Start building your team
Simons launched his plan by getting people who he had worked with placed into two key positions in the company. These positions were the head of sales and marketing and the head of research and development. They were key departments because they have a lot to say about how the company interacts with customers.
“What I had to do was assemble a team around me that shared the same vision for the growth of the company,” Simons says. “The team I put around me were people who had been coming up in other areas but shared that same vision for growth.”
Simons understood why there was some skepticism about his plan at this stage. Both he and his new head of sales and marketing had experienced failure at Novus in their early days with the company. In the case of Simons, the circumstances were eerily similar.
“I was head of business development,” Simons says. “The technologies that I tried to bring to the company failed, because there was a huge resistance in the company to taking new products forward.”
His new head of sales faced similar skepticism because of past results.
“He was responsible for one of our little startup companies, which was in a software business line related to livestock nutrition,” says Simons. “That was also a failure. So my selection of him to be head of marketing and sales was not obvious to most people at the time. They thought it was quite high risk.”
Simons was confident that both he and his colleague had learned from their mistakes. Simons had clearly done pretty well for himself, as he was now the company’s CEO. He felt his colleague was the right guy to have working with him to spread his vision of going all out for the customer.
Who better to have at your side when you’re facing a group of skeptics than someone who knows what you’re going through and believes in what you’re trying to do?
“What was important to me was to have R&D and marketing be very closely aligned in terms of their goals,” Simons says. “I’ve seen that R&D can be isolated from what the customer needs and what the marketing needs are. It was very important we get a structure in place and people in place who understood that R&D is really serving the customer.”
Simons needed people who shared his excitement for generating new business.
“If you don’t have support at that level, you’re not going to be able to push it down in the organization,” Simons says. “It was much the same thing in operations and how to make sure operations were focused on satisfying a customer need.”
Let’s put it this way: If you have a beautiful engine sitting in your garage that purrs like a kitten but doesn’t have anything to power, it’s not going to do you much good. Simons wanted to focus on where his engine could take him rather than how efficiently it ran.
“Efficiency is very important, but in the end, efficiency isn’t going to cause a customer to buy,” Simons says. “It was more important to be a reliable supplier and a responsive supplier. Efficiency was just one of those factors. So it was making sure I had the right team in place to grow the company.”
Simons wanted to build a culture in which the company was always looking for new opportunities to generate revenue and expand its reach in the field of nutrition products.
“I wanted us to build upon what I thought was a strong technical base that we had in the organization and to leverage that to provide more value to our customers and to provide it to more customers,” Simons says.
