New Brunswick’s Symplicity Designs Poised for Growth
MONCTON–Growth is good in business. But growth often creates a fresh set of problems as companies struggle to scale up to meet market demands.
That’s where Symplicity Designs comes in.
Symplicity is a Moncton-based company that helps businesses, not-for-profits and governments improve their operations. CEO Matt Symes says most organizations get started with the goal of solving a customer problem and making something better. Naturally, if they’re good, the company takes off and grows.
“As it grows, there comes a point in every organization’s history where it plateaus and at that point they almost always need a little help because they do one of two things: they either grow and continue to grow, or they start a steady decline,” Symes says.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a two-person company or a hundred-million dollar company or a multi-billion dollar company, they are all hitting plateaus somewhere. We help organizations get past those plateaus.”
Symplicity does this by helping organizations and businesses understand themselves from the outside in, starting with the customers. They then help the client analyze the core constraints in the business. Symes says the problem usually doesn’t have to do with individuals, but processes. This is something he says clients often overlook because, well, humans kind of suck at root cause analysis.
“In every organization, 85 to 96 per cent of your problems, challenges and opportunities will be in how work is done, not who’s doing it,” Symes says. “Unfortunately, 91 per cent of us work in service or knowledge. You can’t see the process. In manufacturing, it’s easy. But in knowledge and service, all we see are people.”
Their clients have ranged from Moosehead Breweries and New Brunswick’s department of education down to two-person mom and pop shops.
“Our clients are quite literally everywhere, because every organization is trying to deliver value, and they’re hitting constraints somewhere and our specialty is helping you to get through those constraints,” Symes says.
While Symplicity is helping businesses that are growing, they are also growing themselves.
They are hiring 12 to 18 new people over the next year in both Moncton and Halifax.
“We have more demand for our services today than we can currently satisfy, so we absolutely need to develop people to be able to do what we do and it takes a long time,” Symes says. “The development, depending on your skills, can take anywhere from six months to 36 months.”
Symplicity hires on the belief that talent comes in all shapes and sizes, whether you have a degree, or the life-experience equivalent. They are not just looking for business people either. They want students of the liberal arts, engineers, teachers and self-educated to apply. Basically if you want to make stuff better or learn how to, you’re encouraged to throw in your resume.
“We follow a very simple formula. Hire for the soul and train for the role,” Symes said. “We have had success with teachers, we have had success with chemical engineers. The great irony is we are organizational improvement experts, and we have one person with a business degree on our staff.”
It may sound like a weird way to go about hiring, but they could be onto something.
“If you look at Facebook and you look at Google, they hire a whole bunch of engineers, then they immediately turn to arts students to start guiding the ship,” Symes says. “It’s not so much of a surprise that we really do treasure those talents, it’s too bad others don’t value them as highly.”
Symes says internally, the diverse team has helped accelerate Symplicity’s growth. But another big reason for their growth is that the company taps into a bigger market. He says most other companies that do similar work often only go for big business and government contracts. Symplicity’s focus is broader. Thirty to 40 per cent of their work is with small to medium-sized businesses, who are often under-serviced.
“From a customer perspective, we offer hope and help for companies who are normally ignored by businesses who offer similar types of services,” he says.
“A lot of people are very good at finding solutions, but there are not as many who are good at working with clients so they can find the solutions and own them.”
Going forward, Symes sees Symplicity taking more ownership in some of the companies they help.
“We have a lot of interesting offers on the table. We just took a 20 per cent equity stake in another company,” he says. “Because we help organizations improve, innovate and grow, it’s almost foolish of us not to have equity stakes in a number of companies. I think in the future you will see us have a portfolio of companies that we co-own and do this for as well.”
Symes also sees Symplicity moving to an online market in the future where they can share the content with those who want to consume it as well. They are also in the works of creating their own digital platform.
“We’re dogmatic about making sure we grow from the core,” he says, “but have a lot of [opportunities] that are really exciting on the horizon.”