Highland

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a program manager at a Jewish domestic abuse agency based in Chicago.

For what projects/services did your company hire Highland?

I am launching a new program called Seven Circles for young Jewish couples in our community to learn about how to have a long-term healthy relationship. To differentiate from the direct abuse services our organization offers, we wanted to build a new marketing website for this program.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Someone recommended Highland to us and we spoke to them along with a number of other potential web developers. Highland stood out for a few reasons. First, they were most reasonably priced and flexible with us, since we are a nonprofit with limited budget. Also, my strength is definitely not in technology and it was important that I felt comfortable with the web developers, and I felt like they could communicate to me in a way that I could understand and learn.

Highland made me feel that way immediately. One thing Highland did that helped me make my final decision to hire them, was create a very detailed and easy to understand deck to outline our project. They clearly did their research on who we are as an organization and integrated it into the deck.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

I met with Highland many months before we were ready to begin development of this new website. We put the actual website building on hold and Highland first helped me narrow down an LMS to use for my program curriculum. They worked diligently on this short-term project and helped me understand what to look for and how to prioritize my needs within each LMS.

In the lead-up to the building of the actual site, my main POC made sure I had all my questions answered along the way and we checked in regularly, which was a very helpful experience. We then started the building of the site and it took way less time than I expected. The team morning check-ins every day over Zoom that I attended, and we communicated throughout the day over Slack. The site was built within 3 weeks.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

In total, we worked with 3 team members at Highland. We had a team lead, a designer, and a developer.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

While we just launched but so far, our program donor, our board, our staff, and our target couples are very pleased with the site.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It was so easy to communicate. They had check-in calls over Zoom every morning that I attended and we communicated throughout the day over Slack. Whenever I had a question, they answered immediately and with patience as I was learning so much along the way.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

I really appreciated the customer service. I felt like they cared about our organization and what we do. They also cared about me, personally, and how I could learn along the way. I know and trust that they will be there for us over time.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

I did share numerous emails with language, ideas, and edits and there were just a few instances where I had to go back and make sure they were all integrated. That said, they got almost everything I shared (and I shared a lot!).

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m CEO of a health information company — Treatment. We provide a sophisticated mobile app that helps families and individuals manage their health, complete assessments, and manage health issues over time

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

We partnered with them to help us through the process of developing an MVP.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Highland helped us with researching, designing, and validating our product through consumer testing. Their team delivered screens, an interface, and a prototype of our mobile app. They’re still working with us as we develop and expand our product lines.

What is the team composition?

We worked with 4–5 different people at Highland, including Jon (President) and David (Director of CX Practice).

How did you come to work with Highland?

One of our team members hired Highland while working at a major insurance firm. He worked with them on many different products and was extremely impressed with their work. He's the one who introduced us to them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $150,000 on this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We hired them around July 2020, and we’re working with them on an ongoing basis.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Their deliverables are incredibly helpful to the development of our product line. Highland was extremely professional throughout the process, from developing the MVP to testing the prototype with consumers. They completed all of their tasks on time too. We’re impressed with their work products.

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

Highland’s on time and on budget. Their senior management team, especially David, has been a part of most meetings. He's particularly skilled in the project management space. He extensively evaluated the problem and then defined how to solve it through a specific plan.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m most impressed by their business analytics. Their team helped us focus on the business problem we needed to solve, which was especially helpful in the middle of last year. It took a lot of work to understand the product we wanted to build and our target customers. As a result of its quality, we’re able to build on their work in our subsequent efforts.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, and I honestly can’t compare them to others.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

In hindsight, it was important that we defined the problem that we wanted to solve for our customers upfront. If you don’t get that right, you’ll be off on the wrong foot right away.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CIO with the College of Lake County which is a community college in the northeast corner of Illinois, just north of Chicago.

