The Client’s Advocate
How ASG ensures client success by building trust and doing the right thing.
At ASG, we believe that building trust between our clients and team members is crucial to lasting, fruitful relationships.
What does it mean to be a client advocate?
Being a client advocate is part of our culture at ASG. It requires a high degree of trust from leadership. This allows us to become a seamless extension of our client’s teams so we can do the right work and get the job done.
“If you give someone a task, and then you are still worrying about it, it’s not really off your plate,” said ASG Engineer Rylan Wolfe. “When you give an ASG team member a task to do, you know it will be done right the first time.”
How is being a client advocate beneficial?
This approach allows ASG team members to be partners in every sense of the word. Krista Gearhart, an engineer at ASG, said, “Clients trust ASG to come in and work alongside them,” said ASG Engineer Krista Gearhart. “They trust that we understand and will advocate for their processes and practices.”
Our clients don’t just have a singular person to help them solve big problems, they have the entire ASG team behind them. “At ASG, we don’t just say we can do the work,” said Adam Bartley, a Cost Controller at ASG. “The team has access to the extended team with all their industry knowledge and experience, so they are able to plug into projects without skipping a beat, giving clients better answers, faster.”
How is ASG’s approach different from how other external partners work?
At ASG, we focus on aligning project management and strategic goals to keep patient safety at the top of our minds throughout our work on a device. “Engineers at ASG care about getting it done right the first time,” said Gearhart. “We follow our client’s internal processes and are familiar with external standards in an industry where safety is critical.”
Not only do ASG team members know industry standards, “We understand client processes like they are our own and fully adopt them,” said Wolfe.
ASG operates from a strong system of values, including its One Team philosophy. It has always been a priority to create strong, trusting relationships with our clients so that we can go do the work that they need us to do,” said ASG Systems Engineer Andrew Ozga.
How do ASG team members implement client advocacy into their daily work?
Bartley, who was recently working on the financials for a project, focused on making sure the project manager didn’t have to worry if someone asked questions about the cost of the project. “My job is to make sure that when a project manager brings everything to management, they don’t have to double and triple check the financial aspects of the project,” Bartley said. “If ASG manages a section of a project, they know it’s done right the first time I hand it to them.”
“Our clients allow us to take ownership of writing and verifying design inputs and writing and validating user needs under their quality system,” Ozga said. “This is important work, and we’ve built trust so that people can say, ‘Take this over’ if their focus is better spent on continuous improvement or honing processes.”
Wolfe, who was recently working on a submission, was focused on building a large document and updating it as needed. “One of our goals is for our clients to trust our ability to deliver parts of the project so they can forget about it until it’s needed,” said Wolfe.
We focus on trying to understand our clients’ strategy when it comes to Standard Operating Procedures or risk management documents so that we can maintain consistency across projects,” Gearhart said. “There are always a lot of moving parts in documentation. Regardless of where we are put on the project, we focus on uniformity from start to finish.”
At ASG, being a true advocate for our clients is not a one-person job; it takes the entire team. “ASG has a lot of diverse minds and experts in their field on the team. In every project we join, we have a separate ASG team meeting to make sure we are all focused on delivering the best results,” said Wolfe. “Not only that, but ASG team members who are not on the project will step in if you have a question and help polish a document that’s ready for submission. Teamwork isn’t just something we talk about, it’s why our culture is based around One Team, and it shows in our work.”
ASG Co-Founder, Principal and Senior Consultant Doug Koeneman says, “All of our team members advocate for the client in their position, regardless of their role, we expect them to do the right thing. This idea advocacy was foundational when we started ASG 13 years ago and it is core to what we do today.”
