Dear Syspro True Pros
I have been thinking about what separates the companies that thrive through every cycle. The downturns, the disruptions, the moments that others wait out, from the ones that simply hope to survive them.
It isn’t strategy alone. It isn’t technology. It’s who we are when it counts. The version of us that shows up when a customer calls with a problem. That decides what to do when no one is checking. That either earns trust or doesn’t.
That’s the version I care about.
Syspro is in the middle of something real.
We’re becoming an industrial AI company. That means we’re embedding intelligence into the operations that manufacturers and distributors have depended on for decades, not bolting it on, but building it in, so it actually works when it matters. That changes what we build, how fast we move, and what we ask of each other.
I believe the only way to build something this ambitious is to be genuinely clear about what we stand for. Clear enough that it helps someone make a better decision, when the answer isn’t always easy.
That’s what values are for. So we’ve sharpened ours.
Values determine behaviour. Behaviour, repeated across thousands of decisions and dozens of teams, becomes culture.
A few weeks ago a long-standing customer told me, unprompted, that what they value most about Syspro isn’t the software. It’s that we understand their world. That we ask the right questions. That we genuinely know their business.
And recently, one of our teams flagged early that a project wasn’t going to land the way we’d promised. They didn’t wait to be asked. They came with a plan, owned the outcome, and we course-corrected in time.
I share those two things because they’re exactly what our new values focus on. These are the standards we hold ourselves to, and they only work if people feel safe enough, supported enough, and valued enough to actually live them.
Earn the Floor.
Our customers’ problems aren’t solved in meeting rooms. They’re solved on factory floors, in procurement offices, in the places where the margin for error is real. We earn the right to build for them by understanding the complexity they live with every day. That takes domain knowledge. It means walking the factory floor in your customer shoes.
Learning Velocity.
We’re not building a product that competes on AI models. We’re building a company that learns faster than anyone else. Every production run scheduled, every inventory decision made is signal. The person who surfaces a problem early is a hero. One of my commitments to every person here is that Syspro will be a place where you will be able to grow and develop, and that will make us harder to beat.
Customer Outcomes Obsessed.
A renewal isn’t the win. The win is when a customer’s inventory days on hand go down. When their production yield goes up. When they make better decisions faster. The gap between “the customer is happy” and “the customer is genuinely better” is where our real work lives.
Accountability with Autonomy.
We need people who are empowered to own their outcomes. Not just the ones that go well. People who move within their mandate, who come to leadership with a direction rather than just a problem, and who understand that in a high-trust organization, accountability isn’t a constraint on autonomy. It’s the price of it. These aren’t separate ideas. They’re the same thing. I commit to giving people the space to actually lead.
Relentless Pursuit of Industrial Grade.
This isn’t just about what we ship. It’s how we show up in everything. The quality of a commitment. The rigor behind a recommendation. The standard we hold ourselves to when nobody is watching. Our customers run operations where things going wrong has real consequences. That raises the bar for all of us, not just in engineering. In every conversation, every deliverable, every decision. It’s also what makes working here mean something.
We don’t need to be perfect. We need to be the kind of people who notice when something isn’t right and do something about it. Who learn faster than anyone else. Who care enough about the manufacturers we serve to hold ourselves to their outcomes.
I also want this to be a place where people grow. Where you look back in five years and point to something you’ve built, a skill you developed, a person you helped get better and most importantly, to the customer outcomes you’ve helped achieve. That matters to me as much as the results.
My ask is simple: be great in your own role and help someone else become greater too.
That’s how we build something worth depending on.
Leanne
