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Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation. Before we dive in, I wanted to personally thank you for listening. Many of the ideas we discuss on this show inspired my new book, AI Augmented Teams. If you're looking for practical ways to combine human expertise and AI to achieve better outcomes, I think you'll find it valuable. Learn more at Paydar AI Books. That is P A I D A R AI Books. Now let's get started with the show.
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Hey, rip that band aid off and try something new here from a tech perspective. If they know why, if they know why, what we're doing and they know the heart behind why we're doing it and what we're trying to accomplish. Not that it's not painful and hard, but at least you're going into it with an understanding that there is thoughts behind it and that you can put something behind it and try harder.
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Welcome to Embracing Digital Transformation, where we explore how people process policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darin, Chief Enterprise architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host on this episode, why Most Mergers Fail, Culture, technology, and leadership lessons with Tom Amberge, CEO at Unis Solutions. All right, Tom, welcome to the show.
B
I appreciate it. Darren. Good to be here.
A
Hey, I'm really interested in this topic because it really goes into organizational change and culture and technical debt. All those great. All those great things that we totally find when we're in M and A and integration of companies. But before we dive into that, everyone that listens to my show knows that I only have superheroes on the show, and every superhero has a background story. So, Tom, you're a superhero because you have to be to be on my show. What's your background story?
B
I appreciate that, man. The background story is always, always a fun story. I come from a military family, so I was a military brat, so kind of grew up all over the US didn't get to do any of the fun stuff going international. We would always kind of come back home to Florida when my dad would get deployed overseas. But I've lived coast to coast and grew up in Las Vegas.
A
Air Force or.
B
He was a Marine, United States Marine, so.
A
Oh, Marine, okay.
B
Yeah, he went in. He went in a couple months after I was born, so I was a lifer along with him all through, you know, 18 years of growing up. And he was a career. He was a career guy. He stayed in for 25 years, I think. 25, 26 years, so definitely good upbringing.
A
Tell him thank you. Yeah, tell him thank you for his service. We really appreciate it here on the show.
B
I'll do that. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. So grew up military family, grew up kind of all over. Learned a lot of different things. Probably maybe one of the most important things to learn was kind of the mission first drive. Right. About life and work and putting more important things above yourself. You know, my dad's case, it was the military and put the nation first. In my case had a high school football injury, so I couldn't go into the military. But have always kind of had that drive of being mission first and missing mission minded. And so that's taken me to work primarily in government technology on both sides of the fence. I've worked in government serving some municipalities in Florida and being on some other things and then have, have bookended that with a couple different govtech companies where we really focus on providing really good quality tools. And so, but for me, you know, a lot of people ask me the why and for me it's really about making change. I joke with people, like it doesn't seem in the cards for me to be Bill Gates and be able to build my own city. So I think how can I, how can I impact the most people? And I've really found that through, through government technology companies, we can really impact a lot of people. I've worked at places where my tools are used by agencies and things that touch upwards of 200 million people a day. And so what, what greater way to kind of impact the life of.
A
That's amazing.
B
Every American right is, is to serve, is to serve government. And so we really, we work really hard to take care of people and you know, try to do that in my life and with, with, with my family, with our community, the church and with, with everything we kind of do at work. So I guess if the background story for me is, is kind of the humble roots of starting with the, you know, the military life all the way up through kind of staying mission minded through raising a family, through work that I do through investing in communities and really happy about that. So personal note. Married 32 years to two adult children, both married now. We've got one grandchild as we're recording this for birthdays on Saturday.
A
It's fun being a grandparent, isn't it?
B
Oh, it's awesome. It is, yeah. It's the best thing in the world.
A
It's, it's the best thing in the world, right? I, I've, I just, my fifth grandchild was just born.
B
Congratulations.
A
I'm very excited about that as well.
B
Yeah, we got one. We're waiting.
A
Hey, let's, let's dive right into this.
B
Yep, let's go right on to.
