Meet the Baron of Management Consulting- Todd LeBaron

“There are no secrets to success. It’s the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” – Colin Powell

Being an advisor for companies is a challenging task. Without the proper skill set and adequate years of experience, venturing in to the consulting space is no cake walk. In this modern era, consulting firms must align to their customer needs to deliver real results and to provide successful solutions. With the explosion of cloud computing, the customer has more control in each business line to drive success for their organization and demand that from their consulting providers. Braving all odds of this domain, Todd LeBaron setup OpenSymmetry to make a profound impact in the management consulting arena.

Having served his country in the US Navy and Air Force, Todd spent time honing his technical and management skills with forays into ‘Big-5’ consulting and two software start-ups. He founded Open Symmetry in 2004 and since then has led the company to profitable growth, sustained customer loyalty and introduced recognized service delivery through innovation.

Focused on delivering relevant business initiatives, Todd has worked globally with clients spanning 22 countries across five continents.

OpenSymmetry is the world’s largest independent consulting company specializing in the implementation of SPM solutions. They have helped over 500 customers plan for, select, deploy, and benefit from technology supplied by the industry’s largest leading vendors, resulting in reduced costs, increased revenues, greater visibility, and lower risk. With over 1200 successful deployments across all industry segments and geographies, as well as a vendor agnostic company that prides itself on being a customer advocate, OpenSymmetry can help you cut through the complexity and achieve your business outcomes.

The Inception of OpenSymmetry
“OpenSymmetry was founded because we knew there was a better way to deliver services versus what we had seen with software vendors interested in only selling products. We started out as a small Incentive Compensation Management consulting company and have progressively grown to have dedicated practices across all major ICM software vendors and have started to expand into other areas including corporate performance management and human capital management,” said Todd. Since starting in 2004, OpenSymmetry now has over 180 employees, globally.

Building Integrated Enterprise Solutions
OpenSymmetry offers a variety of services and solutions such as Sales Performance Management Assessments, Implementation Services, Testing, Training, and Managed Services.

STRATEGY/ASSESS: Todd formulated the strategy services offerings of OpenSymmetry to provide customers with a comprehensive overview of what needs to change, whether it is with their people, processes, or technology to move to that future state. For example, when looking at Sales Performance Management (SPM) the full process from onboarding, quota and territory mapping, quotes, pricing, incentives, forecasting and planning represents many areas for potential improvements. Being able to identify which areas have the highest impact to your organization to move you from uncertainty to opportunity enables customers to gain a competitive advantage over their competition.

DEPLOY/DELIVER: Delivering on the promises the technology vendors make and enabling their customers is a source of pride for Todd and his team. “We provide more than just technology configuration with testing strategies, training and enablement as part of the delivery approach. We regularly improve on business process using a Kaizen methodology for operational excellence. As a result, we can easily provide the proof points on what it takes to have a best in class deployment and provide the assurance to our customers on how to get it right the first time based on their business requirements,” remarked Todd.

MANAGE: After the deployment, customers have the option to completely manage the solution, have OpenSymmetry manage it, or a hybrid approach for ongoing management. This is where OS EDGE comes into the picture. “We want to remove the administrative burden of calculating compensation, enable your sales operations team to act strategically, and get the EDGE over your competition,” said Todd. Customers are able to leverage best practices and streamline incentive compensation planning, payout, and reporting, allowing their team to focus on higher value activities.

Cultivating OpenSymmetry’s Success Recipe
“At OpenSymmetry, our employees are problem solvers and entrepreneurs at their core and as a result are always looking to help create ways to make things easier, simpler, faster, better, and solve a business problem for our customers. The technology shift to software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) is enabling us to further expand value to our customers,” added Todd.

The company does this by building integrated enterprise solutions across sales, finance and HR by joining its expertise business process and technology solutions. With the ever expanding cloud technology and open APIs, OpenSymmetry is able to partner with technology vendors to build seamless integration points and holistic end-to-end solutions where one software vendor ends and another begins and do it quickly and easily for customers.

