The Case Study

The Business Problem

A better way to scale a family-owned business

Riad Nizam is the President of Master Electronics, a leading authorized distributor of electronic components. When Master Electronics became our client over six years ago, they were doing well as a company but it was hard to scale. Without a tool like Rhythm, they would start with a plan but four weeks later, lose momentum. As the company grew from 160 to 450 people, it became increasingly important to have a system to manage their growth.

In order to scale, Master Electronics had to:

• Build a culture of trust to empower their employees to make decisions without having the family last name

• Track their plan and stay focused on the activities that drove their growth initiatives

How Rhythm Helped

A system to track plans and create a culture of trust

"We had a $140 million business and no decision was made without family input", said Riad Nizam. They had to find a way to empower others to make decisions and start trusting people. 

Here is how Rhythm helped create and sustain a culture of trust and stay focused on their initiatives:

• Core Values: The Rhythm team helped them develop a set of core values as a foundation to create a culture of trust and empowerment. This allowed them to start trusting people to make decisions because they knew they had the same values. "Now we trust people based on the same values. Before we trusted people because of the same last name", Riad said. Now they were able to confidently hire the right people. This was a critical breakthrough that allowed them to grow. 
• Retaining New Hires: As they grew from 160 to 450 people, one of their initiatives was to reduce new hire attrition to 20%. Rhythm software provided a disciplined way to track this initiative. They created a hiring and onboarding process, then documented and executed all the steps in Rhythm. Weekly meetings with the new hire and managers were recorded in Rhythm to touch base and uncover any roadblocks. They were able to exceed their goal and got it to 12.6%.
• Grow Existing Accounts: Rhythm helped them focus on growing their existing customer accounts. Every salesperson had 300-400 customers they were servicing. They weren't able to cover them all so they put in an initiative called DLO (Do Less.. then Obsess). Everyone now had a smaller account base of only 100 and they increased the sales team by 10%. Using Rhythm, they stayed focused on tracking this initiative and exceeded their goal of $6 million and instead hit $14 million in 2020. 

The Results

Achieved over 100 initiatives with family and team input

Using Rhythm software helped create a culture of trust and more transparency company-wide. "Since everything is documented in Rhythm and seen by everyone, it helps with self-discipline and accountability. They don't want to let their peers down", Riad said. 

Over the last six years, Master Electronics has built a system they can rely on and as they set bigger goals, they can break them down into bite-size pieces, cascade their plans to the rest of the organization in the disciplined and structured way that has proven to work. 

Here are some of their results:

• Grew from 160 to 450 employees
• Crush their goal of reducing new hire attrition (goal was 20% and they achieved 12.6%)
• Scaled from $140 million to $440 million in revenue 

"We won because we had a system to stay focused."
- Riad Nizam, President, Master Electronics