A
That's awesome. Yeah, let's dive right into this. With that background. With awesome background. Right. You're, you're in a company now that has gone through a lot of change, a lot of merger and acquisition and integration things and. Cause I remember when we talked, I just went over my notes again when we originally talked and you've been at kind of the middle of all of that every single time. Is that right?
B
Yeah. You know, I think it's interesting. Yes. You know, you said superhero. I think one of my, one of my, one of my super skills I guess is I've. I've kind of went to a couple of different companies that have had. Had quite a bit of integration work to do. And so I've built a little bit of a playbook that enables me to come in and be involved in M and A. Be involved a lot both on the, on the process of buying and selling and all that goes with that. But maybe more importantly the skills around how do you bring things together? Whether you're buying a bunch of stuff or even when you start to carve stuff out and you got to kind of close the wound a little bit on a business that you, you've sold something off like what's that look like? And so at Uno, where I'm at now, it is a business that has, has been birthed through 12 different companies over time have come together, you know, small to small to medium sized companies that have, that have come together with really the idea that we're better together and we would be better together around a very good, solid core set of technologies that focus on financial services for government. So things like budgets, things like procurement processes, grants, which is very near dear to our heart, payment systems. So kind of if you think about, if you, if, if, if listeners know what an ERP is. Right. So everything that wraps around an ERP that makes it really good, we do that and we leave the ERP to some other folks, some of our good partners. But, but through that, over the course of. Call it about five and a half, six years, I've been involved in for three but for, for about five and a half, six years these businesses have all come together and we thought it'd be better to be one and we've created unisolutions and gone through the fun journeys that you were describing earlier with bringing things together.
A
Yeah, let's talk about some of these journeys because I've been through some M and as before on the. IT side and bringing new systems together can be a nightmare to handle. So where do you start? Yeah, where do you start with this situation?
B
Yeah, you know, believe it or not, you start with culture and you start with why. So I'm a big, you know, Simon Sinek start with why. But I'm a big Patrick Lencioni fan in terms of really defining what an organization is meant to be. And so there is a lot of really hard work and I know we'll talk about it with integrating technologies, integrating systems, integrating processes, but if people that you're working with don't understand why you're doing it, why do we need to move from Slack to teams so that we're all on the same platform? Why do we need to change our security posture so that's easier? Why do we need to move from AWS to Azure or Azure to AWS so that we're all together. Like what, what is the. It's a lot of hard work. Why? And so I, I often spend and, and I did at unit. I spent the first, you know, 90 to 120 days. We had about 550 employees at the time when I joined and I talked to personally 400 of them in the first 90 days. And, and so I wanted to get to know them. I wanted them to get to know me, to understand kind of where I was coming from and then work with the executive team as we were building that out. But really to start to define what the business is like, why does it exist, what are we going to be focusing on? I kind of move off the, you know, I mentioned being a mission driven person but in the, in a business context I like to move away from that terminology. I think it's been overused and I love, I really love in Patrick Lencioni is the advantage he describes. Just answer some questions. Why does the business exist? Be very clear about that. And then what does the business actually do? Like be very clear about what the business does. Like make it simple. And then what are your success factors? What's going to make you different from your competitors? And then values, which are an important thing is another thing though that in the business context has kind of been overused. So we call them what they are, their behaviors. How are we going to behave? Because that really is what a value is. Right? What do you expect? And so we went through the definition process. We spent a couple off sites and, and iterating and we didn't want it. It wasn't marketing speak, you know, it needed to be clear and easy to understand. But it wasn't led by a marketing firm or anybody. We did it ourselves. And so we took that and we rolled that out and we started really defining to the business why this mattered and why the work we're going to be asking you to do matters And. And getting people engaged and bought in and trying to.
A
So I want to back up. Yeah. I want to back up a little bit on that. The. When you're bringing two companies together, the. Why, the what? The success factors, the values, the behaviors, they could be different.
B
100%. 100% they were. And so one of the.
A
So, yeah. How did you resolve that? Right. I mean, because ours. Our values are better than your values. Right.
