David Cummings on Startups

Category: Leadership

  • Employee Continuing Education

    Each month I meet with a group of entrepreneurs to talk about how we can make our respective companies great places to work. We typically spend three hours in the meeting divided into two topics. One of our topics today was continuing education for employees, as defined as internal training and development as well as external programs and courses.

    At my company, we do the following continuing education and training programs:

    I picked up some new ideas at the meeting today that I’m looking forward to implementing. After we try some, I’ll report back here on their effectiveness. Continuing education is a critical part of a fast growing company and I’m a big proponent of it.

  • KPI Dashboards for High Growth Businesses

    One of the biggest challenges of a high growth business is managing communication. Paradoxically, communication within a company must increase exponentially as the number of employees grows. As more employees are hired, more layers of management are put in place, more planning must happen, and finally more communication must take place in a variety of forms. Dashboards with key performance indicators (KPIs) are a good communication mechanism to get team members on the same page.

    Our most recent project has been updating our internal KPI dashboard based on recommendations in the book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits. Currently, we’re tracking the following on our dashboard:

    • Current ratio
    • Recognized revenue
    • New bookings
    • New bugs
    • Percentage of productive engineering hours

    As you might have guessed, it is simple and not quite holistic enough to capture input from all of our different departments. We’re working on moving our dashboard to track the following categories, broken out by department:

    • Sales
      – Bookings
      – Weighted Pipeline
    • Marketing
      – Qualified Leads
      – Opportunity Value from Marketing Leads
    • Services
      – Billed Hours
      – Overrun Hours
    • Support
      – New Tickets
      – Closed Tickets
    • Engineering
      – Development Hours
      – New Bugs
    • Operations
      – Current Assets
      – Average Days Sales Outstanding

    In addition to expanding the number of metrics we track, the other major change we’re implementing is color coding the values based on percent of goal. The Google Spreadsheet cells are colored according to the following values:

    • Red: 0 – 74% of goal
    • Yellow: 75 – 89% of goal
    • Green: 90 – 109% of goal
    • Dark Green: 110%+ of goal

    I’m excited about the changes we’re implementing. Let me know about experiences in your company related to KPIs and dashboards and I’ll keep you posted as to how it works out for us.

  • Interviewing Entry-Level Candidates

    We’re always trying to get better with our interview process. Interviewing is particularly challenging for entry-level candidates where there’s a lack of experience to draw from. In addition to our written and technical exercises, we like to do the following for entry-level positions:

    • Ask extensive personal questions like who influenced them the most outside of their parents, how many siblings they have and what was their environment like growing up, did they play sports or music, etc.
    • Present a career path, if possible, to give them an idea of how they can grow in our company
    • Schedule interviews with as many company team members as possible, with the simple message that if any interviewer says no, the candidate is removed from consideration

    Our success rate to date is about 80%. We’re working hard to continual get better, and the goal is to get over 90%. Finding entry-level candidates that will succeed in your company is hard. Good luck!

  • Personality Tests in Startups

    As part of my EO Forum we decided to take personality and values tests to learn how we can better relate to the other members of our group. We had the great pleasure of being facilitated and tested by Billy Mullins of Vikus Corporation. The process and outcome really opened my eyes to the benefits of these tests for several reasons:

    • Existing team members can better understand how other team members relate
    • Teams can identifiy characteristics missing from their group and work to recruit to fill in the gaps
    • Tests like the Hartman Values are complementary to personality tests like Myers Briggs and can address areas like work ethic and ability to incorporate new information

    Based on this experience, my company is now looking into tests to administer to existing employees as well as late-stage job candidates. In addition to Myers Briggs and Hartman Values, we’re also looking into Calipers and DISC.

    For startups, especially ones with multiple co-founders, I’d recommend taking some of these tests and looking at the outcome as part of the team building process. Team building is critical in all stages of a business, and I’m confident personality and values tests will help everyone.

  • More Benefits of Daily Check-ins

    As you might know, I’m a big fan of daily check-ins. After spending some more time doing them (we’ve been doing them for 16 months with the leadership team), I’ve realized there are several additional benefits I didn’t consider before. Here are some more benefits that come to mind:

    • Having everyone stand up and talk in front of their colleagues gets the energy level up
    • Since it is at the start of the day, everyone says hello or good morning, helping promote the team camaraderie
    • As you’ve already talked with your team that morning, if an issue comes up later in the day related to one of your priorities, it doesn’t take as much time to get them up to speed on something you need help with

    I highly recommend doing daily check-ins across your company.

