“Let’s be clear, I never said I was sorry. I'm simply telling you how this works.”

We were in the middle of a due diligence sprint with the incoming owner of First Choice Power (FCP), and the time had come to review our very complex and convoluted broker payment system. This was not a small matter, as tens of millions of dollars passed through this sales channel every year, and I had my fingerprints on every step of the process.

When I joined FCP seven years earlier, electricity deregulation had just started in Texas, and we had only a handful of broker relationships. A small team of internal sales leaders and analysts could easily keep track of everything related to the brokers and their clients with minimal effort.

Fast forward to 2011. Our team-based sales culture and industry-leading technology propelled FCP to experience exponential growth. The company served nearly 100 active energy brokers, offering various payment arrangements, and our commission reporting was proactive and user-friendly. Our small but determined sales team had built an incredible foundation for scale through relationships, automation, and grit, which led to a tipping point moment that continued to pay dividends for years.

No one internally had expected such a strong and sustained growth trajectory, which explains why there was a legacy resistance to investing in our broker tracking and payment systems. The timeliness and consistency of our payouts and reporting to brokers were the hallmarks of our external brand, which led our third-party channel partners to view our operations as highly sophisticated and professional. Behind the scenes, though, it was a different story. A small handful of our team kept it all together by dedicating several days (and nights) every month to maintaining and updating a series of outdated spreadsheets and nonsensical approval systems. We grew our broker sales channel faster than anyone could have predicted, and made it look like smooth sailing to the industry while we were treading water with all our might just below the surface.

The unprecedented growth of our commercial sales division was identified as a key factor in the premium valuation the company received during this acquisition process, along with our pricing portal and company culture, all of which originated from the same workgroup. And now my co-worker Tommy Richardson and I were sitting across from four members of the new ownership team, sharing the explicit details of our broker payment operations. We explained how we maintained an Excel tracking sheet manually each month, matched up tens of thousands of rows with another report that was produced by the billing system, adjusted each commission stream to fit that broker’s payment arrangement, changed details related to specific deals based on institutional knowledge and a series of shared notes, and then packaged the payment requests to go to Accounting.

After Accounting finished their reviews, which typically took a few days and put us up against the deadlines outlined in our partnership agreements with the brokers, we would receive system approval messages for each payment that needed to be verified and reapproved. The third round of approvals could easily take another half-day or more, thanks to the system's clunkiness and reliance on hand-typed and/or copy-pasted data entry. Approval messages would be waiting in the queue for my authorization, but I was often traveling or stuck in meetings, so Tommy and another teammate would log in to the system as me to approve the final payments.

The system was flawed and would have been an easy point of manipulation for a bad actor or a thief. Thankfully, I was neither, and I was surrounded by men and women of the highest moral character. Tommy was the only other person besides me who completely understood the complexities of getting our brokers paid accurately and on time. To ensure that no one ever questioned our integrity, Tommy and I documented every aspect of our process, ensuring that any auditor could follow the trail, including the steps where he would log in to the system to complete approvals using my credentials. It sounds bananas to explain it all, and it was, but it worked.

The new buyers looked dumbfounded as we detailed every step of the process and produced the paper trail to prove it all. The whites of their eyes would show every time they thought we were done, but then we’d say, “Just wait. There’s more.” As I explained the authorization that I granted to Tommy to log in to the approval system under my account, the head of the integration team jumped in to reassure me,

“It’s okay, you don’t have to apologize.”

To which I replied in an unmistakable tone of confidence,

“Let’s be clear, I never said I was sorry. I'm simply telling you how this works.”

With little support for the efforts of our third-party sales team, we had achieved compound growth for twelve consecutive quarters, partly due to the seemingly “sophisticated” broker commission tools operating in the background.

There are a few takeaways to reflect on from this crazy story.

• Even when I had to fake it behind the scenes and create manual workarounds and a circular approval mechanism, I never lost sleep or felt ashamed because I knew we were delivering a quality product with honesty and integrity. I openly shared our systems with everyone who would listen, knowing that we had nothing to hide.
• I wasn’t going to let someone else project an apology when there wasn’t an apology to make. When I corrected the man who mentioned the apology, I was boldly retaining my position and refusing to let him control the narrative.
• There are countless ways to get the job done, and we were relentless in finding the options that allowed us to grow and to serve our brokers while not letting the naysayers and the “not-my-job-ers” get in the way.

Have you ever found yourself on the precipice of something big, only to be held back by legacy systems and maintenance mindsets? Do you want to be challenged to find pathways of growth and human flourishing with Undivided Life serving as the Executives Down the Hall?

Let’s talk. If it doesn’t work out, I’m not sorry.