Michael A. Smerklo
Management
Yes, it's -- and you hit upon what I'd say the progression in the last 90 days. We came into it realizing there was a slowdown in go-to market and challenging in our customer messaging. When we dug deeper and really did a root cause and discovered as running these 2 businesses in a hybrid fashion, not just selling a hybrid solution, but running in a hybrid fashion, really became clear and speaks to what you're alluding to. The root cause, if you really dig in -- and this shows up in gross margins, it shows up in cash burn expectations that Ashley had out is -- it's really three-fold. One, we have this underinvestment Managed Services, we've talked about it in the past but it really has put our cost to serve at a much higher rate -- higher level than it should be. So when we were signing new managed service customers, our expectations around profitability may have been off in our modeling because we had historically been able to drive cost out of Managed Service at a pretty aggressive rate. When you take 3 years off from investment, that clearly is going to take a pause and we've got to begin an aggressive process, it's 1 of the 5 steps I laid out, to get Managed Services back on track. So I think that's the first aspect of it. But tied into that, when we went forward with this market message, it became very clear that we were putting, because we're trying to get the SaaS business off the ground, an unintended consequence was that we commoditized the market message for the BPO business. And what that meant is we were putting less emphasis on our core value proposition there, so we were signing up for maybe higher levels of performance or not defining scope as well as we should. So therefore, we've had headcount go up or it turned into a headcount play as we've seen headcount go up and cost to serve go up trying to live up to unrealistic expectations. And then, the third one is just making sure, as we've gone through this transition, because we've had vagueness around this, as we've called it out several times, a statement of work, without these clear definitions, we've had to throw bodies at things to bridge the gap in both professional and managed services. And so, it really is -- you asked a super question, but the core issue is deeper than go-to market, it's the 3 things I highlighted. And I think why, as disappointing as it is to be here today, the plan forward is so comprehensive is because it really takes and attacks these root causes that I've just discussed.