• Not all successful CEOs are extroverts: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
  Brad tipped me off to this article — it’s a good one and draws on a lot of the work and thinking done by Jim Collins in both Good to Great and Built to Last (links to both books on my blog in the books sidebar).
  (tags: Books Entrepreneur Management)

• Why I think ClickFraud is far greater than imagined. – Blog Maverick – www.blogmaverick.com _
  Dallas Mavs owner and Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Click Fraud, a notorious member of the Internet Axis of Evil
  (tags: Email Technology Media Marketing)

• WSJ.com – Heard on the Street
  Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on big marketing spend
  (tags: Marketing Media Technology)

• Fractals of Change: Are You an Entrepreneur?
  Tom Evslin’s entertaining Top 10 Ways You Know You’re an Entrepreneur. Some may dovetail nicely if I ever write up my read of The Fountainhead through entrepreneurial lens!
  (tags: Entrepreneur VC)

• Seth’s Blog: Going to meetings
  A great posting about Vendor Love from Seth Godin!
  (tags: Entrepreneur)

• terrygold.com: Hiring Salespeople
  Good posting from Terry Gold of Gold Systems on his experiences over the years hiring and ramping up a sales team.
  (tags: Entrepreneur Sales Management)

• Feld Thoughts
  Brad has a good posting today about entrepreneur accountability — along the lines of my “Forecast Early and Often” theme. — /2005/11/notsocounter_cl.html
  (tags: VC Entrepreneur)

• The Growth Guy: Nine tricks buyers use to “steal” your company
  Really thorough posting (battle scars *may* be present based on the level of detail) about how to best position your company for sale.
  (tags: Entrepreneur VC)

Understanding the Drivers of Success

Although generally business is great at Return Path  and by almost any standard in the world has been consistently strong over the years, as everyone internally knows, the second part of 2012 and most of 2013 were not our finest years/quarters.  We had a number of challenges scaling our business, many of which have since been addressed and improved significantly.

When I step back and reflect on “what went wrong” in the quarters where we came up short of our own expectations, I can come up with lots of specific answers around finer points of execution, and even a few abstracted ones around our industry, solutions, team, and processes.  But one interesting answer I came up with recently was that the reason we faltered a bit was that we didn’t clearly understand the drivers of success in our business in the 1-2 years prior to things getting tough.  And when I reflect back on our entire 14+ year history, I think that pattern has repeated itself a few times, so I’m going to conclude there’s something to it.

What does that mean?  Well, a rising tide — success in your company — papers over a lot of challenges in the business, things that probably aren’t working well that you ignore because the general trend, numbers, and success are there.  Similarly, a falling tide — when the going gets a little tough for you — quickly reveals the cracks in the foundation.

In our case, I think that while some of our success in 2010 and 2011 was due to our product, service, team, etc. — there were two other key drivers.  One was the massive growth in social media and daily deal sites (huge users of email), which led to more rapid customer acquisition and more rapid customer expansion coupled with less customer churn.  The second was the fact that the email filtering environment was undergoing a change, especially at Gmail and Yahoo, which caused more problems and disruption for our clients’ email programs than usual — the sweet spot of our solution.

While of course you always want to make hay while the sun shines, in both of these cases, a more careful analysis, even WHILE WE WERE MAKING HAY, would have led us to the conclusion that both of those trends were not only potentially short-term, but that the end of the trend could be a double negative — both the end of a specific positive (lots of new customers, lots more market need), and the beginning of a BROADER negative (more customer churn, reduced market need).

What are we going to do about this?  I am going to more consistently apply one of our learning principles, the Post-Mortem  –THE ART OF THE POST-MORTEM, to more general business performance issues instead of specific activities or incidents.  But more important, I am going to make sure we do that when things are going well…not just when the going gets tough.

What are the drivers of success in your business?  What would happen if they shifted tomorrow?

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:

1. 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 augmented
2. Formalize junior staff interaction.  Create more intentional feedback loops before/after meetings, including with the staff member if needed, and cultivate acceptance of transparency; get managers to do the same.  Be extra skeptical about the feedback I’m getting, realizing that I may not get an accurate or complete picture
3. Foster deeper engagement across the entire organization.  Simplify/streamline company mission and balanced scorecard through a combination of deeper level maps/scorecards, maybe a higher level scorecard, and constant reinforcing communication.  Drive multi-year planning process to be fun, touching the entire company, and culminating in a renewed enthusiasm
4. Disrupt early and often, the right way.  Introduce an element of productive disruption/creative destruction into the way I lead, noting item 2 around feedback loops

Thanks to everyone internally who contributed to this review.  I appreciate your time and input.  Onward!

Please, Keep Not Calling (Thank You!)

It’s been three years since the federal government passed one of its better pieces of legislation in recent memory, creating the Do Not Call Registry which is a free way of dramatically reducing junk phone solicitations.  At the time, registrations were set to expire every three years.  When I signed up my phone number, I stuck a note in my calendar for today (three years later) to renew my registration.  I was planning on blogging about it to remind the rest of the world, too.

To my great surprise, when I went to the site today, I saw this note:

Your registration will not expire. Telephone numbers placed on the National Do Not Call Registry will remain on it permanently due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008.

That’s two great pieces of legislation.  What will they think of next?