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Building the Team: Why We Have Changed Our Minds About Pittsburgh

April 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Building the Team

Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.

In August 2012, Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist, wrote a blog post called No Battle Plan Survives the First Enemy Fire. In it, he wrote:

“I have been using this line a lot lately. It is a bastardized version of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke’s ‘No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.’

I always encourage entrepreneurs to get on with the business of putting their product in the market. All the planning and designing and strategizing and grand plans of taking over the world are no match for reality.

The real world is messy. Stuff happens that you could never imagine. And then you are reacting to all of that and your grand plans are in tatters. That’s reality. It happens to everyone.

So no point in waiting in the hopes that you will nail it. You won’t. The enemy will take fire, you will hit the deck and then the good stuff starts.”

The post refers specifically to a new product introduction and interaction with the competition, but I think it applies to anything that happens in a start-up: avoid analysis-paralysis, gather data, assume it is imperfect information, have the courage to make a decision, but also the humility to make a change when new data or circumstances require it. Or, as Mark Suster, a venture capitalist in Los Angeles, put it succinctly (and in language more colorful than we can use here): “Just Do it.”

In my last two posts, I talked about the analysis that we had done of our sales funnel, and the decision we made as a result to start a dedicated lead-generation center. We chose a city, Pittsburgh, to build the new organization. We advertised the role and conducted job interviews. But, I don’t think we are going to open an office in Pittsburgh.

We executed our normal recruiting process. Our head of talent, Rebekah, set up 21 interviews for Tom, our head of sales, and me to conduct in person in Pittsburgh. And we met some great folks, but there was one interview in particular that made me change my mind.

I sat down with a smart woman who is currently doing sales for an event-planning company in Pittsburgh. She graduated from college just a couple of years ago and is well on her way to a stellar sales career. When we began the interview, it was clear she had done her homework to prepare. She knew about H.Bloom, the markets we are in, the products we offer and the customers we serve. When I asked her why she was interested in H.Bloom, she offered the following response: “I want the chance to grow. I’ve read about your SEED Program for market managers, and H.Bloom University. I’m hopeful to start out in lead generation and eventually grow into a larger role. In fact, I’d love to move to a new H.Bloom market at some point.”

This was an epiphany for me. I spend a great deal of time on talent development at H.Bloom: interviewing, hiring and training our folks. And yet, here I was in Pittsburgh, interviewing people for a position that didn’t have a growth path. Our data analysis had uncovered an extraordinary close rate by our sales people when they have an in-person meeting, and it highlighted the fact that the activities employed to generate those in-person meetings were performed remotely. But the data did not take into consideration one of our three founding principles (drawn from John Quincy Adams’ quote): “Create an environment in which team members can dream more, learn more, do more and become more.”

How could we combine these two important goals: create more activities with a dedicated lead-generation force while also continuing to provide an environment in which people can learn and take on more responsibility?

It would be difficult in Pittsburgh. While the remote location would provide a dedicated work force and a lower cost of operations, it would not have the additional resources that exist in our headquarters, including access to the management team and current account executives. And it would not have the ability to see our operations in-person on a daily basis. The absence of these things would be fine if the new office were exclusively a lead-generation center. However, if it were to reflect the H.Bloom ethos of talent development, its remote location would be a real impediment.

So, we are now evaluating the idea of creating a SEED Program for sales people. Our current thinking is to run the program out of our headquarters in New York. Participants would engage in a three-to-six month program, where they would focus on lead generation Monday through Friday, dramatically increasing the in-person meetings for our account executives across the country. In addition, they would do weekly sales training with our head of sales and learn about the rest of our organization and operations with “field trips” around our New York market.

I’m sure this plan will go through more changes as we balance the need for an increase in lead generation with the desire to maintain a fundamental trait of our culture, which is talent development. I am also certain that we will continue to be data driven, with the courage to make decisions based on the data but the humility to change direction when more information, or a different priority, comes to light.

In the meantime, I hope we can find a way to work with the ambitious sales person in Pittsburgh. She would make a great addition to our team.

Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/why-we-have-changed-our-minds-about-pittsburgh/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: You Have Identified the Candidates. How Do You Pick the Right One?

March 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Building the Team

Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.

In my last two posts, I talked about the process we use at H.Bloom to run a recruiting campaign: defining the role, targeting the right profile of candidates, building a list of potential candidates and presenting them with a persuasive pitch. This process is meant to yield viable candidates for a position.

