This time, we’re speaking to Jessica Knox, Chief Executive Officer at Metrix. Metrix creates custom learning solutions to help clients build their most competitive workforce. Their expertise is in how people learn. They pair this expertise with powerful design and development capabilities to create inspiring training programs that improve employee performance. They work across industries, taking a deep dive into the culture and goals of each of their clients to create custom programs that meet their unique needs.
Jessica is a leader in the learning industry. She has spent the majority of her career leading teams in the design of strategic, large-scale workforce development initiatives. She inspires clients to explore new, more impactful ways to approach design for learning, including through the use of technology. She actively contributes to the learning community and is a regular speaker at industry events across North America. She draws energy and inspiration from diverse groups ranging from technology startups to visual arts organizations to inform her leadership approach.
Tell us more about Metrix.
Metrix was founded in 1989 by Susan Caldwell along with a couple of other partners. At the time, Susan was the Director of Learning for RBC. She recognized that training was becoming a budget line item for large organizations, thought that existing training suppliers could do so much better and saw an opportunity there. She left RBC and founded Metrix with RBC as her first client.
We work with organizations across different sectors to design large-scale training programs for their employees. Whether it’s onboarding for a specific role, learning more about the company’s products and services, or training in specific areas like sales or management—everything we do is customized.
Could you give us some examples?
If you’re a new manager at a bank, you need to know all about their leadership frameworks, their products and services, how to coach their employees, etc. We work with the bank to put together a whole onboarding program around that. We also do a lot of work in the pharma industry so if there’s a new drug on the market, we train the sales force on how to talk to healthcare professionals about it. Right now, we’re doing a big initiative around personalized healthcare, i.e. how to help pharma companies understand what’s happening now in technology and integrate that into their ways of working.
Your story is unique—you didn’t found the company but now you own it. How did you get to this point and why did you decide to buy Metrix?
I’ve been with the company for almost 14 years so I’ve spent most of my career at Metrix and I’ve played every kind of different role here. When I was in school, I fell in love with the industry—it was a great passion of mine and I knew I wanted to dedicate my career to the learning industry. As for buying the company, it was a matter of great timing. Susan had reached a point where she was contemplating what she was going to do with the company and was exploring a lot of different avenues including potentially passing it on to the employees. We started talking about what that could look like and it took a while to figure out how it would work for both of us.
From start to finish, how long did that process take?
It took a few years and there were several different iterations of what it could look like. We were also looking at other potential buyers for the company during that time.
What makes Metrix different from other organizations?
We have a 30-year history of continually doing really great work so we’re known for quality and creativity. Exactly what that looks like has changed a lot over the last 30 years but we’re constantly evolving and bringing new ways of thinking to our clients.
Something that’s unique about Metrix is the fact that it was founded by a woman 30 years ago and then transferred to another woman. I think that is kind of rare occurrence. There are so few women running businesses and even fewer once you grow beyond a certain size. As I begin to lead the company, I think it’s become a part of our story that we want to celebrate. This year, we applied to be certified as a woman-owned business.
Do you think Metrix being a woman-owned business is a factor in decision-making for your customers?
Sometimes it can be a factor when a company is mandated to hire a certain number of “diverse suppliers”—i.e. Women or visible minority-owned and operated. I’ve also met people over my career who really believe passionately in supporting women’s businesses so they want to help you succeed purely from a values standpoint. But I think there’s also a lot of clients to whom it doesn’t matter at all.
How has your role changed since you’ve taken over as CEO?
It’s been very interesting because at almost the exact same time as I took over I also had a baby. I was acting as CEO for a year before that but there’s a difference when you become the owner as well. It was crazy timing that the acquisition and my mat leave coincided but it was also good timing because the business was doing really well—the leadership team is terrific right now and they were able to take a lot of the day-to-day client stuff off my plate. Since then it’s pretty much stayed off my plate, which allows me to focus on long-term strategy, business development, and coaching and developing our team.
Did you notice any changes in the staff after the acquisition?
We hired another senior person to take many of the accounts off my plate but in terms of organizational changes, it’s been incredibly stable. I told the staff that this is one of those unique situations where there’s new ownership, but because I was acting CEO for a year beforehand, it’s going to be marked by a remarkable lack of change. Our retention has been great overall.
Did you have to make any big changes to the way the business operated?
I think the bigger changes will be forward-looking—looking at how we’re going to evolve over the next three-to-five years. So it’ll be more strategic in terms of that, but it’ll be at a pace that’s comfortable for us. We had already set up the company to run in a fairly optimized way so the only major change really was making sure we had one extra senior person on the senior team Other than that, it’s full steam ahead.
With a business that’s been in operation this long, you must have seen a lot of fluctuations in the company. Can you tell us about the Metrix’s journey and where you’re at now?
Like any agency of our size and any agency that’s project-based, we’ve had to deal with fluctuations in things like sales, people leaving the company, and clients taking their business somewhere else. On the flip side, there have also been times where we exploded with growth really quickly. The highs and lows are just the nature of our work. Over my time with the company, I’ve seen the different ways that we’ve managed that—some of which were better than others.
I think the biggest change we’ve had to deal with was the move to digital, which is crazy to talk about now because now it’s so omnipresent, but when we started, we weren’t doing anything digital. Everything that we did was classroom training and in-person coaching. It was very paper-based—we would put together big binders of materials. When e-learning first became a thing, we had to bring in developers which was a totally new capability for us. We had some success, but we didn’t move to digital quite as quickly as we should have, so dealing with that transition was difficult. The profile of people that we hire now is so different than it was before. It’s more skill-based hiring than knowledge-based now.