B
We resolved it by simply saying in our context, we're starting fresh. So while we took input, like company. And in my context, when I joined, there were already seven businesses that had been brought together. So not only was it one company clashing with another, this was seven. Right. Of varying sizes, of varying degrees. And for us, we were also American and Canadian. So you even had just cultural differences in. In location. Yeah. So it's been. It's been fun. So what we said was, we're going to define Yuna. And it's. And it's not that it's different than everybody else, but it's unique to Yuna. And sure, there might be some similar traits. Like. Of course there'll be similar traits. Right. Because we're working with those people. But we. We didn't start there should be.
A
Right. Otherwise you lose.
B
You lose continuity. 100. Yeah, but I'd say we started with a blank sheet of paper. So we didn't start with one companies that maybe was the largest company and said, that's the foundation. We actually scrapped that. And we started with a blank sheet of paper and worked on that. And so what we went to. We didn't go to six other companies and say, this is the best one. Follow this one. We went to all seven companies and said, this is who we are now and this is what we're shooting for. And really. So in some ways harder. Right. Because we had to take all 500 employees and get them bought in versus a different subset. Same cultural clashes, same. Same difficulties, same getting everybody on board, you know, times seven. And then we. We kind of immediately started doing some additional acquisitions and adding them in. So.
A
So I have a question around that. When you formed your team that helped developed and answered these questions, was. Was it a. Did have members of all seven companies that were now coming together, or how did you handle that? Because you have to have some context of everyone, don't you or did you not? How did, how did that work?
B
Yeah, so, so I'd say the answer is no. We didn't have representation on the team. We had basically I was charged with building for the most part a new executive team. Um, and if you think about it, give total scale. But these were seven companies of a certain scale and now this was one company of a different scale. And, and so having the right kind of resources, the right people that operate different skills. Right. So, so we were, we were pretty much building a new team. There was a couple people like our cfo, who I love to death, started three months before I did. So we're, this is a private, private equity backed business. So they're, they're going to hire, you know, keep things going while they were kind of talking to me and doing some things. So we had, the CFO was there, the head of HR had been there for about six months. And so there was some continuity there. But the rest of the team so brought a new sales lead, brought a new technical lead, new product lead, new customer lead. All those folks that were sitting around the table with us.
A
Highly disruptive.
B
Very much so, Tom.
A
That's really disruptive. Oh man, that must have been tough.
B
It was a journey. It was a fun time. But what we did to ensure that we had contacts was we did go and talk to people. That's why I said I talked to over 400 people. Whenever I hire an executive, I tell them that one of the things that they have to do is go talk to people. You need to go on a listening tour. It's a requirement for a new executive in the business. And so in this context, you know, a lot of people pretty, pretty quick and they had to go talk to people for multiple product lines and what we call product line now, which were for multiple companies and go through that. And so, so I really encourage them to ask about the history, ask about the culture, ask about the things that they liked. So that when we were sitting at the table you had those thought processes and if something was going to be difficult, not that we wouldn't tackle it, but we were prepared to tackle it. And as simple as something like we joke about it. Yeah, we joke about to this day the slack to teams thing. People were just viscerally connected to slack and, and to be connected and it's a great tool. We just for, for a multitude of reasons, we're, we're Microsoft Shop and, and but to migrate that over, we man some of the Most difficult conversations around that. And so. But people were ready for that because it was questioned. Right. You'd talk to people and things about things. Are we going to get to keep our slack channels? Are we going to get to do this? And, and so all that ties into the culture though, right? Because when we do ask them to kind of, hey, rip that band out off and try something new here. From a tech perspective, if they know why, if they know why what we're doing and they know the heart behind why we're doing it and what we're trying to accomplish. Not that it's not painful and hard, but at least you're going into it with an understanding that there is thoughts behind it and that you can, you can put something behind it and try harder.