Being a community college, we are a public institution, funded through a mixture of property taxes and state funding. Like any college or university, we depend a lot on philanthropy. We have an arm that does outreach for us. We also are very involved in our community, so we work with local businesses in the Lake County area to understand their needs for staffing and try to make sure that we are providing the right education for our students to go ahead and get jobs in the County of Lake.

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

Highland worked with us to do the strategy work on our public-facing website and our student portal.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The project as a whole had three phases: strategy, design, and implementation. We hired Highland to do the strategy work, which involved a lot of customer interaction by interviewing our students and community members. They also interviewed prospective students, and most importantly, they worked to interview individuals who selected other universities rather than ours to understand what it was that made them go elsewhere, which is a really critical part of strategic work and it is hard to do.

The team then created personas of the different types of students. After they created the personas, they then created journey maps, which corresponded to each persona and their journey through the services of the college and how the public website or the student portal helped them along on that journey.

Highland gave us great insight into our customer base, our prospective customer base, and those customers who chose somebody else besides us. Then they gave us great language that we could continue to use about who those customers were. 

They used a lot of visual design tools to help articulate what they were hearing from prospective or current customers. They were mostly net-based visual design tools, and then they also used recordings and other tools to be able to take down the notes from the customers that they were interviewing. Highland also used some basic conceptualization tools and techniques that you could use on a whiteboard to get a group of diverse thinkers engaged in understanding a problem and providing their diverse perspective and how to address that problem.

What is the team composition?

We had a group of folks ranging from an account manager and a project manager. Then we had a thought leader, and a few specialists who were experts either on developing personas or developing customer journey maps, or people who are more expert at conducting interviews.

How did you come to work with Highland?

As a public institution, we had to put together an RFP, post it, and then different people can respond to it. Some of that happened with individuals reaching out to us, but we also went out and researched individuals in our area and had conversations with them. I believe that we discovered Highland rather than them discovering us, but for the most part, once the RFP is out, there is a silent period where we can’t talk to anybody and we just have to wait for the RFP responses to come in. 

We then looked at the responses as a selection committee at the college, and we whittled it down to the top three. Highland was one of the top three. We brought them in for in-person presentations. Of the in-person presentations, we then selected Highland as our lead, and then we had a broader group of people conduct a final presentation/interview with some more focused detail questions and we as a result stayed with the top pick Highland and hired them for this job.

How much have you invested in them?

When we selected the overall size of the engagement, it was between $500,000 and a million dollars, and we were near the million-dollar end of that.

What is the status of this engagement?

The engagement began in October 2019. My sense is that this work ended in March of 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Their journey map around the traditional student is something that we’ve used over and over again. People understand some of the insights of the different stages of the students’ relationship with the college.  

That journey and the rise and fall inherent in that journey have become common in our discussion of students and what we need to do to help students be successful. That is just one anecdote.

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

Any project like this is going to have its highs and lows. If I had to rate them on a five-star scale, I would say they are four out of five with regards to project management. The challenge at the early stage was interviewing a lot of external and internal constituents. As we looked back on the project, there was one set of internal constituents who even though they were interviewed, didn’t feel cared for enough and as a result of it, made a bigger stink than they should have been making. 

That was a little bit of a struggle as we moved from the strategy to the design phase, and I think some of that could have been handled with better project management to have perhaps had an ear to the ground and realize that after their initial interviews, they still didn’t feel like they had been able to say everything they wanted to say, and we should have come back to them.

The other challenge with anything like this is that the initial scope of the project changed on the first day we began the project. We had some deliverables in terms of the number of personas and the number of journey maps that we wanted to create, and we didn’t hit that.

Every time we changed scope, there was a conversation around changing scope, so it wasn’t as if something was promised and less was delivered. There were details that we had to decide in terms of the time and the money we had budgeted for this project and we just had to make decisions along the way. 