Speed:
According to Todd, the company is able to bring real rapid results to customers, enabling them to benefit from the technology and achieve desired business outcomes.

People and Values:
OpenSymmetry’s core values are: Excellence, Respect, Genuine, Entrepreneurial, and Fun. The company has the best training available on partners’ technologies, so much so that its partners outsource their product training to OpenSymmetry, so with the right people, customers can be

trained on key technical skills. One of the biggest differentiating factors for the company is the investment in its people. Todd emphasized “We are also continuously exploring and exploiting our employee’s talents. As entrepreneurs and problem solvers at the heart of who we are at OS, we encourage and recognize new ideas. We expect that 70% will fail or not be something we pursue but the other 30% will become new initiatives and divisions for OS growth,”

Clients & Competitors
Under Todd’s leadership, OpenSymmetry has worked with a number of clients ranging from SME to Fortune 500 companies across all industry segments and geographies. The company’s competitors can be categorized into three buckets. It competes against the software vendors, the big global system implementers, as well as the Boutiques and Offshore Outsourcers.

A Customer’s Memorable Experience
Todd recalled that a comp administrator for a large financial services company had just gone through product training, and confided in him that she was very nervous moving from her ‘green screen’ mainframe system, and that she wasn’t sure how she would be able to do her job with a new ICM system. She kept stating that it was just too complicated, they will never be able to get all of the tribal knowledge into the new system and she was already working 60+ hour weeks. Flash forward 6 months and this same person came to him nearly in tears, thanking him for the company’s brilliant work. For the first time in 15 years, she had finished the comp run early, checked it twice and could go home and spend time with her children. No other ROI felt as good as this one for Todd, and he has used this as a project success benchmark ever since.

Achieving Outstanding Results for an Insurance Company
One of the most powerful stories involved a major insurance company. Their compensation team along with the help of costly external developers was working long days, as well as weekends to ensure agents got paid on timely and accurately. With a highly customizable solution, an 8-week deployment, and seamless integration with their salesforce.com portal, agents were able to view how they were performing against their targets and also accelerated the development of compensation plans by to 66%, saving the company tens of thousands of dollars per year and annual plan changes. The company is now able to calculate compensation on more than 300,000 transactions in less than 10 minutes and the added benefit of experimenting with new rules and models to help drive the right sales behaviors. This case study is just one of many where OpenSymmetry has helped its 500+ customers be on a trusted path to the top to drive repeatable results.

Key Focus Areas
Coming to the focus areas for OpenSymmetry, Todd specified the following:

• The acceleration of product innovation to enable customers and partners to more effectively provide seamless integrated enterprise performance solutions.
• Continue steady global growth and operational excellence.
• Shift technology enablement to customer enablement approaches where we look at people, process, and technology and build solutions to support the shift to the customer.
• Provide value-orientated services.
• Continue strong financial management of the company.
• Dedicated focus: “As part of the commitment and core values to continually provide excellence in everything we do and embrace the entrepreneurial spirit, we have a dedicated focus and leader for product solution development. This enables all employees to explore new solutions and opportunities and the more you explore the more opportunity you have to identify areas you will ultimately invest and expand.”
• Managed Services: “We are investing heavily in our managed services offering integrating various cloud stacks of our technology partners and listening to our customers. Key areas our customers continually ask us to help them with are integration across platforms and eliminating the seams between solutions. We are leveraging our expertise in optimizing end to end processes and technology and packaging to provide back to our customers. We are developing bundled solutions for both mid-market but also quick starts to enable enterprises a way to quickly realize value in manageable waves.”
• Pre-Packaged Solutions: “Taking what we have done repeatable across industries for our customers and packaging the best approaches and standards in an out of the box solution pre-configured.”
• Mobile Enablement: “Amount of people who use mobile vs desktop has sky rocketed the past view years and there is a major shift in the workforce and how millennials wish to receive information; we are so exploring mobile solutions.”

