Scott Burns spent his teenage years as a Junior Olympic champion alpine ski racer. At 30, he’s still moving fast, now as CEO of GovDelivery, a government-to-citizen e-mail and wireless communication service that he cofounded.
“I wanted to start my own thing before I got too old and lost my guts,” he says, laughing.
Burns started GovDocs (now a division of GovDelivery) in 1999 with Zach Stabenow, his boyhood ski-racing buddy. Stabenow came up with the idea for GovDocs, which creates and sells printed labor-law posters to businesses. But he wanted Burns to be the boss.
“I knew that Scott was good at leading by example,” says Stabenow, now GovDelivery’s executive vice president. “And I knew he would be incredibly respectful of employees at any level of the company, and trust their ability to deliver. He doesn’t try to do it all himself. And he checks his ego at the door.”
In 2001, Burns and Stabenow launched their next brainchild, a line of software products called GovDelivery. Public-sector organizations license GovDelivery’s software and use it to send e-mails to citizens who’ve requested updates on anything from snow emergencies to influenza to city council meetings.
Today, GovDelivery has a staff of 25 and serves approximately 80 agencies at every level of government. Clients include the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul; the U.S. departments of labor, state, agriculture, and transportation; and the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The company exceeded $1 million in revenue for the first time in 2003, and annual revenues have more than doubled since then.
“I really believe in our mission,” Burns says, “which is to help government communicate effectively with citizens. I think it’s an absolute miracle how much easier it is for citizens to be good citizens now—and I’m passionate about being a part of that.”
He grew up talking politics around the dinner table. His mom was on the school board in Duluth; both parents were active in political campaigns and fundraisers. Dartmouth College recruited him as a ski racer, but Burns gave up racing after a year to concentrate on school—and being president of a campus political group.
With a degree in economics, he went to work as a business analyst for McKinsey & Company in Minneapolis. Less than two years later, McKinsey offered him a promotion—or a full ride to the business school of his choice, with the option to check out other opportunities first.< /P>
“It was like a get-out-of-jail-free card!” Burns says. “And I really wanted to check out entrepreneurship.” He signed on as director of marketing with a start-up in Denver called Safe-Rent, providing Web-based tenant-screening services to apartment managers. After a “chaotic but fun” year, he was back in Minneapolis helping Stabenow with GovDocs and preparing to enter Stanford Business School.
“Then I got distracted,” Burns says. Conversations with the City of St. Paul led him to the GovDelivery concept. The 24-year-old Burns hired two employees and raised half a million dollars to finance the first version of the software.
“Unlike a lot of ‘idea’ people, Scott had the knowledge and ability to grow this seed of an idea into a full-fledged business,” says Lisa Lynch, director of communications at GovDelivery. She points out that, despite long work weeks and a hectic travel schedule, Burns is active in the Minnesota Citizens League, serves on the board of SchoolStart, Inc. (a non-profit that helps start charter schools), and maintains a keen interest in politics. “It’s not just his day job,” Lynch says.
She and Stabenow credit Burns for keeping the company on track after 9/11 and the dot-com crash caused government budgets to tighten.
“I try to plan for things to go well, so that when they do we’re ready, and to also understand that they might not go well,” Burns says. “It’s a strange balance. But we’ve experienced so much growth in the last couple of years, if we’d planned on being a mediocre company, we would have been in real big trouble!”
