How Culture Survives Growth featuring John Sansoucie

John Sansoucie (0:00)

When we started the company, I was told, the worst thing you can tell me is, you can't teach people US payroll tax at India. It's impossible. At the end of the day, our product is our people. We're a BPO, but without those folks properly trained, taken care of, happy, but their family lives are nice and balanced, we don't exist. And I harp on that all the time. That's the factory floor, but it's also the only asset we own, are the human beings out there. I was in the professional employer organization, Space POs, nature outsourcing software all my life.

Our people are deep subject matter experts, not just, I'm going to sit here and do this all.

SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

Welcome to the Culture From the Heart Podcast on the From the Heart Business Network. In a business world where employees and customers crave authenticity and trust, hosts Larry Levine and Darrell Amy are on a mission to find and showcase heart-centered executives and the companies they lead.

You are about to hear an inspiring conversation with a visionary leader that's bringing heart into the workplace, empowering employees, serving their clients, and uplifting communities, all to create true success. This is Culture From the Heart. The movement starts here. Let's begin.

Darrell Amy (1:14)

Welcome to Culture From the Heart. I'm your co-host, Darrell Amy, here today with Larry Levine, and we're joined by John Sansoucie, the CEO of CogNet, a company that helps businesses scale through outsourcing, process improvement, and AI-enabled operations. John, welcome to Culture From the Heart. It's great to have you here.

John Sansoucie (1:33)

Great to be here. Appreciate your time.

Larry Levine (1:34)

It's our pleasure. Thanks for hanging out with us, John.

Darrell Amy (1:36)

Yeah. As we kick this off, John, the one question we ask every leader on this show is simply this, what does Culture From the Heart mean to you?

John Sansoucie (1:44)

CogNet was always built as a family, and we try to keep it that way. We realized we grew over four years from probably 67 employees to 670 or so.

Keeping that has been difficult. It requires me on a plane more, but that's what we want.

We always tried to keep this organization close that way, because it grew up from that. That's a bigger challenge than you think, but with the right team in place, it's possible. We want to continue that. We say, how do we keep this as a family atmosphere until 2000 employees? How do we continue that legacy forward?

Larry Levine (2:22)

The big question is, how do you keep family, and how do you keep alignment in a family like the size of yours as it continues to grow? Because we all know family dynamics change. How do you keep the family aligned all rowing in the same direction?

John Sansoucie (2:39)

It's easier than my own family, I can tell you that for sure.

But I find that it's just communication, and in some of that, I was at fault at, and I've gotten better at over the years of over-communicating from my perspective. Here's where we're going in the company. Now, let's also talk about where you are. A lot of that, as we've evolved, it's starting to become measurement, but measurement allows that communication to be meaningful versus, hey, we were a small company and so-and-so does everything, we love them. That's great. How do you evolve into measurement and then also keep your people aligned? Definitely communication. So they hear from me a lot. Every time I get over there, I get the management team, which is a good 60, 70 people together and say, here's where we're going, guys. The whole is barred.

Some of it, they may want to hear and some they don't. AI is one of those things. It's a threat and an opportunity to our business. How do we continue that family legacy, really? Knowing that technology is encroaching, if you will, it's okay. Let's embrace it and make it part of the business.

Darrell Amy (3:48)

Well, and so for context for our listeners, John, you run an organization across two continents and with a large ocean in between, correct? Like this is not just 600 people in one building with 20 stories. This is 600 people across thousands of miles. Keeping a family dynamic in that, that is a high goal for the spread of your organization. So tell us more. This is really, really fascinating.

John Sansoucie (4:21)

I come fresh off the heels of our anniversary. So there's our 19th anniversary party. We do it every July.

The evolution of that party, I think is a parable for where we've ended up. For years, we had it in a nice hotel, and we give out awards and everybody's happy. Then what we found out are people just really want to dance. They've watched every Bollywood and Tamil movie you could ever find. So we listened and we said, okay, well, then this is going to evolve. We'll do 30 minutes of my little speech and give out the awards and stuff and we'll turn the music on. It was amazing to watch that change in everybody. Because a lot of times the guys at the C-level, they want to structure something like this and do what they want to do. Listen a little bit is a big one and listen to what they want. To the point now where we literally have our teams, our functional teams. We have a guy that used to be, did choreography for some of the movies in India. So they practice for a month and they compete against each other.