We are about People and Partnerships

Lets face it, almost every business’s underlying objective is to be profitable and for the financial stakeholders to make money be able to keep the business running.  For time and eternal, business owners, senior leadership teams and board members have created and recreated business and financial models to try and achieve the best outcome for their business.  As we all know, some businesses are a significantly more successful in the creation and implementation of business models that are profitable and sustainable than others.

As is always the case, there is no hard and fast rule that is a “master key” to business success, but in my experience of over 18 years of getting to know and serving hundreds of businesses, there is one common factor that many successful businesses display.  That factor is people.  In my experience business’s that put people first, tend to have a multi-faceted advantage over non-people focused businesses. Some of these advantages are bullet pointed below:

·         They have a more engaged and productive staff

·         They form better and more robust partnerships with their clients

·         They focus on outcomes not solely on revenue

·         Good people breed good culture, good culture encourages everyone to do their best

I could keep listing the attributes of people focused businesses, but I think you get the point, which is, if the business invests and focuses on its people then there is a greater chance that the people will deliver for the business.

As a people focused business, vBridge displays all of the above characteristics, it is one of the attributes that drew me to join vBridge and one year into my tenure I haven’t been disappointed with the people focused culture of both the vBridge and Softsource businesses.

An extension of being a people-centric business, is being fanatical about our clients and the success of their businesses, it is our belief that the same principles that I listed above flow through into our partnerships with our clients.  This is where the notion of partnership over transactional relationships comes in.

At vBridge we are always looking for ways to partner with our clients and it is in this situation that we are at our best.  Whilst we acknowledge and respect that some of our clients just want to be able to make use of our rock solid “as a Service” platforms and the awesome self-service tools that we provide on top of our platform, and that is fine with us, but where we are at our best is when we are consistently engaging with our clients to and working together as a partnership on ways to improve how our clients do business.

Recently we responded to an RFP where the section on Partnership was heavily weighted and robust, the organisation that had issued the RFP even included a detailed partnership charter that was to be agreed as a requirement of responding to the RFP.  This approach refreshed my thinking about how important partnership is in ICT.  As a provider of infrastructure and systems that our clients use every day to run their entire businesses on, it is imperative that we are a partner that our clients can trust to perform and deliver, day in and day out.  If we don’t do this, our clients businesses are at stake, and this is a responsibility we take very very seriously at vBridge.  But it is also a responsibility that we “lean into”, not only to perform and deliver but to lead and help improve our clients’ businesses.  We are not here to do the bare minimum of what a written SLA dictates, we are here to work with our partners and make their businesses, better, more efficient through technology and ultimately more profitable.

Below is an excerpt from that RFP response, below is what we strive to be for all of our clients who are up for advancing their business through partnership.

The clients definition of partnership is copied below:

"Partnering is a management approach used by two or more organisations with common objectives working collaboratively in an open relationship founded on trust, a consultative approach to problem identification and resolution, and an active search for continuous measurable improvements, as ways to inform processes and direct behaviours that maximise the effectiveness of each participant’s resources."

“Importantly, it is founded on an ‘attitude of mind’ together with a set of procedures and

cannot succeed without both”

We take some key themes out of this definition:

·         Common objectives and strategic goals

·         Working collaboratively

·         Trust

·         Consultative approach

·         Continuous improvement

·         Maximisation of effectiveness

There are some other themes that we would like our partners to consider, that we focus on to produce a truly effective partnership these are listed below:

·         Thought leadership

·         Cultural alignment

·         Honesty & integrity

·         Joint activities across our teams outside of our day to day

In this section of our response, we will elaborate on how we intend to integrate all the themes listed above into our ongoing Partnership.  

Overarching Partnership Model

At Softsource vBridge we believe and invest in partnering with our clients in every aspect of our engagement.  We prefer a partnership and service delivery model over the “sales orientated” relationship model that has often been prevalent in the ICT industry.

We would like to note and endorse the statement that, partnership is founded on an “attitude of mind” as the cornerstone of our fledgling partnership.  It is our promise to our clients that, we will bring this partnership focused attitude of mind from day one, we will bring this attitude along with innovation, our ways of working and delivery, to ensure that we are setting the foundations of a long-term partnership.

Words on a page are a great start to show intent for the partnership, but we would like to demonstrate to you how we intend to develop and foster the partnership in every stream of our engagement and provide real world examples of where we have gone above and beyond to assist our clients in achieving their business objectives, and how this has developed and strengthened our partnerships.

Personally I am proud of the way we partner with our clients, and I want to continue to develop and strengthen these partnerships will each and every client who would calls vBridge their ICT partner.