I don’t feel like Highland was in any way inefficient; we were engaged in really big picture discussions and they were the discussions that had to happen, but because of just the nature of a project like this, some of those conversations took up more time. As a result, we had less time and funding to be able to create all of the personas and journey maps. We created a number of personas and the adequate number of journey maps, but the reason I am not giving them a five is that they didn’t hit all the initial expectations because we as a group had to struggle through changes in scope and those decisions that go along with that.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We were impressed with Highland’s ability to envision and understand our customers at an emotional level. That empathy with our customers really separates them. 

They had an individual on their team who was just fantastic at helping us really conceptualize, think through, and make decisions about what our customer experience was going to be like. He helped us get deep down into the understanding of what our customers were really going through. That thought leadership was unparalleled, and as a group, you could tell that on the CLC side, everyone in the room got viscerally and visibly excited as we had those conversations with his leadership.

Are there any areas they could improve?

That would be the project management piece. The piece that in hindsight we were least successful at was the fact that there was this remnant of an internal customer whom we had interviewed and talked to but who didn’t feel completely heard. They were less satisfied than we wanted them to be on the project and I think that could have been addressed through the project management piece of the whole endeavor.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be willing to think big and pay for the ability to think big. It is going to change the outcome of your product so you might have to spend a little bit more, but what you get will be enduring, it will hit where your customer’s sweet spot is, and it is our hope that our revenue at the college will have increased because we spent more money upfront doing the strategy work before we did the design work. 

Doing the strategy work with a visionary kind of organization like Highland I think will really pay dividends for us as a college in terms of future enrollments and in terms of our student/customer satisfaction.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a content manager for a toy and game manufacturer and distributor. I oversee marketing content such as graphics and copy.

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

In response to COVID-19, we needed to recreate physical show booths. We previously used physical booths at events to showcase new products to buyers and media outlets.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Highland helped us build a virtual showroom for us to showcase our products. It’s like a website.

At the beginning of the project, Highland asked questions and created charts. Their team categorized our problems and ideas to create this picture of potential solutions. We continued to have a lot of meetings to work through the solution. Their team helped with the design, and our designers helped with the execution. Highland built a test site, and then we walked through the platform with our sales team that would use it. Then, their team did a lot of troubleshooting.

What is the team composition?

We mainly worked with one person, Greg (Senior Product Designer). We also worked with the product design director and a developer.

How did you come to work with Highland?

One of our designers found Highland on Clutch. She sought a team that could turn a physical product into a virtual one. What she read on Clutch made her think that their team would be a good fit, so we contacted them.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started around July, and it ended around September 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

I talked about the project with my team, and we don’t have any negative feedback. We had an awesome experience with Highland, from the quality of their work to their communication. Although it was a stressful experience because we had time constraints for building this completely new product, Highland made the project as easy as possible.

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

We met every morning to talk about the project. They presented what was done and still needed to be done. I didn’t have to worry about organizing the project because Greg handled it. Their team was also great with responses. They felt like a part of our company, so it was a great experience.

What did you find most impressive about them?

When searching for someone to work with on this project, we talked to other companies. I liked that Highland was down-to-earth. They were invested in the project and wanted it to succeed as much as we did. I knew that I could trust them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Honestly, no.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust them and let them work. Communicate with them as much as possible because Highland’s available. They’re on your team and working to make you succeed.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of sales for Workspace Interiors. We’re a 20-year old company and we’re commercial furniture installers and providers.

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

We didn’t have a customer management tool, and we had very loose processes for sales and general management of our customer experience. In my previous job, we used Salesforce CRM, so I was experienced with that and knew that we needed that tool. It was just a matter of making this process go through.

Once we decided we were going to invest in a tool, we looked into several Salesforce and a few other options. I heard about Sugar from a former employee, so I reached out to their CFO to get more information and that’s what we decided to go with.  

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had several meetings with the entire team so they could understand our business flow and sales process. We’re a smaller team, so we wanted Highland to understand our team members and each of their roles. In these meetings, they outlined  our processes and identified where there were gaps.

Once the CRM was launched, they provided training for our team.

