EMyth taps Smartsheet to help transform its business

Learn how EMyth used Smartsheet to standardize their digital transformation and technology tools to better serve their extensive client base.

Industry

  • Professional Services

Organization Size

  • Emerging and SMB (1-199)

Region

  • North America

"With Smartsheet, everything just connects. The internal systemic continuity that these cloud-based systems have sparked is exactly what EMyth needed as we took on our reinvention."

Jackie Sangster

Director of Program Management, EMyth

How does a business rethink who they are and what they stand for?  How then do they rebuild with this new lens? One business coaching company has asked themselves these questions — and acted on what they’ve found — this past year. And Smartsheet was at the heart of their transformation. 

EMyth is a 40-year-old business coaching company born out of the successful EMyth (Entrepreneurial Myth) book series. Over the years, EMyth has worked with more than 70,000 businesses in 145 countries. While revamping the company’s old structures and critically evaluating the business, they determined that the technology systems they had in place clearly needed updating.

What was initially thought to be a quick systems upgrade became an opportunity to reimagine the business in its entirety.  

The Decision to Embrace Business Transformation

The projects and tasks surrounding the necessary system overhauls and company reimagining ranged in scope and affected every department. “The systems we had in place for project management were limited,” said Kelly Hay, EMyth Project Manager. “We relied on Excel to track our projects and tasks; as a result, we couldn’t easily display project timelines and were wasting hours in meetings trying to keep up with changes.”

In order to really be successful, EMyth needed a leader who could closely manage all of the changes that were underway in the company.

Jackie Sangster, EMyth’s Director of Program Management, joined the EMyth team in April 2012. “My very first assignment was to find the perfect project management software for what we were doing and introduce it to the team. I wanted to develop systems to consistently, collaboratively track progress and aggressively move forward towards our goals.”  

“Once I found Smartsheet, I had a feeling it was the right fit for us.  When our head of IT mentioned the Google integration and that we would soon be transitioning to Google Apps, there was no other contender,” said Sangster.

Collaborative Transformation Takes Shape in the Cloud

Sangster and EMyth now manage seven workstreams in Smartsheet that represent the core of the company’s overall transformation:

  • Transition Planning: Transitioning from a series of legacy EMyth coaching processes to new ones is no small task, and each detail is tracked in Smartsheet. Gantt charts make viewing the progress of this transition easy for anyone in the company.
  • Corporate Re-branding: EMyth’s new approach is reflected in its new corporate brand image. Sangster and her team use attachments to keep all of the assets involved in this process organized and easy to find, and archived with the project’s timeline.
  • Video Projects: New videos tell the compelling story of EMyth’s clients and of their own journey over the last year. The creation of these videos, from storyboarding to the final rendering steps, are all tracked and documented in Smartsheet.
  • Website Development and Redesign: Ideas, notes, contracts, images and timelines for EMyth’s new website are all tracked in one central location.
  • Content Development: Another key feature of the reimagined EMyth is their new Product Delivery System, which expands the variety of services that the company is able to offer its clients. Each development phase of this new system is tracked in Smartsheet.
  • Product Delivery: EMyth has also reevaluated the options that their clients have to access their coaching services and are now offering comprehensive online coaching. Smartsheet is used to track each of these new product developments and coordinate their delivery.  
  • Human Resources: EMyth is using Smartsheet to manage the recruitment and training of their newly expanded Coaching Network from hiring new staff members to training schedules and milestones.  

Smartsheet and Google Ensure Systemic Continuity

In addition to Sangster’s workstreams, the EMyth IT department uses Smartsheet to plan and manage all of their systems migrations, most recently their transition to Gmail from Outlook.  

Adopting Smartsheet was just a piece of EMyth’s migration to the cloud. In addition to Gmail, they now use Google Docs and Google Drive. 

“Every major task assigned within the sheet has a connected Google Doc which covers the requirements or goals. Every stakeholder now knows the context of the project,” explained Sangster.  

Hours Saved to Rebuild on Main Street

“With Smartsheet, everything just connects,” said Sangster. “The internal systemic continuity that these cloud-based systems have sparked is exactly what EMyth needed as we took on our reinvention,” said Sangster.

With Smartsheet and Google working seamlessly together, communication and feedback are more efficient. Sangster even estimates they’ll save about 2,000 hours of meetings this year. “Everyone now has the capacity to collaborate. I’ve seen a mega-shift at EMyth. There’s a true buy-in to project management.”

“Our IT department has totally changed, thanks to Smartsheet and Google Apps,” said Ben Ostergaard, EMyth’s COO. “We realized that just because you have technology doesn’t necessarily mean that you know how to do your job. Smartsheet and Google Apps let technology get out of the way so that we can get our jobs done. They promote self-responsibility; employees are able to take responsibility for their own technology use.  We’ve left behind the days of IT maintenance and crisis resolution. We have the resources to put our thinking behind ‘what’s possible’ rather than just ‘what’s possible right now.’”  

“Smartsheet has been instrumental in tracking the progress of our overall corporate transformation,” said Tricia Huebner, Vice President of Business Development at EMyth. “We can deliver on our promise of innovation and progressive thinking to our clients in a whole new way. Smartsheet and Google have given EMyth back time and money to invest in developing more products and programs to serve our clients so that they can create sustainable and profitable businesses which are the backbone of our economy.”