“We enable our customers to realize the promises of the technology vendors and make their strategies turn into reality.” – Todd LeBaron

“There are no secrets to success. It’s the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” – Colin Powell

Being an advisor for companies is a challenging task. Without the proper skill set and adequate years of experience, venturing in to the consulting space is no cake walk. In this modern era, consulting firms must align to their customer needs to deliver real results and to provide successful solutions. With the explosion of cloud computing, the customer has more control in each business line to drive success for their organization and demand that from their consulting providers. Braving all odds of this domain, Todd LeBaron setup OpenSymmetry to make a profound impact in the management consulting arena.

Having served his country in the US Navy and Air Force, Todd spent time honing his technical and management skills with forays into ‘Big-5’ consulting and two software start-ups. He founded Open Symmetry in 2004 and since then has led the company to profitable growth, sustained customer loyalty and introduced recognized service delivery through innovation.
Focused on delivering relevant business initiatives, Todd has worked globally with clients spanning 22 countries across five continents.

OpenSymmetry is the world’s largest independent consulting company specializing in the implementation of SPM solutions. They have helped over 500 customers plan for, select, deploy, and benefit from technology supplied by the industry’s largest leading vendors, resulting in reduced costs, increased revenues, greater visibility, and lower risk. With over 1200 successful deployments across all industry segments and geographies, as well as a vendor agnostic company that prides itself on being a customer advocate, OpenSymmetry can help you cut through the complexity and achieve your business outcomes.

The Inception of OpenSymmetry
“OpenSymmetry was founded because we knew there was a better way to deliver services versus what we had seen with software vendors interested in only selling products. We started out as a small Incentive Compensation Management consulting company and have progressively grown to have dedicated practices across all major ICM software vendors and have started to expand into other areas including corporate performance management and human capital management,”
said Todd. Since starting in 2004, OpenSymmetry now has over 180 employees, globally.

Building Integrated Enterprise Solutions
OpenSymmetry offers a variety of services and solutions such as Sales Performance Management Assessments, Implementation Services, Testing, Training, and Managed Services.

STRATEGY/ASSESS: Todd formulated the strategy services offerings of OpenSymmetry to provide customers with a comprehensive overview of what needs to change, whether it is with their people, processes, or technology to move to that future state. For example, when looking at Sales Performance Management (SPM) the full process from onboarding, quota and territory mapping, quotes, pricing, incentives, forecasting and planning represents many areas for potential improvements. Being able to identify which areas have the highest impact to your organization to move you from uncertainty to opportunity enables customers to gain a competitive advantage over their competition.

DEPLOY/DELIVER: Delivering on the promises the technology vendors make and enabling their customers is a source of pride for Todd and his team. “We provide more than just technology configuration with testing strategies, training and enablement as part of the delivery approach. We regularly improve on business process using a Kaizen methodology for operational excellence. As a result, we can easily provide the proof points on what it takes to have a best in class deployment and provide the assurance to our customers on how to get it right the first time based on their business requirements,” remarked Todd.

MANAGE: After the deployment, customers have the option to completely manage the solution, have OpenSymmetry manage it, or a hybrid approach for ongoing management. This is where OS EDGE comes into the picture. “We want to remove the administrative burden of calculating compensation, enable your sales operations team to act strategically, and get the EDGE over your competition,” said Todd. Customers are able to leverage best practices and streamline incentive compensation planning, payout, and reporting, allowing their team to focus on higher value activities.

Cultivating OpenSymmetry’s Success Recipe
“At OpenSymmetry, our employees are problem solvers and entrepreneurs at their core and as a result are always looking to help create ways to make things easier, simpler, faster, better, and solve a business problem for our customers. The technology shift to software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) is enabling us to further expand value to our customers,” added Todd.

The company does this by building integrated enterprise solutions across sales, finance and HR by joining its expertise business process and technology solutions. With the ever expanding cloud technology and open APIs, OpenSymmetry is able to partner with technology vendors to build seamless integration points and holistic end-to-end solutions where one software vendor ends and another begins and do it quickly and easily for customers.