  • Sales Training Workshop Topics

    We’re adding weekly sales training workshops to our training program. They work the same as our manager training where we each come up with a few topics we’d like to discuss, write them all down, and then pick two each week to do experience sharing around.  Here are the topics we came up with:

    • Getting around gatekeepers
    • Voicemail best practices
    • Communication timelines
    • Pre-call strategies
    • Overcoming killer objections
    • Questions for pain points
    • Time of day call strategies
    • Call to appointments goal ratios
    • Prospect qualifying
    • Augmenting prospect info (e.g. LinkedIn)
    • Establishing rapport over the phone
    • Customer engagement during GoToMeeting
    • Cold calling strategies
    • Emailing strategies
    • Creating a sense of urgency
    • Strategies for determining the best prospects to target
    • Negotiation strategies
    • After losing a deal strategies
    • Too small of a budget
    • Sales role with marketing
    • Tier one sales rep. feedback loop
    • Demo preparation

  • Manager Training Discussion Topics

    We just started a new weekly training and workshops program for the managers in the my company. As part of it, we had everyone come up with a few topics they’d be interested in discussing in future meetings. Here are the topics we’ll be discussing using the Gestalt Psychology experience sharing methodology:

    • Constructive criticism
    • Effective coaching to maximize strengths
    • Rivalries and motivation
    • Policy and procedure changes
    • Big rocks and prioritization
    • Dealing with underperforming team members
    • Effective delegation
    • New team member training
    • Determining employee effectiveness and effort
    • Frequency of communication
    • Best practices for departmental meetings
    • Dealing with inconsistent department workloads
    • Visibility into development cycles
    • Friend vs manager balance
    • Balance between micro-management and being hands-off
    • Dealing with missed timelines
    • Working with problem employees
    • Decision making without concensus
    • Delegating undesireable work
    • Strategies for minimizing overlapping work
    • Managing employees with inter-departmental responsibilities
    • Improving attitudes towards problem customers
    • Manaing people with skillsets you don’t have (e.g. programmers)

  • The Buzz of Daily Check-ins

    For 2009 we started a new strategy of daily check-ins from the bottom up every day in the office. This means that every department does a scrum-like daily check-in answering the following questions while standing in under 10 minutes:

    • What did you accomplish yesterday?
    • What are you going to do today?
    • Do you have any roadblocks?

    Then, the department leader asks if there are any ideas for improvements as well as any heroes to recognize for outstanding work. We do this every single day! People that telecommute (we have a one day a week telecommute policy for everyone) dial in to a conference number.

    This is a bottom up daily check-in as everyone does at least one and up to three of these in a row in the morning. It works as follows:

    • 9:30 – Managers with direct reports
    • 9:40 – Managers of managers
    • 9:50 – Leadership team

    This way, any issues are immediately propagated across the organization and can be worked through by the leadership team within 20 minutes of finding it out.

    There’s an awesome buzz of noise every morning when this takes place. I’m a big fan of it.

  • Include a Written Section during Interviews

    One of the best techniques to employ during the interview process is that of a written portion. For us, we have a series of research questions that aren’t easily answered without effort. It helps us understand the candidates’ writing skills, resourcefulness, and attention to detail.

    In addition, being a SaaS company makes it easy for us to provide a few simple assignments for the candidate to do using our web-based software. This helps us better understand how quickly they pick up new products, their resourcefulness, and their likelihood of success in the company.

    I recommend using a variety of different techniques to assess candidates.

  • Recommended Leadership Books by Patrick Lencioni

    Leadership and managing people is something that you really need to work at and consciously look for ways to improve. For any new managers, as well as seasoned managers, I recommend reading the following books by Patrick Lencioni in their entirety:

    • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
    • The Three Signs of a Miserable Job
    • The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
    • Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars
    • Death by Meeting
    • The Five Temptations of a CEO

    Patrick Lencioni is, in my opinion, the leadership guru of the 21st century. Check out Amazon.com for these books.