals that we set out at our launch. There is still plenty of room to continue reaching and striving to meet the aspiration that we've laid out there.
There’s no limit to the great things we want to do—and can do. And keep having fun while doing it.