Nathan For You – Enterprise-level Success Leads to Small Business Solution Guru
“Nathan for You” is a show that lasted four seasons and ended around 10 years ago. The show centers around Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder, the most painfully awkward of all Nathans, present company included. According to this Wikipedia entry, the series is “based upon the premise of Fielder, playing a fictionalized, off-kilter version of himself, trying to use his business background and life experiences to help struggling companies and people, frequently offering them outlandish and prohibitively expensive strategies, parodying the methods of marketing and management consultants.” If you like cringe you will love this show and probably all of his work. I lasted exactly one episode, during which I switched between a mouth-agape-pained expression and a covering-my-face-with-both-hands-and-occasionally-peering-through-my-finger-crevices expression. I couldn’t do another one.
The later expression I was referring to
I bring this up because, well, I am also a Nathan. And while I am not (yet) as successful as Mr. Fielder, I do still have some dignity (ok, that sounds mean, he actually is a very creative guy). But also because I’ve lived in the world of consultants for many years and I understand what he’s poking fun at. I’ve seen fancy consulting companies (of course not the one I worked for!) come in and design an overblown solution to a simple problem that has very little chance of success. I often excelled in those cases because I’d be able to provide a solution that met client goals without crushing their pocketbooks. And I also understand how to help small businesses be successful because I’ve managed a small business myself! Building Joy Accounting Services with Terra over the last 11 years has been an amazing experience. So amazing, in fact, that we’ve decided to build another business in the country we moved to earlier this year, France.
Joy Solutions is a culmination of 20 years of experience and skills that Terra and I have built. Each of us brings a different skill set to the table, and we’ve had a lot of success putting out minds together to solve problems for small businesses. While Terra has been the engine of our small business in the US, my background has been focused more on enterprise level projects. The combination of the two gives us the insight needed to tackle almost any challenge placed before us.
Since we are relatively new here in France, I wanted to introduce myself and give you an idea of the skills and experiences I bring to the table. My post-college career journey started as a middle school counselor for 450 children in Hamilton, Montana. I quickly realized that this was not the career path for me, and after Terra and I moved to Seattle I started looking at other career options. After a brief stint as a college recruiter for Microsoft, I found a position as a project manager, which turned out to be a great match.
From the get-go, I found that this project management thing was fun and creative. Yes, I was managing a team – or herding cats as many in the PM world call it – but I was also building solutions and having in depth whiteboarding sessions with clients to understand what they wanted. In a sense I was the glue that held everything together. My job was to understand the client and then convey that understanding to the technical folks building the platform. And I very quickly found out that I was very good at this.
At my next career stop, my scope and responsibility increased dramatically as my primary job was managing a two-year project from start to finish in which my team built a public facing website alongside an internal facing site for a governmental entity in Hawaii. I experienced incredible career growth in this role as I was a part of the process from the initial stakeholder interviews all the way to launching the sites and wrapping a bow on the project. And I got to travel to Hawaii once a quarter for 1-2 weeks…not too shabby!
As you can imagine, all sorts of crazy things happened along the way. For example, our business analyst left the company, and I had to take over his role along with the role I was already doing for the remainder of the project. At this time, I learned some important things about managing scope and customer expectations. I worked closely with the technical architect and somehow managed to both please the customer and end up finishing the project within the allotted time and budget. A minor miracle I can assure you!
After this experience I felt like I could manage any project successfully, and this was quickly tested as I moved into a consulting role at Slalom Consulting, and later to another company called Coppei (renamed Exadel a few years ago). Over the course of the next 10 years, I worked on 15 projects spanning a dozen companies which represented several different industries. In most cases I was dropped into a situation where I had to quickly learn the company culture, diagnose the problem (which was always very different) and create a solution within 3-9 months. So that you have an idea of the types of projects I’ve led, here are a couple of examples:
Client – Growing construction company in Pacific Northwest
Goal – Select the best technology fit for the growing business to be able to handle their project work – from the bid process all the way through execution of their projects. Determine how the company’s processes would work within the confines of the software and train employees on how to use the software based on their role.
Method – Worked with the company owner to understand the most important processes and interviewed a few different representatives to understand which technology solution would work best. Selected the best option and then created process flows in Microsoft Visio showing how the company processes would work within the software. Created role-based playbooks to help each role within the company understand how and when they would need to interact with the system.
Outcome – This growing company was able to take what they were doing from a spreadsheet and put it into a sophisticated system which substantially increased visibility into profit margins and decreased human error. This system enabled them to present a professional face to their partners and customers and keep everything on track as they continued to grow. This project reinforced to me that technology for technology’s sake is not helpful; it is only useful when used in ways that clearly enhance and improve existing processes.
Client – Major US telecom company
Goal – Convert a program designed to connect the field sales workers with the corporate product teams to remote-only at the beginning of Covid.
Method – I conducted 30+ interviews over a three-week period and, based on what I learned, came up with 10 recommendations that I presented to upper-level management and was allowed to implement. Over the course of the next six months, we completely revamped our processes, from recruitment and selection of participants all the way through the actual program experience. A major focus was increased communication with both the participants and their product team leaders.
Outcome – Effectiveness of the program soared due to 1) the matching process being more rigorous, 2) more proactive communication between program, teams, and participants, and 3) more focus on “what’s next” for participants in their careers. This led to many more individuals jumping to a new level in their careers, often transitioning from a sales role to a corporate technical role.
I actually ended up working on three different projects over the course of three years for this company. In addition to the project described above, I also helped start a project innovation pipeline - developing an innovation process from scratch and then ‘selling’ it to stakeholders as high as VP level. After that project, I joined the Strategy team and co-wrote a 25-page whitepaper on the “Future of Connectivity” with one of the technical employees on my team. How much this whitepaper influenced the company’s strategy is anyone’s guess, but my manager let me know that it was making the rounds and that her VP-level manager was impressed enough that she wanted to see what else I could do.
In 2024 I finally took the plunge and joined Terra full time at Joy Accounting Services. As a small business owner, I did (and do) a little bit of everything, from creating and implementing hiring practices to building our company’s mission and vision to working with our biggest client on a project designed to help them figure out how to take the next step as a company.
This small business ownership and management experience layered on top of years of large enterprise experience has rounded out my perspective, broadened my set of skills, and enhanced my understanding of what small and medium-sized business owners go through. If you’re a small business owner who wants to determine the next steps for business growth and are ready for a “Nathan for You” without the awkwardness, please contact us and we’ll get started!
Nathan For You - Without the Awkwardness