Timothy Loudermilk wants
a work environment
filled with self-motivated performers. So to create that
environment, the founder and
chief software architect at
Trivantis Corp. hires the best
people he can and then trusts
his employees to do their jobs.
“If you are in a company
where you need to manage
people tightly, then I think that
what you have is you have a
company of people that are
relatively unpersonally motivated,” says Loudermilk, who
managed the 85-employee
provider of publishing technologies and services company
to 2006 revenue of more than
$10 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Loudermilk about how to hire
the best people and how to get
the most out of them.
Q. What do you look for in
employees?
First of all, I look for people
with specialties that are better
than what I can do. I don’t
think you can be afraid of hiring people in their field that
are better than you.
For example, at this point, I
can assure you I am not the
best computer programmer in
the world because I’ve moved
away from it over the years. I
have a team that’s just the best
in the world that I can find.
But, I think you have to be
confident in the people you
hired, and you have to look for
people that have real expertise
in their field.
Q. How do you find the best
employees?
I think it’s really hard to pop an ad in the paper and hire
someone. Your best places to
look are really to your own
employees first.
Many of the people we’ve
added to the business have
been references from other people in the business that are very
happy and very excited about
the job that they have. They’re
your best possible recruiters.
Our development team in
Florida, for example, almost
everyone that is on the team
was recruited by word-of-mouth. It’s very popular, word-of-mouth, in a marketing
sense, to talk about products. I think in this generation, it’s just as important on employment.
Occasionally, we will
use some outside professional recruiters, and the
reason we do that is
some of the folks that we
work with have a keen
sense of what we are
looking for because I am
looking for the top 10 percent performers to hire.
And when you have a
company that’s 15,000 employees, you might be
able to afford to not have
the top 10 percent performers. But, when you
have a company that’s
85 people, everyone’s contribution really matters.
Q. How do you motivate your
employees?
I think there are certainly
ways to motivate. You probably
have to keep from demotivating them more than anything
because I think some work
environments that are highly
structured can be somewhat
demoralizing to professionals.
So, what I want to do is create an environment in which they absolutely love to work.
That means an environment of
trust, of personal responsibility, and they have an opportunity to contribute to the end
product. I think it’s really
important that they be able to
see and use the end product
that they are working on. And,
of course, that is coming from
a software standpoint. It’s really easy to look at the product
and realize your contribution
to it, whether it be in sales or
whether it be in development.
Q. How do you show
employees that you trust them?
First of all, you should never
give them deadlines. You
should actually get them to
buy in to deadlines.
Let’s say you have a particular project. You look at the
project, assess how long it’s
going to take, let them assess
it in their sense, agree to it,
and let them be accountable
for saying, ‘Here’s where I am
on this project.’ I think that
there’s too often a tendency in
business to set random dates
that mean nothing. I don’t
think that’s the way I choose
to manage this business.
We agree to dates that are
real, and then they own them
— they are accountable for
them.
Q. How has hiring the best
people and trusting them made
the company a success?
Everybody personally has an
investment in the end product.
When you have a successful
end product, everyone feels
the success of that. That’s the
critical component.
Whether it be in sales or
product development, having
a successful company takes a
lot of different skills across a
broad range, and when people see the success of the
company, they need to understand that, that is their personal success.
So, the reward system has
to be there in terms of financial, stock options. Profit-sharing is appropriate. Those
all have to be in line.
HOW TO REACH: Trivantis Corp., (513) 929-0188 or www.trivantis.com
