15 Years with BP3

BP3 is celebrating our 15th anniversary this month. A few thoughts reflecting on what it has meant for me.

Sharing Someone Else’s Dream

Twice I’ve been invited to join with someone else’s dream and make it my own. When Erin Defosse invited me to become the Board Chair for the Magellan International School, he invited me to pour my dreams for the school into the school he had founded. It was an amazing opportunity, and I couldn’t be more grateful. If you ever get an opportunity like that, don’t look the gift horse in the mouth!

BP3 was another dream. A dream that Lance Gibbs, Rainer Ribback, Flournoy Henry, and I shared. We met for coffee on Sunday mornings for years considering whether we needed to start our own company to do what we wanted to do in the process and automation space. And in those conversations we developed our common view on how to approach building a company together.

BP3 has meant so much to me. The challenge of starting it, building it, recruiting our team, navigating partnerships and client relationships — it has all been incredibly rewarding. BP3 has also helped our team pay off student loans, buy houses, have kids, and build new careers! We’ve saved our clients billions of dollars, and we’ve influenced the industry we participate in.

If you’d like to learn more about how BP3 came to be, and maybe a few words of advice for anyone else on this journey, keep reading!

Core Competencies — not Technologies

In 2007 we started BP3. Our ambition was simply to have the kind of firm that we would be proud to work for, and let it grow. We knew that the market’s need for process improvement and automation was insatiable when measured in years and decades. We also knew that the technology stacks would change — but that these core concepts would ride along those technology stacks and evolve. We believed we could ride these technology waves by focusing on core competencies and trends that transcend technology.

Sitting here in 2022, I can see those quite clearly:

1. Process. If you want to change your company, you need to change its processes. If you want those changes to stick, you need to implement the processes in software.
2. Automation. There is a faster way to that business outcome and that way starts with a capital letter A for Automation.
3. Design. Because it isn’t just about how things look, it’s about how they really work.
4. Engineering. That software won’t write itself, and not everyone wants to be a Citizen Developer or any other kind of developer. We’ll do the hard yards for you.
5. Production Operations. Your fancy software is only adding value if it is up and running — and evergreen — when you need it — we make sure it is.

What’s changed in the technology landscape in the last 15 years?

• The iPhone — and everything that comes with it. It had only just been announced when we started BP3. The iPhone specifically, and mobile apps generally, soon changed everything about enterprise processes!
• The Cloud — oh sure, it existed in 2007. But it was barely in the first inning of a 9 inning game. Would cloud software render process and automation moot? would it make it more important? Compute became highly scalable and affordable in the cloud.
• AI and Machine Learning. AI and ML techniques improved dramatically over the last 15 years. Partly because of the increased access to affordable compute resources.
• Walled Gardens — SalesForce, WorkDay, ServiceNow and other walled gardens have become nearly ubiquitous.
• Mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn became common place
• New categories of software have emerged, like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP).
• And I’m probably barely scratching the surface with this list… so many of the technologies that were “amazing” are now just taken for granted.

Focusing on our core competencies has allowed us to not only ride out these technology waves, but leverage them to build our business, and to create value for our clients.

One of the best things we did was to invite others to share our dream with us and help build it: Flournoy, Asif, Ivan, Peter, Greg, Krista, Gordon, Pat, Farrukh, Matt, Joel, Wade, Gary, David, Lauren, Evan, KP, Carmen, Andrew, Mindi, and so many more. 150 and more now. And we invited companies to share our dream — Modexe, Teknovare, Futurum, TransformAI, Agilify, and more. We like to say that we are looking for a faster way to do that® — and that we will go farther, faster, together.

So here we are, in 2022. I can’t believe it has been 15 years! And I’m even more excited than ever about what our opportunities are. I’m in the airport, waiting for my flight to London to start boarding, so that I can meet with our board, our team, and our partners in Europe. And this all started around a Starbucks on Great Hills Trail on a Sunday morning. I guess if we had to do it over again, maybe we would meet at Barrett’s or Epoch or Houndstooth! I’ve upgraded my coffee thanks to BP3.

Maybe you’re starting a company — or you’ve been running your company for years now. One of the hardest things to do is to run a company through the many stages of evolution and pivots — and through changes in your team — that follow. Many business advisors will tell you that you have to change your team — while ignoring the value of believing in your team. These advisors also won’t prepare you for the fact that your team will change around you anyway — they’re making their own career choices and life choices. You have to build a culture that survives change. So if you’re building a company that lasts… here’s my advice:

1. It’s so important to find people who believe in the dream, in the mission, and in you.
2. When people don’t believe in the mission, or the dream — that’s okay, too.
3. At every phase of the game, the doubters will emerge with legitimate doubts in the face of change. Don’t get too big, they’ll say. Don’t take investment money, don’t bootstrap. No matter what choices you make, some will question or doubt. As a leader, it is also up to you to lead your team through it.
4. It is much more work and effort to manage a business that isn’t growing than one that is. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking otherwise. Growth solves a lot of personnel, culture, and management challenges. Without that growth, you have to dig deeper to keep the team aligned, and create opportunities for people with growth mindsets.
5. Celebrate your team’s successes, it means more than you realize. That affirmation matters so much to your team members, and to your culture.
6. Find a way to put the wind at your back. You can have a contrarian thesis for your business — but make sure that contrarian thesis still puts the wind in your sails helping you grow. Fighting a headwind is much harder than growing with a tail wind.
7. Find your core competencies that will transcend the current market fads.
8. Leverage those market fads (if you can) to grow your business around your core competencies.

As I’m sitting here after 15 years with BP3, I am really grateful for everyone who helped get BP3 to this point. And I am even more excited about what comes next for all of us.

One more thing… Isn’t it more likely that a “metaverse” that we find engaging would evolve from a game — and game-like world-building — rather than from a corporation intent on dominating eyeballs? Wouldn’t we rather that Metaverse come out of something fun, rather than something that encourages unproductive arguments and amplifies negativity? There’s a lot of talk about the Metaverse these days… but I can’t help but think that it is already here — I think Clive Thompson was right to argue that it is already here in the form of Minecraft. He could have made the same argument and used Roblox as the example. I’ve heard Minecraft compared to “virtual Lego” more often than to a Metaverse — but I think Clive has a real point:

Clive makes another great point in his article — that Minecraft practically requires you to be creative when you engage in the world:

Minecraft is essentially unplayableif you don’t create things. The most basic acts in “survival” mode — making shelter, making weapons to defend yourself, growing food — require you to figure out how to creatively recombine materials in the world. On an even fancier level, the game has a logic-wiring system that makes it Turing complete. People have crafted everything from replicas of their houses to fully-functioning games of Tetris to libraries of banned books to, of course, uncountable hang-out zones for their friends.

He argues that the creation aspect of Metaverses isn’t optional, its required. All in all, he covers 8 reasons why Minecraft is already a better Metaverse today. Perhaps someone will add a VR view into Minecraft in the future to take advantage of its system of perspective and physics — and decidedly low-fi graphics.

Originally published at https://sfrancisatx.substack.com on May 23, 2022.

Scott Francis is CEO and Founder at BP3 — where we focus on process as the lens to drive business value: because if your business matters, your process matters.