David Cummings on Startups

Category: Corp Culture

  • Strategies for Identifying Recent College Grads to Hire

    One of the reasons we’ve been successful is that Atlanta is a great city for young professionals and we’ve developed a methodology for identifying recent college grads that can immediately start adding value to our company. Many companies are leery of hiring recent college grads as they are unproven, require training, and might not work out. Well, looking at most people’s resumes, regardless of being a recent college grad, you could say the same thing. Some benefits of recent college grads include that they are more Internet savy, social media active, and energetic, on average. Plus, they are eager to learn and prove themselves.

    Here’s how we identify recent college grads to hire that do a great job and fit with our corporate culture:

    • Determine if they have a strong work ethic demonstrated by a good GPA or challenging extra curricular activity like varsity sports or a full-time job
    • Give a written portion during the interview process in the form of essay questions about your industry that require research and writing skills
    • Have the candidate use your product and produce a deliverable that shows some competence after self-paced teaching
    • Look for professional and personality traits that fit your organization — one of my favorites is receiving a handwritten thank you note in the mail after interviewing a candidate

    These steps have worked for us and I encourage you to try them out.

    What else? What are some other strategies you use to determine if a recent college grad will be successful in your organization?

  • Startups and Disability Insurance

    One area that is often difficult for startups is insurance. Difficult in the sense that being so small, with so few employees, if any, rates are typically high and options are low. Now health insurance is always considered the most important insurance, and it is, but another type of insurance that isn’t talked about as frequently is disability insurance.

    In the past two weeks I’ve talked with entrepreneurs that mentioned situations where disability insurance would have been valuable. One entrepreneur had an employee with cancer that took significant time off. Another entrepreneur had a key employee that was pregnant and needed bed rest for the last two months of the pregnancy. In both cases, disability insurance would have been beneficial but the entrepreneurs didn’t have it.

    Short term disability insurance usually pays 60% of the employee’s salary for up to 12 weeks, with a maximum of $5,000 per month while long term disability is usually more customized. At a cost of $30 – $70 per employee per month, it becomes clear that having a single issue arise more than pays for itself. Hopefully, an issue will never come up.

    My recommendation is to look into disability insurance and purchase it if you can afford the payment. Insurance is usually cost effective and helps give piece of mind to the entrepreneur and team members.

  • Setting the Corporate Culture Tone

    Most entrepreneurs, especially when they are starting out, underestimate the power of a strong corporate culture. In my experience, the corporate culture is immediately evident upon entering an office and walking around. How can you tell? Here are some simple examples:

    • Awesome office (fun, cool, and inspirational)
    • MacBooks and iMacs on desks
    • Dual monitors everywhere
    • Unlimited drinks and food
    • People that truly want to be there

    My recommendation is to read about the Zappos corporate culture as well as books by Jim Collins and Patrick Lencioni.

  • Recommended Entrepreneur Books

    A lightening round topic came up at today’s EO Accelerator monthly accountability group meeting about good business/entrepreneur books to read. I named a few off hand and realized I needed to have a better list available. Here’s a list of books that I own and recommend, representing about 50% of the business books that I own:

    This is a pretty good list to start with. I recommend clicking through and reading about them on Amazon.com to learn more.

    What else? What other books would you recommend?

  • The Oz Principle: Above and Below the Line

    I just started reading The Oz Principle to learn new ideas about individual and organizational accountability. Right away, in the first chapter, the Oz Principle is described, and is acutely relevant to startups. The idea is that there are actions above the line and below the line, and all organizations need to focus on developing a corporate culture and management team that develop an environment of above the line actions. Start ups, moving so fast and so critical in having the right talent need to especially focus on above the line attributes. Here are those attributes:

    Above the line:

    • See it
    • Own it
    • Solve it
    • Do it

    Below the line:

    • Wait and see
    • Confusion / tell me what to do
    • It’s not my job
    • Ignore / deny
    • Finger pointing
    • Cover your tail

    I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book and learning more about the Oz Principle.

    What else? What are some other above and below the line actions you’ve seen?

  • What People do Absent Information

    We’ve all heard the saying that it is better to over communicate than under communicate. One of the things that’s been proven to me time and time again is that absent information, people make up ideas to fill the void. This isn’t a malicious act, rather it is human nature.

    My recommendation for entrepreneurs is to pursue a multi-modal communication strategy including some of the following mechanisms:

    • Daily stand-up scrums
    • All-hands meetings
    • Department briefings
    • Email (keep it concise!)
    • Breakfast/lunch
    • Phone including voicemails

    Again, over communicating is better than a lack of communication. Remember to control the message and not let false information fill the gaps.

    What else? What other strategies work well for communication?

  • Tony Robbins on Startups

    Most of us have heard of Tony Robbins, likely the best known self-help guru of the past 30 years. I had heard of him but didn’t know much about his philosophies until a friend of mine said he’s a big fan of Tony’s work, so I decided to pick up his book Awaken the Giant Within. The book, published in 1991, has one of the best strategies for startups I’ve read, and it isn’t even geared towards them (written for people to help themselves).

    Here’s what Tony writes about harnessing the power of decision, and indirectly, building a successful company:

    1. Remember the true power of making decisions.
    2. Realize that the hardest step in achieving anything is making a true commitment — a true decision.
    3. Make decisions often.
    4. Learn from your decisions.
    5. Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.
    6. Enjoy making decisions.

    Sounds a bit like iterating/pivoting, doesn’t it?

    What do you think? What else would you add about decision making?

  • The Smile Factor

    While reading the Delivering Happiness: A Movement post on TechCrunch, I came across a quote that really summarizes what we look for in new hires and epitomizes our corporate culture. In the article, when responding to the question about how Tony Hsieh hires such great people, Tony says, “I only hire people who smile.” Yep, that pretty much sums it up for us.

    We focus on the following core values:

    • positive
    • self-starting
    • supportive

    People who smile during their interview correlates nicely with our three core values.

    What core values do you look for when hiring? How do you know you have a match?

  • With ROWE, How do you Know?

    We’ve been discussing the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) concept lately looking for ways to make our company more ROWE-like. ROWE comes from the book Work Sucks where two HR professionals from Best Buy set out to change their corporate culture for the better. The idea is to focus on results, not hours in the office or number of meetings attended.

    We’re debating some of the following questions:

    • What benefit, if any, is there for positions like customer support that need to be available for specific hours (e.g. 9 – 5 M – F)?
    • How are performance issues handled?
    • How does ROWE affect more collaborative roles where several people need to work closely together?

    What do you think of ROWE? What challenges and successes have you found because of ROWE?

  • Steve Jobs and Richard Branson Micromanage Success

    I’m continuing to read the Richard Branson book, Business Stripped Bare, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs and Richard Branson share a similar trait — they care so much about the brand experience that they micromanagement it at the CEO level. This level of passion for the brand is something many large company CEOs could learn from.

    One section in the book, on page 98, has a passage from Richard Branson’s diary talking about him flying on the first Virgin Atlantic flight to Japan:

    Need slippers in Upper Class, not socks. Need Japanese beers…Japanese tea from London, no good. Japanese food from London. Tastes good but must be better presented. Looks like fish and chips. Saucers for Japanese teacups.

    Of course, we’ve all heard how Steve Jobs controls every last detail of the Apple products, all the way down to the packaging. Clearly, great brands like Apple and Virgin share the common trait that their CEOs ensure no detail is missed.

    Have you seen this with other brands? Which ones?