The information we capture on the CRM is customizable to us, and even several months after we’ve launched, we’ve been able to make changes to the CRM so it’s more suitable to our needs.

What is the team composition?

We worked with three people— a project manager, a developer, and of course Jon (President) has been with us the entire time.

How did you come to work with Highland?

When we decided to go with Sugar for our CRM, they pointed us towards Highland.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $25,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project lasted from February–June 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We’re extremely pleased. We instantly developed trust with this team. Each team member brought a different set of skills to the table for us and clicked with us individually.

We had a unique experience because we were working remotely due to COVID-19 and we weren’t able to meet in person. We still had a very positive experience.

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

I was extremely impressed. Whenever we spoke to them and had our high-level meetings at the beginning of the engagement, our project manager captured everything in real time. I was really impressed with their timeliness and organization.

Jon has been so attentive. We continue to have a call to touch base every 2­–4 weeks and that has been very helpful. Again, he has been so engaged and really understands what we’re trying to accomplish and what our needs are. We’ve continued to reach out to our developer as well when we’ve needed to make adjustments, and she has been very available to us as well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Once we engaged with Highland, I felt completely confident in choosing Sugar. They made everything so user-friendly. It can be difficult to roll out something like this to a whole team, but they made it a lot less stressful than it could have been.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We do have one issue with Sugar Connect because we have Microsoft issues, and we’re still working with Highland to address that. IT was our priority to get this out to our sales team as quickly as possible.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Let them know your expectations up front. Give them the reins and hold on; they’ll take you where you need to go.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketing specialist for an outdoor leadership development center of a Christian liberal arts school in the Midwest. As a leadership development center for youth and young adults, we run summer camp programs, a gap year, fully-residential graduate programs, retreats, and undergraduate programs. It’s a pretty dynamic center that serves a lot of different constituents.

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

We were considering a big CRM switch. We had assumed, pre-research, that our registration system was keeping camper families from registering. From our point of view, it was a clunky system that wasn’t very intuitive or user-friendly. It was going to be a pretty big switch, and we’d been recommended to do a bit of customer journey research.

What was the scope of their involvement?

In the beginning, we went into a discovery to figure out what questions we were asking and what we wanted to know. Highland guided us through that; they created all of the interview guides and created the frameworks through which we’d be doing the research.

I think we were a little bit unique in that we wanted to learn the process — we didn’t want them to just do it for us. They were really good at teaching us what they were doing. They pulled back the curtain a bit but still gave us really good support. They followed a Jobs to be Done research methodology.

We walked away with 11 coded interviews, which was a really clean way of seeing what parents were thinking and doing throughout their process. Those got funneled into a customer service blueprint, which mapped out the customer’s experience and what the key events were in their decision timeline, from first thought to consuming the product (in this case, summer camp). The blueprint also showed behind the scenes, so all of the processes and people that are involved in making everything happen.

The other thing we walked away with was a full deck of research findings, including what the key push-and-pull factors were in a parent’s decision to send their child to camp, and then the key habits and anxieties around that decision.

What is the team composition?

We worked with Florence (UX Researcher & Designer). She was our main point of contact throughout the project, and I felt like she could do everything. She timed out and managed the project, and she pushed us on the timeline. I didn’t think we could get it done in 2–3 weeks, as I was accustomed to our timeline, but sure enough, it got done, and we got all of the deliverables on time.

We threw some timing curveballs at Florence, and she was able to flex with us and make it work. She was also able to interview, take those findings, and really clearly map them out in the user journey. It felt like with just one person, we got everything.

How did you come to work with Highland?

It was just word of mouth. I’d been talking about this big switch with a co-worker, and he knew about Highland, their services, and their methodology. He’d had a really good experience with Jon (President). Highland already had some knowledge of our organization. We sat down for a proposal, and it felt like they read our minds in terms of what we needed to know and where we needed to go. They were also willing to teach along the way, and it was important for us to learn. Finally, we have a pretty tight budget, so for them to be able to work with us on that was key.