A
So that I, I like that approach because instead of them coming up with ideas in their own head or instead of them hearing. Because I said so. Right. Which never goes over well when you're going through a digital transformation. I like that approach. But you also said it wasn't perfect. Well, I don't want to use the word perfect. It didn't address all their concerns. They still wanted their slack channels.
B
Sure.
A
But too bad, right?
B
Yeah. At some point, yeah. You know, you go through and you have, you have honest conversations and you start to slow roll things. Right. You build a plan. You really coach on the why. I think, I think a couple things that I believe we did well, first of all admitted that we didn't know everything. We're gonna make some mistakes. Like we're gonna migrate your slack channels and we're gonna miss one. Right. We're going to migrate all your data storage over and we're going to put it in our new OneDrive system and folders are going to be out of order. That's going to happen and we've said that's going to happen and have the team ready and address the issues and make sure you're going through that stuff. But one of the things that I thought was important for me and is important for leaders listening is that as a leader and as the top leader, I'm the CEO. As the top leader, I can't hide behind anything. Like I need to be out in front. I need to be taking ownership of the mistakes, taking ownership of the problems. Encouraging, listening to people. I hear, I hear your pain now here's, here's why and how we're going to get through this. And so I, I would do town halls, I would go in person, I would make my team go to places and Go in person, have conversations and work through things. Because the, the key to a lot of this stuff was you're building a culture and you're taking people through those. I still want my slack and I still want my Gmail or I still want my, whatever piece of software I used for expense reports. I like my expense report better than your expense. Like everything down to that. You had to go and listen and then explain why, like about the unity and the things that come together with that. And so, you know, I, I, I gave us, I gave us a B plus, kind of a, maybe an A minus on the process, but I gave us an A plus on knowing that as leaders we went out and, you know, you take the beatings and you take the, you take the hits where the mistakes were made. You own it, and then you make sure you don't make the same mistakes again. And so we worked really closely with the integration teams to make sure we weren't repeating mistakes. If you made a mistake, you learn from it and you move on and you own it with the team. And the team sees that and they, if nothing else, they can say, you're doing what you said and that's what's most important.
A
Right. So this is what I love, I love what you guys have done with this approach because it seems more human, like you're engaging with your employees instead of it just being a mandate from above, from this, you know, opaque thing. You're like in there with them saying, I know this is painful, but we got to do something. Right? We can't have everyone doing their own thing, and we got to come together and unify. I, I, I really like that approach. My next question is, is why do you think people got hung up on such, I'm going to call them trivial tools like email.
B
Yeah.
A
And, and Slack channels or messaging. Come on. I mean, these, these are everyday tools. Right? Why do you think people got hung up on these sorts of things? Because I, I imagine when it came to things that are more complicated, people are like, all right, we understand we need everything consistent. Why do you think it is that comm, those simple things that are throwing a kink in, into integration?
B
Yeah, I don't, I don't have a PhD in psychology, but I think it's all psychological and I think it's, it's, it's a human response. And so change is hard. We, you know, we could talk days about change and change management and the impact on change. And I think one of the things that you, when you study change through anything, there's the period of, it's a period of loss. Right. And so what, what's really happening to these folks is as their tools are in their mind taken away. Right. They're moved over to this. What's really happening is they're processing the loss of who they were at the business they used to be at and now they have to be somebody else at a new business. Whether it's true or not, we want them doing the same job and we want them taking care of the same customers and we want them to enjoy it. And I do believe in the human side, but with recognizant it is a loss. When change occurs, there is a loss and you have to process the loss and then adapt to the new, you know, environment and the new truth. And so it, it wasn't so much that they were so tied to Slack. It was, that was the visual representation of change that was, was, was easiest for them to talk about or easiest for them to point to because the pay stayed the same.
A
Are you sure you don't, you sure you don't have a PhD in psychology? Because that was really good.
