Human Resources
Getting great
employees.
Michael Lacey, CEO of Plymouth-based e-business consulting and technology services firm Digineer, Inc., has a little advice for the leaders of growing companies. Entrepreneurs identify closely with their businesses, he says, but they need to know when to step back.
“One of the keys to growing smart—and I had to learn this the hard way—is to hire good people and then get out of their way,” Lacey says. “All too often, I’ve seen something start to move in the wrong direction, and [then I] dive in and get all involved in it. Usually that complicates things, and it slows down your business growth because it takes you away from what you need to focus on, which is growing the business.”
Easier said than done, perhaps. Especially the “hire good people” part. Who has time, when their company is growing explosively?
If Lacey can do it, anyone should be able to. Since its inception in 1998, Digineer has ballooned at an average rate of 57 percent a year. The company’s goal for 2008 is to take in $17.5 million in total revenue. The trick to staying ahead of the hiring curve is forecasting, he says. As much as possible, a company should try to predict what’s coming in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
The best bosses refuse to bring on anyone who's not a good fit for the atmosphere. One of Michael Lacey's early credos was not to hire anyone he wouldn't want to have a beer with on Friday evening.
“We’ve developed a model where we are looking out at our sales pipeline six months out in the future, and mapping that to the resources we have available,” Lacey says. “We try to plan our hiring based on it. When we were a little smaller, we didn’t quite have that level of sophistication, so an awful lot of it was just having weekly meetings to get a sense of where we were at and plan out our next steps.”
Most companies agree that you should be profoundly picky in your hiring. But it’s not just a matter of who has the best résumé. Culture tends to be very important in fast-growing companies, and the best bosses refuse to bring on anyone who’s not a good fit for the atmosphere. One of Lacey’s early credos was not to hire anyone he wouldn’t want to have a beer with on Friday evening. And Salo quickly adopted a “no jerks” rule.
