Art Zeile0:18
An entrepreneur has to have a passion for sales. Those first prospects are going to pick up on the energy you have, the passion you have for your product or your service, and they're going to either believe in it or not. Especially in an earlier stage where there's a lot of risk involved in the sales transaction, they need to believe in you as the chief salesperson in terms of that purchase decision. So again, sales is absolutely paramount and you have to truly appreciate the function and appreciate what it means to the company at that stage. The second dimension that I always point to is that of risk tolerance and the ability to make good decisions under duress that have very large implications when you're a small company. Think of it this way: If you make a $50,000 decision as a small company and it's a bad decision in terms of the impact, that could affect your payroll, it could affect your ability to survive, whereas with a larger company $50,000 might be just a drop in the bucket. The entrepreneur that works at that stage of company in its life cycle is making those decisions daily, so they have to be comfortable with the ability to make those decisions and they have to make ultimately good decisions each and every time because you're riding on that edge.
I view myself as the chief talent officer for the company, and the real responsibility there is to ensure that I'm surrounded by people that are much more talented than myself at every single level. Joel Daly, our COO and my business partner, and I literally look at the management level of our company each several months and determine how we can add responsibility to those folks so that we're constantly forcing them up a learning curve, constantly having them gain skills they need for the next step in their career. In fact, we would go as far as to say that our ultimate goal is to create 50 CEOs and COOs like ourselves over the course of our career. We want those people to be so successful that they go out and manage their own companies once they're done with their experience at Hosting.com. We subscribe to a philosophy called topgrading. The essence of that methodology is that we ask people to really get detailed about their career: every step they took in their career, why they made those steps, the responsibilities they were given, how they would grade their own performance, how their supervisor would look at their performance, and try to essentially build a holistic picture as to how that person increased the scope of their responsibilities over the course of time in their career.
When I think about the qualities that we're trying to expose in an interview, the first is that the person is passionate about what they do. The second would be showing the degree of intellect they have on the expertise that they're going to be taking on. The third would be that they clearly were the point person behind an accomplishment rather than an innocent bystander. And the fourth would be that they essentially are team oriented, that they truly do believe that accomplishments happen as a result of a team. People want to work for you primarily because they believe in your values. They want to work with a team that they can trust and that they believe is engaged in a mission that they believe in, and that mission one way or another always revolves around values. So we have had the same value statement for the last three companies. So the values I truly believe transcend the business model.
The reason why Joel and I have shared an office for the last 19 years is because we truly believe that people should know we believe this company exists because of teamwork. So I am functionally in charge for the most part of my time focused on sales, marketing, and finances. Joel spends most of his time focused on operations and engineering, and we visibly show people today every single day that it is important that all these functions work together very closely.
