Co-founded by Patrick McCreesh, Simatree is a reputable management consulting and technology advising organization that has established itself in both the public and private sectors. Patrick understands the needs of the markets and offers a sustainable bridge of communication between businesses and the public. He wants to see leaders do more with assets in their organizations. He believes that many organizations undervalue two of their most critical assets – their people and their data.
In conversation with PerceptivX Patrick explains how Simatree focuses on investments in data to support people by helping leaders make better decisions and team members accomplish more work.
PerceptivX (PX): How does Simatree help businesses ‘Align & Grow’?
Patrick McCreesh (P): Simatree is about alignment. We started Simatree because a few of us aligned around the idea that we could form an advisory company with a different culture and provide a different level of service to clients across the commercial and public sectors. Since 2018, Simatree has served clients across the country with offices in the Washington, DC Metro area, Dallas, and New York City. Our clients range from Fortune 20 publicly-traded global economic titans to privately held mid-tier companies and small businesses, from non-profit organizations that support societal goals to quasi-commercial entities that regulate our public organizations, and public sector clients that serve critical mission areas in our federal and local governments. These organizations all have one thing in common – they need support aligning their data and technology with their strategic objectives. Simatree helps provide that alignment; and it has been our experience that with superior alignment comes growth, which is why our tagline is Align & Grow. It all comes together in the commitment we make to our clients and our staff to Share Openly, Support Completely, and Drive Progress. We Share Openly amongst ourselves within the company and create an environment of transparency, but also with our clients. We will tell the whole ugly truth when we work with our clients and we won’t hold back. We also ask for the same honesty from our clients. We need to know the messy stuff to be able to help guide the organization to success. Second, we Support Completely, meaning that for our people we know that work doesn’t stop when they walk in their front door and that it is impossible to be in the office without thinking about what’s going on at home. So, we try to support our team with what they need. That means flexibility in both the kinds of work and the kind of support they need. For our clients, this translates into a full range of support from the strategic through implementation. We want to solve the whole problem for our clients and if we don’t have the whole solution, we try to go and find it for them by engaging a broader ecosystem of partners. The third piece is to Drive Progress. For employees, we always want them to feel growth – for themselves and amongst the organization. For our clients, we want them to know that we will try to solve any problem in front of us, but we know that a solution isn’t always realistic. No matter where the client starts, we will always work to Drive Progress. We work with clients to identify their strategies and then design a solution roadmap that develops their technology, data infrastructure, analytics, people infrastructures, or whatever solutions they need to serve their strategic direction. Like many others in the space of consulting, we start by understanding the client and what the client wants to accomplish. We then take this goal and make it our goal. We identify the right capabilities, technologies, people, and processes that the organization will need in order to accomplish its goal. We help define this on paper and sequence the work so that a large goal becomes attainable steps. Then we live the journey with our clients. We don’t just drop the plan and run, but we take ownership of the plan. We understand that adoption is everything and build solutions that extend from an understanding of organizational development. Many of our team members are trained in change management and our solutions come with an eye toward usage and adoption – meaning we think about how to get people to actually want to use the technology, analytical, and strategic recommendations we develop.
PX: What separates your product from your competitors?
P: We do not have a proprietary technology or a solution. We do have wonderful people, repeatable processes, and a fantastic culture that combine to deliver a unique kind of service to our clients. That service is truly people-centric technology solutions for our clients. My fellow team members are confident and fun to work with. They come from a variety of proven roles such as top consultancies, excellent training and educational programs, and even our client institutions. Our processes are developed through years of expertise across industries to be applied in the realms of digital transformation, analytics, and strategic growth. Our culture has been developed through the intentional work of building a transparent and empowering organization that supports the growth of our people.
