From staff augmentation to a $200M+ managed-services business

Why I built it

In 2014 CenturyLink's professional-services leader asked me to build a managed-services business. What existed was staff augmentation and one-off projects: no service catalog, no pricing model, no SLAs and no standard contracts.

What I built

• A product, not projects: a service catalog with clear in-scope and out-of-scope work, pricing models, ITIL-aligned delivery, SLAs and KPIs, and standard contracts.
• One delivery model with flexible terms: customers could change terms such as a response-time SLA without changing how the service was delivered.
• Six service lines, added one at a time: infrastructure, cloud, end-user computing, application management including SAP HANA, network, and managed security.
• Three tiers, from self-managed to fully managed, giving Sales a fast entry offer and a custom offer on the same delivery model.

How I ran it

• Jointly led the business with the operations leader over a 500+ person delivery organization in the U.S., India, Singapore, London and Poland. I owned the offer, pricing and P&L.
• Designed and owned a 50-person operations command center: monitoring, first response, KPIs, runbooks and budget.
• Personally led the largest enterprise pursuits, behind roughly $100M of the annual run-rate.
• Rebuilt delivery twice, from onshore to offshore to automation.

What I learned

• Standardize before you scale. The catalog is what made offshore delivery, automation and later AI possible.
• Put flexibility in the terms, not in the delivery model.
• Run the business and the operation as equals.