Ken Steinback believes launching a business is a lot like marriage in at least one respect.
“When you get married, you usually spend a lot of time with your future bride learning about her family and her beliefs and everything about her before you make up your mind that you’re going to spend the rest of your life with her,” Steinback says. “Getting married with partners is the same thing.”
Unfortunately for Steinback, he didn’t learn that lesson until after he and his partners had started CSI Leasing Inc. nearly 40 years ago.
“I didn’t do much due diligence on my partners,” says Steinback, the company’s co-founder and chairman. “I didn’t court them and figure out what they were all about and where they came from. I just knew they were people I worked with or people I just knew and I ended up going into business with them.”
Today, CSI Leasing is one of the largest independent IT leasing specialists in the world, with more than 650 employees and $367 million in fiscal 2008 revenue. Back in 1972, it was a brand-new operation with a team of leaders that couldn’t work together.
“We started the business as basically a partnership,” Steinback says. “Shortly thereafter, I realized you can’t run a business as a partnership unless you have leadership, especially when you’re all equal.
“I took over the leadership role early on because you couldn’t have four partners doing the same thing and duplicating each other’s efforts and stumbling over each other. That was quite honestly what happened the first couple years we were in business until I realized it doesn’t work that way. Equal partnerships just don’t work.”
Steinback feels like the lessons learned from his problems at the start of CSI have made him a better leader today. The experience has given him a better sense of how to build a strong and cohesive leadership team and how to get that team to work with him as the company’s leader.
“That is the reason why my entire management team has been with me for well over 20 years and we’ve had very little turnover within the company,” Steinback says.
