When Manouch Moshayedi
founded STEC Inc. in 1989 with his brothers, Mike
and Mark, they were ready to
give up after six months
because they were exhausted
and not making much headway.
But instead of giving up and
going back to their old jobs, the
trio pressed on and built a successful company that designs,
manufactures and markets high-performance storage and memory solutions.
“If you think what you’re
going to be doing is right and
it’s going to work out, don’t give
up in the first six months or a
year just because you’re not
making huge headway,”
Moshayedi says.
Moshayedi and his brothers
focused on setting achievable
goals and creating an open
atmosphere at STEC, which has
grown to nearly 750 and posted
fiscal 2007 revenue of $188.6
million.
Smart Business spoke with
the company’s co-founder,
chairman and CEO about why
it’s important to hire people with
common sense to help you
reach your goals.
Set achievable goals. We’ve got
longer goals that everybody
knows and bought in to, where
we want to be, what we want to
do three years, five years down
the road. The key to setting long-term goals is to have measurable
results that can be broken down
into shorter time frames.
For example, a long-term goal
that may take five years to
achieve needs to be broken
down into smaller time segments, with measurable results
at each increment — six months,
one year, two years, etc.
The goals have to be achievable. If you set goals that are not
achievable, people will become
disenchanted and know they
will never meet their bonuses
and commissions, and you will
get employees who are just
there to collect salary and not
be motivated. Set up goals that
are realistic for people to meet.
Sit down with your management and figure out, these are
the numbers you should be hitting. … Set up goals that stretch
people to almost their limits,
but at the same time … if they
do stretch themselves, they will
get there.
Having good goals means that
everyone who works for you is
happy, motivated and making a
good amount of money. The company can move forward, and you
can constantly increase those
goals and achieve the growth.
Set goals together with employees. The people who are getting
those goals, who are supposed
to meet those goals … those
guys are always communicated
with, and everybody has bought
in to those goals.
It’s not like in a vacuum, we sit
down and say, ‘This person has
to hit 10 million bucks.’ If we
have given that goal to that person, that person has already
accepted that 10 million bucks
and knows that he can achieve
it — he has to stretch it to get
there, but he knows he can
achieve it.
If, however, it doesn’t happen,
then we’ll have to examine to
see what happened … Whatever
problems that they were, then
try to discuss it and better it the
next quarter.
