When Timothy Hall, founder, president and CEO of Digital Blue Inc.,
was getting his fledgling company off the ground in 2002, he didn’t think he
could spare five minutes to breathe, let
alone enough time to develop a five-year
strategic plan.
But he made the time, and it was time well
spent. Hall’s start-up — which partners with
brands including Disney and American Idol
to target the tween and teen audience with products such as cameras, microscopes and binoculars
— has grown into a $20 million
company. And although its products and marketing strategies
have changed since Hall created
the plan, having it helped him
deal with basic growth issues,
such as capital, infrastructure
and resources.
Smart Business spoke with
Hall about how he’s grown his
company by learning to suppress
that impulse to tell everyone else
what to do.
Q: What are some pitfalls CEOs
should avoid?
When you hire new managers,
there’s a tendency to tell them
what to do. Don’t take your managers and tell them what to do.
Ask them to recommend what
they should do. Challenge and
understand their recommendation and either support it or
redirect them.
That’s pretty hard for CEOs
to do. A lot of us are type-A personalities, who are used to ordering people and telling them what to do. We know
it, we can do it faster ourselves, but we
could certainly get the job done faster if
we just tell someone what to do and they
go execute what we asked. If that happens, you still can’t grow a company
beyond a certain limit.
But if you start challenging them and
mentoring the way you’re always looking
at the subordinate for a recommendation,
either the subordinate gets really good at
that and becomes able to mirror the type of
behavior you would do yourself, or they
leave and you get somebody better.
Q: How do you make sure you’re hiring the
best employees?
A major pitfall is when people don’t really dig in on the recruiting and really spend
a lot of time in an organized process
recruiting new people. When you’re busy in
start-up mode or early growth mode, you’ll
hire somebody who fits the bill and put up
with that.
That’s a pitfall to be avoided because the
people you put on the bus are the most
important thing in the company — more
important than the product.
We won’t hire a senior person unless
we’ve interviewed them three times in different settings. We spend a lot of time with
their reference checks and really dig into
what they’ve done in the past that suggests
they can succeed at a job here. We want to
make sure they’ve done this job somewhere else and can hit the ground running.
Avoid the pitfall of recruiting too quickly
and grabbing the first candidate who does
well in a one-interview setting.
Q: What is the biggest business challenge
you’ve faced?
The big change from being an executive at
a public company to being in a start-up, then
going from a start-up to a rapid-growth company was a second set of challenges.
I had to relearn how to do my job when I
went from being a line executive with a couple hundred people beneath me to being a
line executive with just a golden retriever at
my feet. I had to relearn how to spend
money wisely and watch the cash.
Entrepreneurs who start as entrepreneurs do this better than guys like me
who come from public companies to do
a start-up.
Then when we go from start-up to
growth to a rapid-growth company, you
have to relearn how to professionally
run a company. When I left the public
company, I said, ‘I’m so glad to go to a
company where everything’s efficient,
and we never have to have meetings,
and everything is decided on the fly.’
That works really well up until your
first $20 million in revenue, but then you
have to go back to structure. You have to
go back to having meetings. You’ve got to
have human resources and vacation
schedules and all sorts of things you associate with traditional companies.
Q: How do you deal with those changes?
My team had to talk me into having regularly scheduled meetings again. I always
though that was anathema. In a public company, you’d have these ridiculous staff meetings that nothing got accomplished in. In a
small company, we’d accomplish 10 times
more in the hallway.
But, once you start having two-, three-dozen people, that doesn’t work anymore.
Communication doesn’t flow from hallway
meetings, so you have to have meetings that
have agendas and carefully constructed reasons for being there and minutes to distribute.
As long as you keep those efficient, you can
stay lean and mean and move quickly. You
don’t have to get bogged down just because
you have meetings.
The challenge to the CEO is to adapt to
that world and run the company in a professional way.
HOW TO REACH: Digital Blue Inc., (888) 800-0502 or www.digiblue.com