How much have you invested with them?

It was $15,000–$16,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our partnership began in early July. We got going in late July, and it was done in mid-August 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Through their work, we found that registration was actually not the barrier; parents had, in fact, made the decision before they even got to the website and encountered registration. This allowed us to determine that changing the CRM and the registration process wasn’t going to get more families, so it wouldn’t have solved our core issue. That saved us a lot of money. 

The deck of findings and recommendations that they made really pulled everything that we’d learned and explored in the three weeks into one fairly concise piece. We can show that off to different stakeholders, really rally people behind the issues that need to be fixed, and direct attention there.

We have a few staff transitions coming up, so to have a clean layout of who does what, when, and why in the blueprint is really invaluable for that transition. Using the full deck of research findings, we were able to prioritize key steps to improving our communication, web-flow, the content that’s on our web, and what content we serve up to parents at what time. From that, we created a roadmap over the next year to lay out our priorities and improve the process. 

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

I’d give them a 10/10. Having them keep us on a timeline was one of the most valuable parts of the project. Doing 11 coded interviews was a lot for us, so for them to be able to pull that into an easily readable one-pager was great. They were really good at organizing content. 

The pacing of the project was huge. Had we done this alone, it would’ve been a six-month project. However, because Highland guided us, they introduced us to new tools and ways of scheduling out a project that I think will impact how I run projects like this in the future.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I felt like upfront, we were all on the same page of what we were getting, and that’s exactly what we got at the end. I didn’t have to pull, push, or prod to get that. In my experience with other vendors, they over promise and under deliver. Highland did a good job of getting not only me but also my boss and the people I work alongside on the same page in terms of what we’d get at the end of the project and what we’d be able to do with it.

Are there any areas they could improve?

One of the cool parts of working with them was having an outside voice asking questions. It would’ve been great to get more perspective from their team — we really just had Florence — but they worked with us on our limited budget. Again, what impressed me about Florence was her ability to come into what was a new world to her. Other people from Highland had exposure to our organization, but she did not. She was still able to slip in and talk with our constituents in a really good way.

Any advice for potential customers?

They had a pre-planning meeting that involved all of the stakeholders. Really be open with your timeline and get everything out on the table. That helps the process go a lot smoother. It also really helped bring more value and clarity to our decision-making process about a pretty big investment.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the strategic marketing director of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

We wanted to do journey mappings of some of our markets.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The deliverables were a journey map and insights from interviews. Highland put together interview guides, conducted interviews, and trained us on how to do the coding for those interviews. We did a workshop to create a journey map. Our technical team worked with our customers to map their general experience.

What is the team composition?

We had one point of contact on Highland’s side, who organized interviews and everything else.

How did you come to work with Highland?

They were recommended to us by one of our colleagues.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of their work was around $40,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project with Highland ran between October–November 2019.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Their work confirmed the strategy we’d been working on and had made a multimillion-dollar investment in. That was really helpful. It gave us insights into what changes we should make in our customer interactions. We did several reviews of the material and its output with our teams, and it was really well-received.

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

Highland was very customer-centric, tailoring what they were doing to what we wanted and needed. They were willing to teach us how to do the coding. I believe they have a large number of clients that pay them to do that, but we wanted to do it ourselves. Highland was really responsive in that sense.

David (Director, CX Practice) is really an expert in his space, and I found him to be very helpful in terms of guiding us through the process and acting as a thought leader on how this work connects to creating digital tools and offerings. I really enjoyed the work they did and getting to know them.

They had a rapid, one-week mapping approach, which I found to be a great way to get market insights within a short period of time. We never had issues with deadlines or meetings. We mainly communicated via email and phone, and we had a face-to-face kickoff meeting at their office, along with one at our office, to complete the work. The map took a couple of weeks to get completed after that.

What did you find most impressive about them?