Speed:
According to Todd, the company is able to bring real rapid results to customers, enabling them to benefit from the technology and achieve desired business outcomes.

People and Values:
OpenSymmetry’s core values are: Excellence, Respect, Genuine, Entrepreneurial, and Fun. The company has the best training available on partners’ technologies, so much so that its partners outsource their product training to OpenSymmetry, so with the right people, customers can be

trained on key technical skills. One of the biggest differentiating factors for the company is the investment in its people. Todd emphasized “We are also continuously exploring and exploiting our employee’s talents. As entrepreneurs and problem solvers at the heart of who we are at OS, we encourage and recognize new ideas. We expect that 70% will fail or not be something we pursue but the other 30% will become new initiatives and divisions for OS growth,”

Clients & Competitors
Under Todd’s leadership, OpenSymmetry has worked with a number of clients ranging from SME to Fortune 500 companies across all industry segments and geographies. The company’s competitors can be categorized into three buckets. It competes against the software vendors, the big global system implementers, as well as the Boutiques and Offshore Outsourcers.

A Customer’s Memorable Experience
Todd recalled that a comp administrator for a large financial services company had just gone through product training, and confided in him that she was very nervous moving from her ‘green screen’ mainframe system, and that she wasn’t sure how she would be able to do her job with a new ICM system. She kept stating that it was just too complicated, they will never be able to get all of the tribal knowledge into the new system and she was already working 60+ hour weeks. Flash forward 6 months and this same person came to him nearly in tears, thanking him for the company’s brilliant work. For the first time in 15 years, she had finished the comp run early, checked it twice and could go home and spend time with her children. No other ROI felt as good as this one for Todd, and he has used this as a project success benchmark ever since.

Achieving Outstanding Results for an Insurance Company
One of the most powerful stories involved a major insurance company. Their compensation team along with the help of costly external developers was working long days, as well as weekends to ensure agents got paid on timely and accurately. With a highly customizable solution, an 8-week deployment, and seamless integration with their salesforce.com portal, agents were able to view how they were performing against their targets and also accelerated the development of compensation plans by to 66%, saving the company tens of thousands of dollars per year and annual plan changes. The company is now able to calculate compensation on more than 300,000 transactions in less than 10 minutes and the added benefit of experimenting with new rules and models to help drive the right sales behaviors. This case study is just one of many where OpenSymmetry has helped its 500+ customers be on a trusted path to the top to drive repeatable results.

Key Focus Areas
Coming to the focus areas for OpenSymmetry, Todd specified the following:

• The acceleration of product innovation to enable customers and partners to more effectively provide seamless integrated enterprise performance solutions.
• Continue steady global growth and operational excellence.
• Shift technology enablement to customer enablement approaches where we look at people, process, and technology and build solutions to support the shift to the customer.
• Provide value-orientated services.
• Continue strong financial management of the company.
• Dedicated focus: “As part of the commitment and core values to continually provide excellence in everything we do and embrace the entrepreneurial spirit, we have a dedicated focus and leader for product solution development. This enables all employees to explore new solutions and opportunities and the more you explore the more opportunity you have to identify areas you will ultimately invest and expand.”
• Managed Services: “We are investing heavily in our managed services offering integrating various cloud stacks of our technology partners and listening to our customers. Key areas our customers continually ask us to help them with are integration across platforms and eliminating the seams between solutions. We are leveraging our expertise in optimizing end to end processes and technology and packaging to provide back to our customers. We are developing bundled solutions for both mid-market but also quick starts to enable enterprises a way to quickly realize value in manageable waves.”
• Pre-Packaged Solutions: “Taking what we have done repeatable across industries for our customers and packaging the best approaches and standards in an out of the box solution pre-configured.”
• Mobile Enablement: “Amount of people who use mobile vs desktop has sky rocketed the past view years and there is a major shift in the workforce and how millennials wish to receive information; we are so exploring mobile solutions.”

“We enable our customers to realize the promises of the technology vendors and make their strategies turn into reality.” – Todd LeBaron