Ron Jankov likens his job at
NetLogic Microsystems Inc. to that of a firefighter.
For the most part, he lets his
people do their jobs, but when
there’s an issue, he’s the first
one on the scene to respond.
So, while he may not be listed
under 911 in the phone book,
he is willing to drop everything
at a moment’s notice to help his
people with a problem.
Doing so has helped Jankov,
NetLogic’s president and CEO,
keep his 250 employees
focused on the tasks at hand.
As a result, the company
reported revenue of $70.7 million for the first half of fiscal
2008, putting it on track for a
big bump this year after the
fabless semiconductor company posted fiscal 2007 revenue
of $109 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Jankov about how to keep
employees from being paralyzed during times of adversity
and why just dropping in on a
meeting can be a good idea.
Help people calm down during
adversity. You have to kind of
thrive in adversity. That’s when
you have to stand up and say,
‘If there’s a problem, then I
own it,’ and almost kind of
appreciate adversity because
now you’re needed.
We had a problem about six
months before we went public
where we won a huge project
and then, when we started to
supply that program, we had a
major manufacturing issue
where it was costing us more
to build the products than we
were selling them to for. I had
to go back and get a bridge loan
— we got like $10 million, and
we spent the whole $10 million — but we kept the program, and today, they continue
to be our largest customer.
A lot of getting through that
was just saying, ‘Hey, we can
do this. I know I can get the
investors to trust me to get
through this.’ I had to tell the
manufacturing guy, ‘Look,
don’t panic; just get this thing
fixed in six months. It doesn’t
have to be fixed in two weeks
because I know that’s not
possible.’
Paralysis would stick in if
you didn’t do that. The whole
thing would just stop because
nobody wants to make a decision that’s going to kill the
company, so you can make
them all comfortable by saying, ‘Hey, you can make the
decision, and it’s not going to
kill the company. You make
the right decision, and I’ll
make sure that it doesn’t kill
the company.’
Direct your staff and then let them
go. Once you have good people, you have to trust them
and enable them to make the
key decisions that they’re
tasked with. If they’re VP of
sales, for example, let them
make those key calls on pricing and which customers to
focus on, which suppliers to
use. If you try to overrule
them, you won’t keep good
people.
It’s a thing you develop with
each colleague at a different
pace, and essentially you earn
a certain amount of trust and
understanding with each
other. You come to some
agreement on the philosophy
of how this particular segment of the business should
be run, and once you come to
an agreement on that philosophy, then they move forward
with that agreement.