This was my first experience working with a firm of this kind. We’re a big company, and I found them to be quite flexible and responsive to our needs. I was also impressed with how they handled the COVID situation. They applied their own methodology to their own business, in terms of the training programs they’re offering.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Getting the competed map a bit faster would’ve been nice, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

The client needs to know what they want to accomplish and to be clear about that. Highland can offer a few ways to do it, but knowing what problem they’re trying to solve or question they’re trying to answer is the best way of working with them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of Technology at Kings III. We design, manufacture, install, and service through our call center, emergency phones for elevators. So, if someone is entrapped in an elevator, they would press the emergency button and they would get connected to our call center. We also provide pool-side phones.

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland?

We’re automating several of our processes. They’re automating some of the workflows between a number of disparate and totally disconnected systems.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We use two pieces of software that are specific to our industry. One is the service dispatched dispatch software. The other one is the event management software. Then the sales organization uses Salesforce.

Before working with Highland, it took a group of people to manually migrate the data between each system.

We wanted to utilize Highland's expertise, along with our in-house software developer, to increase greatly that automation between all of those platforms.

In the early days of the project, they scoped out the project and worked with users to see if they understood the concepts that they were coming up with.

They created a custom, external platform to work between each of the pieces of software that we already use.

What is the team composition?

There was a larger team involved in vetting out the scope and doing some discovery work, which included a project manager and UI designer.

Then, on the business side, we work with Tyler (VP). Jordan (Application Developer) has been the primary programmer and he works with our in-house team.

How did you come to work with Highland?

Once we realized that there were aspects of the project that required a bigger team, our software developer recommended Highland. He had seen them speak at a trade show and was impressed with how they understood the platform. We reached out and vetted them to make sure they understood our platform and could help with our project.

How much have you invested with them?

The full budget with them was $110,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in November 2019 and we’re still working together.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

My software developer maintains a very high opinion of Highland and the work that they did. From a user perspective, everything seems great. They were able to make something work out of what little we had. I definitely have no complaints. I plan to call them again when we have similar needs going forward.

How did Highland perform from a project management standpoint?

We had daily stand-ups with them. Things started a little slower at the beginning of the project because we had a tight budget. We couldn’t expand on the scope very much as a result, so after talking with them, they agreed with what we envisioned. We moved into the code writing sooner than they normally would have. We had a tight budget, so we weren’t as flexible  

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were exceptionally transparent. Highland let us see behind the curtain. We saw their systems, we used Jira, we knew their backlog, and we saw how they managed the project. That was helpful for us because it helped us mature our own processes in house.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they have a mature process that works very well.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It’s good to know what you want and to understand the processes that drive them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of Sales for Barron Designs.

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland Solutions?

We are using, and will continue to use, HubSpot CRM for our e-commerce business and to manage our marketing efforts. Our intention is to eliminate multiple operating systems through an ERP system and then connect that to SugarCRM.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our initial discussions were via conference calls until I realized it would be more productive to have a face-to-face meeting, and I flew to their Chicago offices. We had a brainstorming session where we discussed on a granular level how we were going to set up our processes. We also went through some exercises to map out how to set up Sugar, what we wanted it to do for us, and the information we wanted Sugar to provide us to navigate our business.

The meeting was extremely productive. We followed it up with direct calls with my IT department to start mapping out what it looks like to connect our new ERP system to SugarCRM. The idea is that over the first 3–4 years, we will slowly increase how much of our business runs through SugarCRM.

What is the team composition?

There are 3–4 people, including a project manager.  We had one individual helping us to build out a product catalog, and when that person went on vacation, somebody stepped in to complete it. John (Account Manager) has stayed actively involved.

How did you come to work with Highland Solutions?