B
I, it's, I tell you what, it's. There's, there's a lot of pain that come with learning that myself through some past experiences. But. And I've had to coach some leaders, particularly kind of middle management leaders as we're going through this, especially ones that were bought in a gun ho and they were struggling with some of their staff and they, they wanted to beat them into submissions. Like nope, we're not, we're not there yet. You got to, you got to softly lead people through this and understand and it's. I, my team, if I had them on here, they would laugh at you. They. I've been in front of particularly. There was one company, one group that was really about the slack and it was because like kind of slack was a picture of who they thought they were as this, they were the young guys. Right, and all that.
A
Yeah, yeah. I'm using the latest tools. Not the big. The enterprise.
B
Exactly. Yeah. And so that was it. And they will. They remember. And this office was in Chicago and I was standing in the middle of their office on the town hall and I was getting peppered and I would just say, I understand. I would understand. Now here's what we're going to do. And another guy would come up and say almost the same thing. I understand, I understand. Here's, here's what we need to do. And just the day of that and you have to do that let people get it out, let people process and let them get it over there. And so, you know, you deal with the human side and all this is obviously contingent on making sure the tech side's good too.
A
This is where a lot of, A lot of integration, M and A's fail is the culture side, but also the tech side too. Right. Especially if you've got a lot of history in these data systems or in these ERP systems. They could be different or whatever or HR systems or CRMs, whatever. If you got a lot of data in there and people are used to using things a certain way, how did your integration, technical integration go with these things? And what are some tips that you can give others?
B
Yeah, no, you're spot on on the problems. Right. So I'd say how did ours go? I give us about a C, a C minus on the, on the tech integration. And my tech team would not argue that. So we did some things really well. So email migration, kind of the communication tool set, moving people, those that were on Slack or they had their own team in Microsoft environment, to our new enterprise environment. That went pretty well and didn't lose a lot of faith or a lot of steps upon the process. Our kind of folder storage migration went pretty well. Where we had the most problems, which is one of the most important is in Salesforce in our CRMs. So we had two different Salesforce instances, a multitude of hubspots and a homegrown as we were trying to pull.
A
Oh man, what a nightmare.
B
Yeah. So listen, for all the power that Salesforce has, and anybody knows this, they're gonna probably shaking their head in total agreement. It's got all this power. It is not easy to set up and it is even harder when you're trying to migrate things together. And so we, we rushed it. We. We tried to redefine and create kind of what, what the unidata structure needed to look like what we were calling a customer. What was their key facts we needed? And I think they did a fairly good job defining all that. They didn't do a fairly good job of doing the data mapping and so push some things through to try to hit it on our official deadline. And, and so we've struggled and it took us about two full years. I'll probably do fully recover to get everything set to get the system where we want it, to make sure that everyone had access to the data they wanted. It's just. It's a beast. Right. And so, so I would encourage people, those. So whether it's their ERP or their, or their CRM. Those are probably the two big ones. Right. Make sure that you are dedicating the right amount of time. Don't put artificial deadlines and say we got to be done in six months because that's just what has to happen. No, like actually look at what you're doing. Have professionals come in. Use, use third party partners as much as you can afford to use third party partners because they'll have a mindset to be able to help you map everything and be realistic about how long
A
it's without any, without any historical politics.
B
Correct.
A
Or historical biases, I guess is the right word.
B
Yeah, no, 100%. So. So yeah, so it's, you know, we're now at a stage and we're starting kind of this next iteration of transformation for us around AI. But we're kind of the, the original transformation onto, you know, we're netsuite and Salesforce and Microsoft Shop and, and then lots of ancillary parts and pieces around that. We've got everything standardized. We have a good system. We, we did an acquisition late last year and integrated it seamlessly. So, so we had the engine running and we, we got through some of that and so that one got all the data over in the right place, got all the tools done right. The people came over and we, we kind of had the system of getting them ingrained in the culture and so, and so we've got a pretty good engine now and, and I think we, you know, could we do, could we double our size with an acquisition? That one might be a little tough, but you know, if we're doing some small kind of tack ons and things like that, I think we've got.
