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What Makes a Company Great? Look at the Customer

Prashant Srivatava January 14, 2019

I am often asked: What does it take to build a great company? There are many philosophies business leaders can reference to answer this question, but I’m particularly fond of the approach by Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great. He explains the Hedgehog Concept, the idea that success comes from a deep understanding of three key areas and how they intersect.

In other words, knowing what you’re deeply passionate about, what you can be the best at, and what drives your economic engine is crucial. At Evive, we have clear intentions in each of those areas. Our passion is to transform lives with technology—in fact, that’s conveyed in our name: e is the technology element, while vive (derived from viva) is the life element. We strive to be the best at connecting the dots between big data and relevant information for people to make better decisions. Finally, our economic engine is driven by helping large, self-insured employers achieve their total-rewards vision, strategy, and goals.

As a team, we also understand how those three intentions support and inform one another. But for our company to truly go from good to great, we have a fourth area that plays a critical part: our clients.

The most important resource

We’re fortunate to work with HR leaders who are passionate visionaries when it comes to solving problems for their workforces. They challenge us to solve bigger problems year after year, and frankly, each iteration has made us a better organization. Very much in the spirit of our closed loop, new information keeps us learning—and empowers us to grow smarter over time.

These dynamic HR and benefits teams are excellent partners to us, and the exciting ways in which these partnerships evolve unlocks new avenues to success every day. It’s this co-innovation, and the amazing results in the form of new products, that continue to drive our growth engine. It’s what makes our clients the fourth element that is critical in our pursuit to build a great company.

Bringing the four circles together

Since our inception, Evive has been in the “business of better”—this means everything from applying our technology in better ways, to making the benefits experience better for users, to helping employers reach a better ROI. Learning from our clients has given us a better view into the problems that really keep HR leaders up at night and the solutions they crave. That insight is what makes them so pivotal to our future.

Constantly aiming to serve our clients and users in better ways—and working with them to define what “better” is each day—is what we believe will power us from good to great. It’s our clients who enable us to better exhibit our passion, to be the best we can be, and to fully drive that economic engine. That’s how we, together, can achieve greatness.