But what happens then? Once you have interested candidates, how do you figure out which one is the right one for your team? The answer depends on two things: The person’s fit for the role. And the person’s fit for the team.

The process we use to go from a list of interested candidates to the right person for the job has evolved strikingly since we started the company, and it continues to change as we strive to increase our success rate with new hires. Here’s the evaluation process we use:

E-mail interaction. Because we typically start our interview process based on a recruiting campaign conducted by e-mail, the correspondence itself allows for basic analysis of the candidate. Is the candidate interested in the role? Is he or she responsive to our e-mails? Does the candidate take the time to proofread a response? If so, this person is a viable candidate and ready for the next step.

Phone screen. Before setting up a first interview, we ask for a brief phone screen. This allows us to assess: Is the candidate enthusiastic? Is the candidate articulate? It also gives us the chance to determine why the candidate is interested in the position.

In-person interviews. We have multiple people, three to five, meet with a candidate for in-person interviews. They generally last 30 to 60 minutes, and we try to form two different assessments. First, is the candidate a culture fit? One of our values is, “Care deeply about our colleagues.” This assessment has been relatively easy for us to make, because we work hard to hire people who are genuinely good folks. During the interview process, we have a candidate meet with multiple employees to get a broad sense of the candidate’s ability to fit in with the existing team. Second, we ask detailed questions about the candidate’s background, work experience and skill sets to determine if the person is a good fit for the role.

Case study for short-list of candidates. When we started H.Bloom, we would hire a candidate based exclusively on e-mail interactions, a phone screen and in-person interviews. After a couple of early mistakes, however, where we hired folks who did not end up being good fits for their positions, we realized that we needed to make a change. It became obvious to us that the qualifications of multiple candidates can be indistinguishable in 30- to 60-minute sessions.

Candidates who make our short-list are given case studies that approximate the actual job. We provide an assignment, with all of the necessary background information, and then set up a time for the candidate to come back into the office and present the case to a handful of us who will make the hiring decision. This in-depth evaluation allows us to separate the great candidates from the merely good. Here are some examples (next week, I will go into detail on one of the case studies we have done):

For a finance candidate: Under a nondisclosure agreement, we gave the candidate historical financial information about the company and the specific levers for our growth. We then assigned him the task of developing a 12-month revenue model.

For a floral buyer: We gave the candidate floral recipes — the individual stems that make up a single arrangement — for our markets for the coming week. She then walked us through the sources that she would use to procure the necessary flowers from around the world, and at what prices she could buy them.

For a direct marketing manager: We provided the candidate with monthly customer goals for the next year and an annual marketing budget. The task was to present a detailed marketing plan, noting the number of customers acquired each month by each marketing channel and listing all of the corresponding costs.

On-the-job cultural assessment. Once we introduced the case study, we thought we had perfected the interview process. We had moved from a generic interviewing regimen to one that closely approximated the actual role, and it allowed us to determine the candidate’s ability to execute the specific tasks of a position. What it did not do, however, was to analyze the person’s comfort in the role and at the company. We learned that the hard way.

Last year, we had two participants in our SEED program — a training program designed to prepare participants to open and manage an H.Bloom branch — leave the company before the end of the training program. Worse, both of these folks were potential all-stars, clearly equipped to handle the tasks associated with the role. But what we didn’t find out until they had already joined H.Bloom was that there was not a good fit between the position and the candidates’ career desires.

For one person, the allure of entrepreneurship was not enough to overcome the daily stress of a job that ultimately proved to be too emotionally taxing. For the other, the realities of a start-up – the frenetic pace, the semi-formed or nonexistent infrastructure – were quite different from the environment she had experienced with her previous employer, a hedge fund. In other words, there was a chasm between the image of entrepreneurship that these candidates had cultivated during the interview process and the reality they found in the actual job.

This turnover was particularly frustrating to me — because these folks were highly qualified individuals who had the skills to be great in their positions and because we could have identified the misalignment between our company and their desires if we had taken one more step during the interview process.

Now, before candidates receive a formal job offer, they are invited to spend real time – often a full day – on the job. This gives us the chance to see how we feel about future team members in our work environment. For the candidates, it provides a comparison point between the job they envisioned and the reality of working at the company every day.

While we’ve just started employing this last step in our interview process, we believe it will enable us to ensure that we are hiring the right candidate for the job, and for our team.

Has your hiring process evolved? What have you learned?

Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/you-have-identified-the-candidates-how-do-you-pick-the-right-one/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,

You’re the Boss Blog: When Employees Wonder What’s Going On

January 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Building the Team

Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.

“Bryan, we don’t know what’s going on anymore.”

Hazel, one of our best floral designers and one of the sweetest people I know, was sharing her frustration with me. She had joined H.Bloom to be part of a fast-growing start-up. But because we had grown so fast, and I wasn’t communicating effectively, she no longer felt part of the team.

It used to be easy. When we operated only in New York, the entire team – eight to 10 people – would gather on the comfortable couch and chairs that we had splurged on right after we started the company. We’d each grab a beer and have an informal debriefing of the company’s goings-on: what worked well and went wrong this week, our plans for next week, and things that we could do to improve the overall company. Each person knew exactly what was happening, and as a result, felt like an integral part of the team.

Then, we started to grow quickly, opening in Washington, Chicago, San Francisco and, most recently, Dallas. Last year, our headcount nearly doubled, growing to 75 employees from 40 by the end of 2012. While each person who has joined H.Bloom has done so to be part of a start-up, we could no longer sit around on the same couch and talk about the business.

I am sure Hazel’s frustration was representative of the feelings of many within the company, and I was disappointed in myself, because I was failing at one of a chief executive’s most important jobs: communication.

A couple of years ago, Fred Wilson, the well-known venture capitalist, wrote a post on his blog called “What a C.E.O. Does.” He said it was simple:

A C.E.O. does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.”

To keep up with our rapid expansion, I needed to step up my game in communication. So here’s what I did:

  1. A weekly e-mail update. I started sending Bloom’s Bulletin to the entire company every Monday. The bulletin has four parts. First, there’s always an important topic that I discuss at length. In one e-mail, I talked about one of our restaurant customers in New York, one of the best restaurants in the world. The general manager there does an otherworldly job of motivating the entire staff to achieve an unparalleled level of  service. And just as this restaurant views every course as if it were the only course, we view every delivery as if it were the only delivery. Second, I choose a flower or plant of the week. This is an easy way to get the entire company up to speed on our product offerings. Third, I provide complete transparency on the financials of our business: revenue by market, gross margin, etc. Fourth and finally, I enumerate general happenings in the business: new hires, departures, recent media coverage, a new initiative, etc.
  2. A monthly all-company meeting. I started hosting an all-company meeting through a conference call from a different city each month. This gives me an opportunity to communicate directly with everyone in the company at the same time, while also giving me a chance to be with a different market’s team each month. In the presentation, which usually lasts an hour or an hour and a half, I present the previous month’s financials and progress and talk about strategic initiatives. Then, I turn the call over to someone else on our management team to talk about sales, marketing, finance, technology, talent or operations.
  3. A monthly local team meeting. I use the time immediately after the all-company meeting to chat with the team in that local market. It usually lasts 45 minutes to one hour and is a great forum for answering questions. The all-company meeting tends to be a one-way presentation, whereas this local team meeting is an opportunity to engage in real dialogue.
  4. Office hours. Every month, my assistant sets up 20-minute sessions, using Google Docs, for me to interact with individual employees. They can sign up in an available slot, and then ask me questions directly, give feedback or pass along ideas. It’s a great way for me to have some one-on-one time with people, and it is where I receive the best feedback. It also provides me with a good sense of the overall morale within the company.

This communication strategy will continue to evolve and still needs to improve. At the end of 2012, our head of talent distributed an employee survey to determine what we needed to work on in 2013. We were excited to get 100 percent participation in the survey but concerned to find that communication was still an issue for our employees. We scored a 3.7 out of 5.

The challenge we are still struggling with is communicating from one market to another. We rolled out Yammer a year ago to foster this communication, and it works well for the day-to-day celebration of individual employee or market successes. However, it was not providing the forum within which one market could learn from another. So, we are now trying a regular video conference with all of the market managers, where they can ask questions of each other, but equally important, begin to build a relationship so they feel comfortable reaching out to one another directly whenever a question arises.

Eventually, when we are in 25 cities, the needs for communication will be different from what they are today, when we are in five. The only thing I know to do is to ask for feedback continuously from the team, and make changes when necessary.

I end my bulletin each week with the same sentence: “Please send me an e-mail or call me on my cellphone with questions, comments, feedback or suggestions.” I promised Hazel and the rest of the team that I would work very, very hard to communicate effectively. It’s my job.

Bryan Burkart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/when-employees-wonder-whats-going-on/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: , ,