A
You talked about another transition though. You talked about, you, you mentioned it. This transition is a little bit different and it's. In the AI transition.
B
Yeah.
A
How. What are you, are you seeing similar types of things that you can use with the AI transition that you used in an integration or what's fundamentally different?
B
So yeah, I think that's a very good question. And both, there are some things that, there are some similarities at least the call it toolkit that you can use. And then there's some things that are fundamentally different. Right. I'd say the things that are in the toolkit that works is explaining the why. Like why are we do, why are we investing in this technology? Why are we, you know, changing our processes? Why are we doing things different? So really getting, getting ahold of people and explaining to them the why. And that's really the Thing that's one of the fundamental differences that makes that harder is that we're dealing with the news and we're dealing with the public and what they're saying about their businesses and what they're saying about how they're using AI and how they're reducing staff and how they're doing this, this, this. Which I, you know, I tell my team that probably 75% of this stuff's not true. They're just, it's pressed, right? And so you got to ignore that. So we've got to overcome fear and overcome anxiety. That's not, not even tied to what we're doing. It's what's coming in from the outside when they, when they read their articles or their, you know, Reddit post and all everything else. So, so it's even more incumbent, right, to deal with the human side of it, besides just the tech, making sure you got really good tech. So we've, we've done stuff. We've. We've hired professionals. So we have a whole AI team, one which has. Part of the team focuses just on our software firm, right? So developing software is key to us. And so we have a team that focuses just on software developers, and then we have a team that focuses on everybody else. And so it's a lot of, lot of winning hearts. It's a lot of showing value. It's a lot of sitting side by side with someone and showing them how this stuff can really improve the way that they're going about their day. And then probably the final thing that I'd say that goes all the way back to all of this for this transformation is just being honest and being truthful about where we're going and doing what we say. And so I've been out there and what I've told our team is, you know, we're not looking to save money here. We're looking to do more and not spend more money, right? Like, if we can, if we can develop more software and not hire 100 extra people, why wouldn't we want to do that? Because that's money that we can invest in other places, right, and do other things. And we're sticking by that. We're not laying people off and we have no grand plans to cut staff and all this stuff.
A
Well, you're doing the smart, you're doing the smart thing here because too many businesses are laying off their, their talent, which I never understood, that they're laying off their most senior people, the ones that actually can get stuff done, and then they're Wondering why, well, why can't I deliver?
B
It just is mind blowing and I think it's proving it out. And we pull articles in and share. People say, hey, see this is our model, this is where we're going. We then on the flip side of that though, we're also very honest with people. You know, we've got some people that are fearful and AI is going to take my job. And so I've had a conversation with them and I said, you know what, you're right. At this point, you're right, but it's not for the reason you think. It's not a new agent that you built that's going to take your job. It's the fact that your whole team is enabling themselves with a really good tool and they're that much more efficient than you and they're that much more effective than you. And therefore I have no choice but to make a change here because you're not keeping up with your team. And so back to the PhD. I don't have a PhD, but I have studied self fulfilling prophecies. And so back to leadership, right, I've sat with my management team, I've sit with individuals. So I try to do Coffee Connect. We call them Coffee Connects. When I go visit offices, we'll invite 10, 15 people in and we'll sit down and it's a ask me anything session is what it is. And, and we've had several of these where this come up and I say this like, you know, if, if, if this is you, you know, Darren, if this is you or if this is someone on your team, you need to let them know that yeah, it might happen, but not because we're cutting cost and getting rid of people, because we're going to go hire somebody else. Like we're going to go hire somebody who has the skills, who is producing at the same level as the rest of the team. So, and we're honest about that and, and we're forthright about that. So we try to be very open and touch people.
A
So Tom, you need to tell other CEOs to be that honest about it because I, I like your approach because it fits well into. I just released a book called AI Augmented Teams and I talk specifically about this, right, that hey, you've got to become AI augmented. Instead of sitting there as an under leveraged subject matter expert, we gotta leverage. You add AI to your skill set that you already have and it's amazing what you can do. So I'm glad you're, you're already doing what my book talks about. I hadn't even interviewed you yet, so this is awesome.