So every stage the business has operational struggles. How are your operational struggles different today than they were in the past?
Over the past several years, we’ve done a lot to try and stabilize the operations, reducing the number of highs and lows and keeping things more consistent in terms of work-volume and the way that we resource. It’s been a slight growth year for us so the question now is how do we set ourselves up to scale? There’s a certain size that we’ve never really pushed past and we’re looking at how we can do that now.
Another struggle that we’ve had is around the question of culture. Everybody here works really hard and there’s a lot of ambiguity. Nobody has a lot of control over their time because we’re so deadline-driven. I think that there have always been some really positive cultural elements at Metrix, but only in the past couple of years have we begun to understand what culture means more deeply.
One of the things that really helped with culture was giving people more opportunity to provide feedback, to feel that they’re listened to and that we’re addressing their concerns. For us, a huge thing was creating a much more flexible work-from-home policy. It was a small thing in a way, but it gave people more autonomy over their time. And it was something that helped people to feel much more empowered to deal with the ups and downs of our work. In the past several months, I’ve had a lot of emails from staff talking about how great the culture is here and they haven’t experienced that very often in their careers thus far. So that’s great.
Sometimes, when owner-operators implement a flexible work-from-home policy, they worry about productivity dropping off. Have you seen any of it so far?
We don’t have all the data and it’s hard to isolate but I will say, anecdotally, I don’t see an increase or decrease in productivity—it’s about the same. Where it’s really helped us is with overall wellbeing, happiness, and retention. Since implementing the policy, we haven’t seen the same issues as before. Overall, it’s been a net positive for us.
You are a BeachHead client. Can you tell us a little bit about why you brought us in?
We brought BeachHead in at a time when we had an explosion of work. So we had a lot of new business, which was great, but the staff obviously felt the stress of that. People were overwhelmed and it was palpable. We brought you in to really look at how we were working operationally—particularly around resourcing and how we were planning and supporting our resources. After our engagement with BeachHead, our people really felt like we were listening to them. You were able to have in-depth conversations with the staff and give feedback to the leadership team on what they were saying in a way that they may not have fully felt comfortable saying to us directly. That alone really helped. There were a lot of other really tangible effects from your engagement. When you’re so close to an issue, sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees so the support you gave us on how to think about and allocate time really helped and feeds into how we resource today.
What’s next for Metrix?
A few things, some of which I’ve already alluded to. One thing is getting even tighter operationally. We just implemented a new software called Mavenlink, so we can manage our projects more tightly and utilize project data a little more. That feeds directly into what we want to do, which is to continue our organic growth. We don’t have aggressive growth targets because I think that there’s always a balance with an agency like ours between maintaining quality and growth. We want to keep the business healthy and growing, but we want to do it at a pace that feels good for us. The last piece is just building our strategic plan. I think that, within the next three-to-five years, we’re going to make some changes to our business model because technology is rapidly reshaping every single industry and we’re exploring what that looks like for us. In this changing landscape, I think there’s a lot of great opportunities to take a leadership role.
What are some of the tools you rely on to make your job easier or just to inspire you?
I mentioned Mavenlink already and we’re still in the early stages of implementing so I can’t say if I would recommend it or not yet. Like any software implementation, there’s a stage that’s uncomfortable and that’s where we’re at right now because it isn’t optimized yet. I still think that it has a lot of potential for us though.
We have a Google Site called The Hub that we use as an internal wiki to store as much of our organizational knowledge as possible—all of our processes, best practices, and new ways of thinking that we want to bring to our clients. You have so many different people in an agency working on different things and we’re constantly thinking about how to keep everybody up to date. We also use a lot of the collaboration tools in Google as well.
Obviously BeachHead was really helpful and there was another company we worked with, Performance By Design, that essentially help you build an internal set of values. They helped us define our culture code, which we have on display in the office. They help create team norms—how you work together, and what your expectations are. They also do work around giving really honest, open feedback to one another about performance. I think it was the right time to do some of that work and it made a real difference in our culture.
I read LinkedIn to get the pulse of the learning industry and we also have industry-specific places we go for news and resources like Conference Board of Canada or the Association for Talent Development in the States.
For me personally, I’ve tapped into networks like SheEO, where I was a participant and then an activator. I also connected with people through Ryerson Digital Media Zone, and MaRS. There’s a great community there that has a lot of energy and ideas. If you’re an owner-operator, it’s good to share and learn from other people that are in the same boat. Most of the businesses I connected with through these networks were not agencies and they all had slightly different business models, but it was still worthwhile getting glimpses into where we should be going or different lessons learned. It’s also just a great support network.
*****
You can reach Jessica at jknox@metrixgroup.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Learn more about Metrix on their website: www.metrixgroup.com or follow them on LinkedIn.
Connect with BeachHead
At BeachHead, we are passionate about helping businesses scale up from a strong Operations foundation. The BeachHead Organization Audit (BOA) helps founders evaluate their business through an objective lens. Our BOA scorecard allows us to evaluate all aspects of a growing business so we can recommend changes based on what the organization wants to accomplish in the next phase of growth.
If you’re ready to take your company to the next level, reach out and let’s start a conversation.
Email: rdrynan@beachheadstrategic.com
Phone: 416.888-4004
For more posts and insights, follow us on Twitter and Medium and connect with us on LinkedIn