I reached out to SugarCRM, and they gave me a couple of their implementers. I also found out about at least 1–2 others. I did my due diligence and spent a couple of months going back and forth with a lot of questions. I interviewed a couple of third-party implementers and decided on Highland Solutions because I had a better comfort level with them. I didn’t feel they were looking to take advantage of me.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2019, and it’s ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We’re still working on the user engagement. We scheduled a go-live date in mid-April. However, due to COVID-19, we’ve had to focus on setting up all of our systems — such as our computer programs, VPN, and telephone systems — to work outside of our brick and mortar offices, which were never designed to do. Additionally, going live meant we had to train everybody individually via remote sessions, so the user engagement has been somewhat limited.

I now have better visibility to our long-term opportunities. I told them that I needed to see certain things in a way that SugarCRM isn’t necessarily set up for. They’ve created some reports, which helps me to manage the business much better. It seems like every month or two, we’ll do something that’s impactful for me to share with our executive management team. We’re owned by private equity, so we run the business very granularly. The reports allow me to demonstrate what we’re working on, which is really powerful.

How did Highland Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

During the brainstorming phase, they asked a lot of really good questions. I was able to help them since we were in-person. We mapped things out on a whiteboard, which worked really well.

We keep in touch through a chat platform and email. We even have project boards with certain deliverables. They keep me on track and budget by sticking to timelines, which is really cool.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’ve dealt with different implementers and programs over the years. What sets Highland Solutions apart from competitors is that they’re more interested in what’s important for me. They’re interested in me as a business rather than me as a customer, which makes all the difference. They have helped develop a lot of things that are particular to us. 

They’re not in a hurry and treat our partnership as more of a marathon than a race. They look at the long game vs the short, which is pretty humbling. Throughout the process, I’ve been pretty amazed at how some things turned out, especially considering they didn’t know our unique business model when we started.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I’ve been pleased with them. They really go out of their way. They’re patient.  

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Spend the money like I did and fly into Chicago and meet with the whole implementation team to map it out together. Those are billable hours to them, but it was well worth the investment. I spent a whole day there. Let them understand your business; the more they understand the business, the creativity will improve exponentially, the process will progress at an accelerated rate, and the implementation will go much smoother.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the managing director at a national commercial real estate valuation and consulting firm.

What challenge were you trying to address with Highland Solutions?

Our programmer gave notice and left. We had developed an internal ERP that solved most of our problems. It was already in maintenance mode, and our programmer had done an excellent job creating it. 

We needed someone, because it wasn’t our expertise and we didn’t have other development staff, to troubleshoot, fix, and maintain the ERP. We also needed someone who could take it to the next level should we decide to pursue that.

What was the scope of their involvement?

It’s a large program and we had very limited documentation on how it was constructed. Highland Solutions dove in an untangled that. 

They haven’t done new development on that program, but we did start a separate software customization project that was much smaller. They built us a program that takes our Excel work and spits out at an XML file that is used by our clients. 

What is the team composition?

I work with two programmers on a regular basis. 

How did you come to work with Highland Solutions?

When our programmer gave notice, we interviewed several firms. We liked the way Highland Solutions was going to go about the project. They seemed to have the clearest idea. We initially engaged them for a limited time, and since then we expanded the engagement. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them since October 2019.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

They do a great job and are prompt in our standups. They don’t waste time, but they make sure that everyone is on the same page before moving forward with the project.

How did Highland Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They have abundant strength in this area. They are very clear, and it’s easy to track where everyone is through their project management tools. The team is also very responsive, whether that’s through Slack, email, or phone calls. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re always willing to jump on a problem. They are also very honest. We had them estimate out a project that we didn’t move forward with, and at first, the estimate was a little off, probably because we didn’t articulate the project well.

As soon as we realized that, they came back to us and talked us through it a bit more. I felt that was much better than other teams, including our own in-house programming team, when we had one. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, overall I’m very happy with our working relationship. I don’t think we could’ve found a better fit for us. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure you ask as many questions to feel comfortable with them. Highland Solutions is very open and honest, and they’re not going to say something just to sell you on it. 

They tell you exactly how they work and set appropriate expectations. Additionally, they can sub people in and out if you need a different skillset.