Businessperson of the Year: Relias' Triandiflou leads a learning company always looking to learn

​When the 52-year-old Jim Triandiflou joined Relias Learning as CEO back in 2012, the online training company employed a mere 15 people in Cary and a little more than 100 companywide.

Today, that headcount looks much different – and so does its sales volume.

The company – which recently shortened its name to “Relias” in a growth-prompted rebranding – now employs 450 people in Cary and about 670 companywide.

As for sales, Triandiflou’s LinkedIn profile notes that revenue has risen from $20 million when he became CEO in 2012 to more than $200 million.

Relias doesn’t plan on stopping there.

In July of last year, Relias announced a massive expansion plan – one that positions the company to add 450 new jobs in the Triangle by 2020 and receive up to $5.3 million in incentives for doing so through the state’s Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG) program.

The company is on track to achieve that goal and outgrow its current home at 111 Corning Road in Cary.

So earlier this year, Relias pegged Perimeter Park for a sparkling new, glass-encased headquarters – one that has the capacity to house 700 employees. The company plans to occupy the space by early 2019.

Over the last year, Relias – focused on the health care industry – has moved into two additional areas of business: analytics and assessments. And the company has announced seven acquisitions in the past two years to aid in achieving that feat.

It has also expanded into a number of new international markets and completed its first European acquisition: Germany’s Spm.

Triandiflou’s drive has guided this trajectory, earning him the honor of being Triangle Business Journal’s 2017 Businessperson of the Year.

With growth, however, comes a new set of challenges.

“One of our core values is a thirst for learning … we can always do things better,” he says. “We learn from every acquisition, every customer … even if we did great.

“We are a learning company, so we should always be trying to learn. Hopefully, that staves off any arrogance.”

Over the course of 2017, Relias announced one acquisition after another at a pace that would rival the most acquisitive of companies. The acquisi- tions pieced together a new Relias – one that is now two-thirds larger in terms of types of prod- uct offerings.

The company’s latest spree started in October of last year, when Relias announced acquisitions of St. Louis-based Swank HealthCare and Atlanta-based AHC Media. The buyouts moved the company into the acute-care market.

At the time it acquired AHC and Swank, Relias was not in a single hospital. Now the company is in more than 1,000 – out of 5,700 hospitals in the United States.

Those moves were closely followed by Relias’ announcement of its acquisition of Spm. And the fol lowing month,Relias announced its first acquisition in analytics, purchasing Morrisville’s Care Management Technologies (CMT), and also added Boston-based Advanced Practice Strategies, aimed at expansion into pre-hire assessments. That announcement followed another one a couple months later when the company picked up WhiteCloud Analytics of Boise, Idaho.

Carol Clayton, who served as president of CMT at the time of its acquisition, says the process leading up to the sale involved a number of honest con- versations between the two parties. With Triandiflou across the table, those conversations included the question, “Can we be more than the sum of our parts by coming together?”

All of CMT’s 32 employees joined Relias following the acquisition – Clayton is now chief of translational neurosciences – and only two have left since the merger, Clayton says, calling the statistic a testament to the culture and integration process at Relias.

“We have a team of people that does nothing but look at acquiring companies, and we have a team of people that [does] nothing but work on integra-tion of companies once we buy them,” Triandiflou says. Every employee goes through an eight-day, culture-focused company boot camp upon arrival.

Triandiflou, Clayton notes, is calm and confident in his leadership. He’s never caught running around the office, yelling and throwing things. “He knows what he has,” she says. “He has a culture that he has built here.”

Triandiflou says Relias wants to keep that culture “as much of the same” as possible as it grows.

“Over the last five years, our compound annual growth rate organically is 20 percent,” he says.

With acquisitions, that growth rate is sometimes 50 percent, he adds.

“We always want to make sure we are growing on our own without acquisitions,” Triandiflou says. “But then acquisitions can accelerate entry into a new product area, into a new part of health care, so we will absolutely continue to do acquisitions.”

Some years, Relias’ headcount growth is all organic, while other years the company’s headcount growth may be “25 percent from acquisitions,” according to Triandiflou.

And what’s next could be unprecedented in the company’s history.

“We have done acquisitions that have had dozens of people, and we’re now looking at much bigger acquisitions – hundreds of people,” he says.

“I think we’ll do more of a block- buster acquisition – a transformational acquisition – over the next couple of years, where we could add hundreds of people and tens, if not hundreds, of millions in revenue that would really bring us a whole new level of growth.”