Andy Hannah says the key to growing
a company is having the right combination of people, money, technology and customers.
“You can’t have too much at one time;
you need to have the right balance of those
things,” says the co-founder, president and
CEO of Plextronics Inc., an innovator of
technology for printed electronics.
Hannah’s focus on maintaining that balance
has helped Plextronics, which was founded
in 2002, increase revenue 7,700 percent over
the past three years and develop leaders among its 50 employees.
Smart Business spoke with Hannah
about how to create a balance at your
company and how to find the right
people to help you do that.
Q: How do you achieve a balance
among people, money, technology
and customers?
It starts with what the market
opportunity is, what the customer
wants and how important that product or service is to the customer. It’s
the voice of customer process, not
only talking to your customers but
to your customers’ customers.
Once you understand those
details, you can develop a road
map of being able to provide that
product or service. That road map
is how you achieve balance
because it tells you when to hire,
at what point technology has to
be developed to deliver it to the
customer and the interaction
with your customer.
Q: How do you make sure the
financial component is balanced with the
others?
Make sure you have enough money in the
bank to do what you need to do. The road
map tells you how much money you need.
Be honest with your road map in terms of
what you think revenue is going to be. If
you have an honest and good road map, it
determines how much money the company needs to grow. Whatever that number is,
raise it by some margin more than that
because you know that things don’t always
go smoothly.
You have to understand the road map
process to be able to determine how much
money you need. That’s when you talk to
your customer.
Q: How do you find the right people to help
grow your company?
You want to be in an area where you can
draw from local resources and a geographic area that is appealing to others coming
from outside.
I’m a believer in behavioral interviewing.
When you’re hiring for a particular position, know what the role is and what the
behaviors are that you are looking for. Find
out what the behavior beneath the actual
role is and continue to probe on that
behavior. Then you have good hires.
Everybody has one story related to the
role. In behavioral interviewing, you ask
the question three times. You say, ‘Besides
the example, give me another. Besides that
example, give me another.’ It’s seldom that
people have three stories lined up for a particular question.
The benefit is that people can’t hide. If a person has the behavior that you’re looking for,
you will know after you ask the third question. If they can’t come up with a third example, they don’t know or don’t have the depth
of experience that you thought they did.
Q: How critical is culture to achieving
balance?
You need to be true to your culture, especially in your early days. It gets difficult to
maintain the culture the bigger that you get,
and it is going to fray a little at the
edges, but you need to teach your managers how important culture is.
You don’t teach them that you have to
hire people who have the same culture
because diversity is good, but teach
them how important culture in general is.
Culture can change over time, as long
as it changes for the good. You don’t want
it to change into bad culture. Culture is
what it is because of the people. It’s not
like you can preach rotten culture.
It’s about examples and how you act.
Maintaining culture is about teaching
behavior, and when you see bad behavior, you correct it immediately. It’s not
the best method to preach, it’s about
showing and communicating examples
so that it gets reinforced.
Q: How do you communicate the culture?
It starts with openness and honesty. You
have to have an environment where people are comfortable telling what’s on their
mind. Create a forum to communicate
your message.
It starts with asking for feedback. You
can’t just stand up one day and say, ‘I want
everyone to be open and honest with
everybody.’ It starts with an example or
behavior and repetition of that behavior.
People like to feel committed to the
organization, and the only way they can do
that is if they feel a personal connection.
People like to belong and feel like what
they do matters. The more personal relationships are, the more people feel that
they are valued and part of the team, more
than just going to a job.
HOW TO REACH: Plextronics Inc., (412) 423-2030 or
www.plextronics.com