By Heath Huxtable, Managing Director of Braintree
Creating an enterprise with longevity and grip means building relationships, understanding innovation, and challenging perceptions.
Think Small. The tagline of the world’s most famous advertisement for now one of the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers changed advertising and the VW brand, forever.
Today, Volkswagen has 6% of the global market and its luxury car brand, Audi, is considered one of the ten most valuable brands. That small VW campaign proved that creativity and innovation aren’t about size. Gaining ground in competitive markets means listening to people and creating solutions that solve their problems. It means thinking small when it comes to personalized service and collaborative customer relationships, but thinking far beyond the box when it comes to solutions, innovation and growth.
This is the same approach taken by Braintree. A small idea about a dream team of experts with a knack for solving problems and creating world-class solutions built on the right technology; a tree with roots extending into global industry expertise, solutioning, customization, talent acquisition, and building future-proof, resilient technology architectures. The company started small and today is one of the largest Microsoft Dynamics partners in South Africa.
Braintree is built on the foundations of talent and the Microsoft ecosystem. Finding the right people took a long time, but everyone understands the value of the Microsoft technology stack and how to create solutions that are tailored to fit the unique needs of different organizations.
Capable of deploying, managing and maintaining solutions on-site or in the cloud, Braintree has a 27-year track record and solidified its status as a go-to Microsoft partner with the perfect combination of people, problem-solving and creativity.
One of the core reasons for Braintree’s growth has been its investment into people. Yes, most companies talk about how they prioritize talent and recognize the value of skilled people. Not all of them spent nearly 30 years tracking down the right personalities so the culture is a delightful mix of ingenuity, engineering, expertise and long-term relationships.
Talent acquisition is as important as client retention – without the one, you can’t really have the other. Customers know when the services and expertise they receive are delivered with passion. And that passion translates into solutions.
It also translates into a deeper understanding of the market. The IT consulting industry is challenging and mercurial. There’s no guarantee you will retain your employees or your customers. Customers don’t want to feel they’ve been thrown into a lion’s den where every employee is fighting for their share of the wallet, and this is a common pitfall in this industry. It’s very easy to get lost in sell, sell, sell, and lose sight of the end goal, which should be building genuine relationships that span years.
When you get to know your customers, you have the space to design solutions that evolve with them. It shouldn’t be a case of grabbing the whole pie in the first bite, but rather a collaborative and strategic effort that leverages the strengths and talents of your people to unearth the strengths and talents of your customer’s business and people.
The baseline to building a business that thrives in a highly competitive and noisy market needs to be adding depth to your support and structures. This allows the business to flourish, and, most importantly, ensures that customers flourish.
Braintree’s vision for customer service and retention aligns with the name – a tree with roots that grows thanks to mutual respect and shared investment. It’s not a race to the bottom, it is people and processes that prioritize results over politics and power plays.
The result is that the company has grown significantly, expanding into new markets such as the United Kingdom, and building a solid customer base that trusts in its ability to consistently deliver results.
Braintree is growing because of how we grow our customers – we keep on thinking small when it comes to prioritizing customer care, agility, and connections. We will always think big when it comes to building solutions that are sustainable, remarkable and resilient.