Everything at Simatree is designed to align great people with big challenges where they can make an impact. Our clients are facing real challenges for the future – ever-evolving technology, changing workforce expectations, and shifting regulations and/or legal frameworks. Our team members want to solve these weighty problems as part of their personal development and growth to either build skills or apply their life-earned talent in new ways. That is part of the symmetrical story that makes Simatree so interesting. Moreover, Simatree is part of a robust ecosystem in the areas of digital transformation, analytics, and change management, and we listen to the ecosystem. This ecosystem supports our ability to develop business and grow in the market, but it also supports our ability to understand and evolve with the market. The ecosystem includes our clients, but also competi-mates – the other companies operating around us that we partner with sometimes and compete against at other times. The ecosystem includes the universities where we recruit our staff, but also schools where our staff are engaged as alums, advisors, and adjunct faculty. This ecosystem includes conferences and events from professional groups like the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) and TDWI. Most importantly, we listen across this ecosystem to all the items we hear and this is how we can stay close to some of the trends in the market.
PX: Do you believe there is a winning formula for becoming a successful leader? What is yours?
P: Absolutely not. Every successful leader is a combination of that leader’s traits, the style they choose to apply, and the situation. To me, traits are what we are born with and developed in our formative years. Style is something we choose as we develop our organizational skills through formal (schooling and degrees) and informal educational processes (coaching and mentorship). The situation is a combination of both the followers and the environment to include the organizational attributes, as well as the history of the industry itself. When this all comes together, that’s when we can determine whether someone is a good fit for a leadership role and whether someone has been a success in a particular situation.
PX: After all this success, what do you struggle with now?
P: Keeping ourselves focused on the long-term. The world lives to take our short-term attention span and monetize it. But companies are not built-in 24-hour cycles, quarters, or even years. It takes a decade or more. I firmly believe that if we keep doing what we are doing, this company will continue to double in size year-over-year for the next five to seven years. But we have to stay focused. And we have to keep saying yes. There is a tendency as you get larger to get protective of your core business and stop taking risks to grow, but we have grown by taking risks. We can’t forget that. Growth is not linear. It is a winding path with side tracks and rabbit holes. As much research as you do on your market, it is naïve to believe you can always shape the market. You have to remain open to your market pulling you in a direction that makes sense for growth. Even the most strategic operators say yes to a few calculated risks or unforeseen opportunities that help open new doors for growth. For a lot of people, staying strategic means saying “no” and there is some of that, but for me, it also means we need to continue to say “yes.”
PX: What do you do daily to grow as a leader? What questions do you ask yourself?
P: There are two key questions I think about all the time that are closely related: 1) what is the culture of Simatree and 2) what are my leadership principles and how do these relate to the culture of Simatree? This second question was stated differently when I worked for or with an organization where I was not a founder. As one of the founders of Simatree, it is impossible to separate the culture of Simatree and my behavior. I believe, for better and worse, I am setting the tone every day. I think there is a process I go through that helps me build and develop the leadership principles that drive both my behavior and the way I think about the company. I think I go through a bit of a process for developing both the cultural tenets of Simatree and my leadership principles. First, I read, or listen, to content that informs me about research on human behavior. This is intentionally broad and could be about industry, history, biological research, or business journals. What is most important is that it must have a long view of the world, not short-term news. Second, I test what I hear with people around me. Sometimes it is team members in the office or it might be clients. It somewhat depends on who I am going to see next. Third, I try to write on the ideas. This further solidifies the concepts in my framework. I have now heard them or talked about them and talked about the ideas with people – writing about it means I am picking my own words (or visuals) to tell the story. Next, I teach it. I do teach part-time at George Mason University, where I get to test new concepts of unsuspecting students, but I also love to teach new concepts to our Simatree team members. Last, and most importantly, I reflect and refine the concept. These five steps – read, test, write, teach, and reflect – make a pretty good process for ensuring that I take a lot of the latest thinking on human behavior (or just things I haven’t heard about yet) and get it into my catalog of knowledge.
PX: What emerging technology trends are you currently interested in?
P: Everyone in the consulting industry needs to figure out how we are going to respond to or think about generative AI. As a data focused company, we understand the technology and are actively seeking ways to embrace it in our daily work. For some team members they may use it for ideation. Others may use it for innovating and still others may use the tools to draft materials to make them comfortable with a starting point for either written content or visualization ideas. Now, having said that, we know that generative AI tools require team members to ask good questions, make good decisions with the information received, and make good refinements with follow-up questions. These digital “listening” skills in a “conversation” with generative AI are similar to how our team works with our clients today and we are working actively to help them translate these skills to be consultants first and great tool users second.
