Krystina Francis is an entrepreneur with more than ten years of project management experience. As of January 2015, she is the founder of premier consulting firm Adroit Methods.
In With the New
Over the years, Krystina has connected with people with focused skill sets, and she created Adroit Methods to collaboratively use their agility, skill, and experience to offer best practices and project management. The venture was borne of networking, and the team quickly grew to seven entrepreneurs, with more coming.
Adroit Methods asks its clients—whether medium-size companies or Fortune 1000—what their objectives are: more market share, faster project timelines, more efficient workflow, or large scale growth. Krystina and her team manage resources to transparently and effectively achieve the chosen goal.
Entrepreneurs Need Apply
The team at Adroit Methods doesn’t just rack up hours. They look at a company’s problems, come up with a plan, and execute the work involved in resolving the issues. Krystina’s consultants can actually implement the recommendations that they make, an anomaly among consulting firms.
Everyone that joins the Adroit team has to be an entrepreneur.
Innovation is critical to us. You have to know what it takes to get things done. Each one of our consultants has to recognize the things that startups and big businesses deal with.
Unlike big consulting companies which end up hiring an individual in his own bubble, Adroit is specifically structured so that consultants work as a team and offer a productive think tank.
Krystina’s goal is to make sure that her clients produce the highest quality work in the best possible budget and timeline. She manages her other consultants, and treats every engagement like a project.
Learning Success
Krystina began her career in project management in 2004, when she developed the patent-pending Vivid M, the world’s first online recording studio and live performance venue for musicians. She then took a project management role at JHouse Media, and had a hand in SaaS, e-commerce, website development, and marketing initiatives for clients across all industries. From there she was hired at FormFree, where she managed everything from customer surveys, redeveloping the mobile interface, and marketing.
Krystina credits her success to a few of her attributes, and risk taking is not the least of them. When she considers a plan, she writes out the worst case scenario and considers whether it can be mitigated with a plan and survived. Considering the worst possible outcome helps her to judge whether to proceed.
Strong writing skills are important for most anyone to develop, particularly for project managers, where communication is key. Krystina is confident both in writing and pattern recognition, so she’s able to look at data, interpret why things are happening, and identify what could be changed and replicated. She’s able to teach clients and associates by communicating complex ideas simply.
Love and Respect
Despite recognizing that she built her business through networking, Krystina describes traditional networking as a real personal challenge—one that she seeks to engage. Because she considers herself more analytical and reserved, her proclivity is not to jump into small talk at parties. Krystina meets people best in small groups and one-on-one, in meaningful conversations.
But networking isn’t just about making new acquaintances. With the launch of Adroit, Krystina was overwhelmed by the positive responses she’d received from people she’d worked alongside in the past. Old associates wanted to work with her, and cited her integrity alongside her aptitude for doing quality work and managing people well.
No matter what Krystina does in business, she tries to treat people with love and respect, and continually come from that place toward them. Her philosophy is to ask herself how she can help rather than wonder what she can get. Krystina truly believes that character shows itself in they way people treat those they think can’t help them at all.