Wanted: Rock Star Marketer Return Path is hiring a VP Marketing. This is a new position – we haven’t had the job filled in a couple years like this, reporting directly to me. The job spec is here. What it’s like to work here is pretty well captured here. Why should you pass this on to a friend who is a good fit? Because you will help a friend find the best job he or she ever had! Oh and because we will pay you a nice referral fee if we hire your friend. Why should you apply? That’s a longer answer: 1. We are inventive market leaders with a really unique business model, at a good scale, in a…
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Return Path
Closer to the Front Lines, Part II
Closer to the Front Lines, II Last year, I wrote about our sabbatical policy and how I had spent six weeks filling in for George when he was out. I just finished up filling in for Jack (our COO/CFO) while he was out on his. Although for a variety of reasons I wasn’t as deeply engaged with Jack’s team as I was last year with George’s, I did find some great benefits to working more directly with them. In addition to the ones I wrote about last year, another discovery, or rather, reminder, that I got this time around was that the bigger the company gets and the more specialized skill sets become, there are an increasing number of jobs…
The Gift of Feedback, Part III
The Gift of Feedback, Part III Last week, I posted about my new development plan. I thought I’d also share a “team development plan” that we crafted this year for the entire Executive Committee at Return Path (basically me and my direct reports), coming out of all of our 360 live reviews taken as a whole. Push each other harder and be continuous in our effort to provide the team and each of us feedback and further develop: Improve ability to handle conflict as a group; Drive this work deeper into the organization; “Eyes/ears/mouth open;” Explore how to better serve as role models to the rest of the organization, especially our direct reports/the next level of management; How do we…
The Gift of Feedback, Part II
The Gift of Feedback, Part II I’ve written a few times over the years about our 360 feedback process at Return Path. In Part I of this series in early 2008, I spelled out my development plan coming out of that year’s 360 live review process. I have my new plan now after this year’s process, and I thought I’d share it once again. This year I have four items to work on: Continue to develop the executive team. Manage the team more aggressively and intentionally. Upgrade existing people, push hard on next-level team development, and critically evaluate the organization every 3-6 months to see if the execs are scaling well enough or if they need to replaced or…
Return Path Makes The List of "Best Places to Work" in Colorado
Return Path Makes The List of “Best Places to Work” in Colorado Long-time readers of this blog no doubt understand my central philosophy when it comes to management. I believe that people come first. When employees are happy they make our clients happy. Happy clients happily pay for our services, which tends to make our investors happy. When you start with the people, everyone wins. At Return Path we invest a lot in our people. And we invest a lot in Team People – what we call “Human Resources” – to support those people. So what a great honor to see all that hard work and investment pay off in the form of a “Best Places to Work” honor! The…
Book Short: Wither the Team
Book Short: Wither the Team I keep expecting one of his books to be repetitive or boring, but Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team held my interest all the way through, as did his others. It builds nicely on the last one I read, Death by Meeting (post, link). I’d say that over the 9 1/2 years we’ve been in business at Return Path, we’ve systematically improved the quality of our management team. Sometimes that’s because we’ve added or changed people, but mostly it’s because we’ve been deliberate about improving the way in which we work together. This particular book has a nice framework for spotting troubles on a team, and it both reassured me that we have done…
Senders No More
Senders No More February marked the official end of Return Path being in the email sending business, even a little bit. Of course we still have corporate email servers, and we still have basic retention email marketing programs for our customers and prospects (with explicit permission of course!), but after a 9 1/2 year run, we no longer have direct consumer email-based relationships. As we announced last fall, we recently divested all of our businesses other than our deliverability and whitelisting business — Postmaster Direct (list rental), Authentic Response/MyView.com (surveys), and ECOA (change of address). Those were great businesses, but they increasingly diverged over the years from each other and from our core deliverability business, so it made sense for…
Book Short: Hire Great
Book Short: Hire Great It’s certainly not hiring season for most of America The World The Universe, but we are still making some limited hires here at Return Path, and I thought – what better time to retool our interviewing and hiring process than in a relatively slow period? So I just read Who: The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. It’s a bit of a sequel, or I guess more of a successor book, to the best book I’ve ever read about hiring and interviewing, Topgrading, by Geoff Smart and his father Brad (post, link to buy). This one wasn’t bad, and it was much shorter and crisper. I’m not sure I believe the oft-quoted…
Desperately Seeking an Owner for "Other"
Desperately Seeking an Owner for “Other” A couple weeks ago in Living with Less…For Good, I mentioned that we’re on a crusade against extraneous expenses at Return Path these days, as is pretty much the rest of the world. After a close review of our most recent month’s financials, we have a new target: “Other.” A relatively inconspicuous line on the income statement, this line, which different companies call different things such as “Other G&A” and “General Office,” is inherently problematic NOT because it inherently encompasses a huge amount of expenses, although it might, but rather because it inherently doesn’t have an owner and rarely has a budget. As we dug into the gory details of “Other” our accounting system…
Challenge
Challenge I do a decent amount of fundraising for my high school and college, and we frequently employ “challenges” as a means of hitting our goal. For a fundraising campaign, that usually takes the form of finding a large donor to give matching gifts, or $X for everyone who gives more than $X, or $X for any new donor — something like that. We did a fun challenge program at Return Path this December that worked out pretty well for everyone, company and employees alike. We’ve been working the team pretty hard the last 4-5 months, and we wanted to give everyone some kind of fun noncash bonus as a thank you. We also had two major milestones that we…
Half the Benefit is in the Preparation
Half the Benefit is in the Preparation This past week, we had what has become an annual tradition for us – a two-day Board meeting that’s Board and senior management (usually offsite, not this year to keep costs down) and geared to recapping the prior year and planning out 2009 together. Since we are now two companies, we did two of them back-to-back, one for Authentic Response and the other for Return Path. It’s a little exhausting to do these meetings, and it’s exhausting to attend them, but they’re well worth it. The intensity of the sessions, discussion, and even social time in between meetings is great for everyone to get on the same page and remember what’s working, what’s…