B
Good. Well I'm glad, I'm glad I got that. We're getting something right and we're seeing really good traction. We landed on doing an enterprise so we've part was part mandate from ownership group but we were kind of moving this direction anyways that we're providing enterprise level AI to everyone in the organization. So it's not just software developers. It's, you know, we're now pushing 700 employees so all 700 people have access and are expected to use it for whatever makes sense for their job. We're, we're really looking at different opportunities to streamline workflows. We've got some people that are going through some zero based redesign for key processes so that you know, kind of use them as guinea pigs to go through that process and show the change so that we can kind of roll some of those strengths out across the organization. So, so it's, it's been a fun journey. I love it. I use it. We, we keep track of usage obviously just from a spend perspective. And my goal has been to always be in the top 10 as a CEO and mine's not developers. Take developers out all the other employees. Yeah. Not, not our developers. It's a problem if our developers aren't all on top 10. So this is our kind of core staff of 500.
A
Right.
B
And, and so far for the last three months I've been able to, I've been in top five. So I've been.
A
Well there you go, Tom.
B
Ask people to do it. I need to do it and show value that way. And so I hold that over my team a little bit because they're not quite so far up the list and I remind them.
A
That's awesome. Hey Tom, if people want to find out more about you guys and what you've done on your transformation, where can they find out more information?
B
Awesome. Yeah. So unisolutions.com and it's spelled a little different. It's e u nasolutions.com if you go out there and you can see the great stuff that we're doing. We've got some great customer testimonials and well there's some history out there and we talked, you know, we're also, you know, we, we're, we've rebranded and we're all in on una but we don't want to let go of, you know, there was a history there and we're proud of the companies that have come together and so you can read about the history and then see how it, how it came together. And there's some, there's some contact information on the website and, you know, if it's something you want to learn more, you want to dig into, reach out, find me on, find me on the website, find me on LinkedIn, wherever. I'm always happy to talk and help people through a journey, bounce ideas, do whatever, because, you know, I just think we're in this together. Right? This is really good. I love that Tom is important, so
A
I love that a lot. That's awesome. Hey, Tom, thanks for coming on the show. This has been, this has been insightful. I learn. I learned something new every day.
B
Awesome.
A
You brought some great things. So thanks for listening to improvement. Embracing Digital Transformation. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us five stars on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube. It really helps others discover the show. If you want to go deeper, join our exclusive community@patreon.com embracingdigital where we share bonus content. And you can always connect with other change makers like yourself. You can always find more resources@embracingdigital.org until next time. Next time. Keep embracing the digital transformation.
Host: Dr. Darren Pulsipher
Guest: Tom Amberge, CEO, Unis Solutions
Date: June 23, 2026
This episode delves into the real reasons most corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) fall short, focusing on the people, processes, and technologies involved. Dr. Darren Pulsipher interviews Tom Amberge, CEO of Unis Solutions, whose leadership steered the integration of 12 companies into one unified public sector tech provider. The conversation blends personal leadership anecdotes with practical, ground-level change management lessons, addressing cultural clashes, technical integration pitfalls, and how to foster real engagement through digital and AI transformation.
Timestamps: 02:01–05:25
Timestamps: 05:30–07:59
Timestamps: 08:20–12:55
Timestamps: 12:56–16:30
Timestamps: 16:30–19:20
Timestamps: 20:00–23:28
Timestamps: 23:28–27:25
Timestamps: 27:25–34:03
For further learning about integrating AI into your teams and organizations, Dr. Pulsipher’s new book "AI Augmented Teams" is also recommended.
This summary contains major actionable insights and a candid, “from the trenches” look at transforming organizations through mergers, tech integrations, and AI adoption in the public sector. Tom Amberge’s approach—lead with culture, be honest about difficulty, and relentlessly communicate—offers a pragmatic playbook for any digital era leader.