When Ed Burke decided to grow a
part of Informatics Inc.’s business
from $26 million to $100 million in four years, employees could have easily freaked out at the rapid growth rate.
But instead, the goal focused them on
really getting better.
“It really stretched us to think about
how we were going to do that,” Burke
says. “Whereas, if it’s incremental growth,
‘Well, we can up this a little bit, this a little
bit, and all those little bits will probably
get us there,’ but this other way
makes us focus a lot more on what
we’re really looking for.”
As president and CEO of
Informatics, he maintains a
growth mentality for the $41 million company, which provides bar
code technology for small and
medium-sized businesses.
Smart Business spoke with Burke
about he ensures his company
maintains a competitive advantage
to keep his company growing.
Q: What’s the key to growing your
company?
The first part is delivering the
products and services the customer really needs and understanding your competitive advantage in that. You’ve got to understand what the customer wants
and be able to deliver it better
than anybody else.
Spend time talking to the customer. That’s one of the big, often
overlooked aspects of business.
We get going in our offices, and
we think we know it, or we get
too busy with the internal stuff and never
talk to the customer.
Q: How do you understand your competitive advantage?
If you don’t really think you have some,
look hard because you probably do.
Oftentimes, I don’t think companies do, and
it’s hard to grow because their offer isn’t that
compelling to the customer.
Make sure you do, and then quarterly have
a competitive advantage review. Are we
really designed for the customer? Are we offering some sort of differentiating product
or service to our customers? If not, you’re
going to lose them.
Q: How do you communicate with customers?
Part of it is just putting it on the calendar. Devote some time every week to
make some of those calls. Even if it’s just
one call every week, make it. You have
to have the discipline.
Keep it brief. Don’t go into 25 questions. We
have basically four questions that we ask,
and it takes literally a few minutes if they just
want to answer the questions and not go into
the editorial response.
Keep it simple. Everybody’s busy. You can
call them up, ‘If you can just give me two
minutes, I just have a couple questions for
you.’ They’ll say, ‘OK, I can handle a couple
minutes,’ and you hold to it so you don’t violate that confidence. If you have it distilled
down to what you’re interested in, you can
usually do it pretty quickly.
Q: How do you hire as you grow?
We do a good job of isolating what we’re
specifically trying to look for in each individual job. There’s a big difference in what you
look for in a salesman versus a software
developer. The personalities are dramatically different. Make sure you’ve defined what
you’re looking for in each position.
Then we have a personality test that we
give every applicant. Then we do team-based
behavioral interviewing of those candidates.
As an individual trying to do all that
myself, I can’t read the personalities
effectively in an hour meeting or
interview. Sometimes you’re looking
for something, and you may be looking too hard to find it or too hard the
other way not to find it, so the team-based [interview] works well.
We’ll do the interview and immediately sit down and compare notes. We
grade each on a scale of one to 10 —
then we have more of an objective
measure. Let’s say I gave them a nine
and someone gave them a seven, we
say, ‘OK, it’s got to be within one point,’
so we compare notes and, ‘OK, I’ll lower
mine to an eight,’ or if I say, ‘No, he’s
really a nine,’ and he says, ‘He’s really a
seven,’ we throw out that question.
Q: How do you prepare for growth?
You have to have a vision for growth.
There are so many businesses out there
that are just happy rocking along. They
have a good process, and they deliver
plus or minus 5 percent growth every
year. You have to have that ‘big hairy
audacious goal’ mentality.
Do you want to grow? And if you do
want to grow, then you have to set something ambitious and get it on everybody.
That lessens a culture shock kind of thing
of, ‘Man, are we really going to do that?’
That’s part one.
Then part two is to say, ‘Where are our
best opportunities for growth?’ We have different modes of going to market and different products we can deliver. What’s going to
be our biggest bang for the buck?’ We just
started working through that. It’s always
that constant thing in the back of our mind.
HOW TO REACH: Informatics Inc., (972) 881-5500 or
www.informatics-inc.com