Over the last 23 years with SSI, I have been deeply involved in many areas of SSI’s business. Most of that energy was spent with industry, clients, and in the earliest days, developing our solutions. With a smaller team and a smaller organization, it is practical for a business to focus much of its energy externally. A lot of work still goes into the day-to-day running of the business, but the focus is largely on what the business does – not how it does it.
Since Denis Morais and I took over the business from its founder, I’ve enjoyed leading the company alongside Denis as co-CEOs. We’ve both been able to leverage the expertise we’ve developed to work with trusted clients and new customers and worked from within to improve the business. With two leaders with similar skillsets and experience, that was a natural step in the evolution of SSI. However, we now feel that we can build a better company by ensuring that we each focus on the areas where we bring unique value to SSI and the areas that align with our personal goals.
My focus going forward will be on how SSI does what we do. I will be working with our business systems, operations, finance, and IT teams to ensure that SSI’s continued evolution into a mature, data-driven, secure, and stable organization allows us to do what we do better.
This focus on how we do what we do is necessary for SSI more than ever before. SSI as a business is changing in many ways. We have subsidiaries or employees in several countries and continue building a corporate presence in more of the key markets we serve. We now offer multiple solutions to the industry, reaching beyond engineering and design departments and into the rest of the shipyard. Perhaps most significantly, the world around us is changing ever more quickly. The shipbuilding industry is evolving and needs a very high level of business and IT sophistication from those involved in global shipbuilding projects, especially for the Navy and Coast Guard projects our clients have trusted us with for years.
This next step is ensuring that SSI can deliver value to the business of shipbuilding more securely, effectively, and efficiently than ever. That has always been SSI’s goal, and it continues to be my goal personally. While the future will hold different challenges and opportunities, I am still walking the same path.