Q. How do you help employees deal with setbacks or failures when you do promote a growth mentality?
I don’t really look at it as failures, and I don’t think anybody here should. It’s really a level of success, not whether or not it was a failure.
I personally like to reward people more on something they’ve actually done than something that didn’t go perfectly.
If you provide people the freedom and responsibility to go out and do things, the expectation from that is good things are going to happen 60 to 70 to 80 percent of the time. When things don’t go perfectly, the other 20 to 30 percent, you can’t throw somebody under the bus.
You have to expect that it’s not going to be perfect all the time, but your expectation is solid. Smart business is going to be done in the effort of trying to get there.
Freedom and responsibility, I guess those are two things that I think are utterly important to embrace in a company that wants to grow. It’s impossible to do without your employees having the freedom and responsibility to really try and help.
Q. How do you maintain the company’s culture through fast-paced growth?
Part of growing is not just adding new clients but adding new products and services. That’s a core piece of what I think it takes to grow.
Companies could grow in different ways, some companies kind of reinvent themselves and develop huge new products and services and try to attack the marketplace that way. At Etactics, we’ve really tried to add incremental products and services that work together with our other products and services in a nice manner. They integrated with our other things and kind of had a little bit of verticality to it.
That’s one piece. One piece of that culture is to continually enhance what you have and develop small, new, add-on products that our customers will want to buy.
The second piece is to develop new products and services that are, again, a complement or have some synergy with our other products and services. I think the key is you have to have some really new things that are going on that have a large upside potential, but then you have a lot of these smaller things going on, [and] they’re just kind of helping you just keep the ball rolling.
Q. How do you recognize new products that will be successful?
(There are) a couple of different ways. I think the first key is that we encourage everybody here at Etactics to listen and engage our clients and provide feedback back to the marketing team in product development so we’re getting some of that feedback, as well.
I think that’s one of the key ways of enhancing and coming up with new product ideas. But it’s not the only way because most great innovative ideas were really the idea of one person, and unless you spoke to that one person with that great idea, you might have missed it.
Those few key great ideas, they may come from clients, they may come from competitors, they may come from somebody else knowledgeable about the business we’re in. It’s important to always engage different people and kind of formulate through your mind, our mind, what we can do based on the business problems that are out there.
Being able to recognize the ones that we can impact is something I think we do really well. The ideas are actually the easy things to come up with. The hard part is actually picking the right idea to work on and then following through on.
How to reach: Etactics Inc., (330) 342-0568 or www.etacticsinc.com
