FYI: Life in the Fast Lane

Highlights from the 2002 Inc 500 conference.

Tweet

FYI

The site of this year's conference was Albuquerque, and New Mexico governor Gary E. Johnson welcomed the leaders of America's fastest-growing private companies at a special reception. All governors who host Inc 500 conferences claim to be entrepreneurs. Johnson is one of the few who actually was one. Starting out as a handyman in 1974, he built a commercial and industrial construction company that now has 1,000 employees.

These days, when Johnson isn't handling his official duties, he likes to ride his motorcycle around the state. He told about stopping at a diner in his biker body armor one day. The waitress said, "You look like the governor. A lot of people must tell you that."

"They do," he said.

"Must piss you off," she said.

The attendees needed body armor of their own to weather the turbulent economy of the past year, and yet a more resilient group of people you'd be hard-pressed to find. For all that they'd been through, they retained their optimism about the future -- and their sense of humor about the past. Said Mary Naylor, founder of Capitol Concierge, a 1994 Inc 500 company, and now CEO of VIPdesk: "At my company we used to think we were playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? But now we've realized we're really on Survivor."

"The best way to get people to think out of the box is not to create the box in the first place." --Martin Cooper, CEO of ArrayComm

One step back, two steps forward
Keynoter Thomas G. Stemberg, cofounder and chairman of Staples, talked about opportunity in adversity, an appropriate theme for this crowd. Staples, he noted, often took its biggest and most important strides in response to situations that looked like disasters at first blush. As for economic downturns, he noted that there was never a better time to find and hire great people.

It's also a great time to put together a board. "It's amazing," Stemberg said. "If you have a nifty idea, crazy as it sounds, people will open their doors for you. And today, if a nifty public company comes to me and a nifty private company comes to me, I would choose to work with the nifty private company. Three years ago, I'm not sure, but today definitely."

In response to a question from the audience about establishing Staples as a brand name, Stemberg said: "Actually, the name was a problem in the beginning. We had to keep explaining who we were and what we did. But I had a member of my board of directors who was a very smart guy. He said, 'Run it right, and Staples will become a recognized brand."

Someone else asked for Stemberg's advice on going back to school to earn an M.B.A. "Experience overcomes education by a three-to-one ratio," Stemberg said. "You're better off taking special education courses in a specific area or maybe entering one of the weekend M.B.A. programs."

Less is more
PowerBar cofounder Brian Maxwell said he'd wanted $250,000 to launch the company and found he couldn't get it because the venture capitalists thought that it wasn't enough to start a packaged-food business. "They said, 'If you asked for $2.5 million or $25 million, we could take you seriously," he related. So he made do with what he had. Now, as an angel investor, he tells people, "You really don't want my money. You'll do better without it. The lack of money will force you to do things you wouldn't think of otherwise."

"Venture capitalists want to choose management. Private-equity investors want to buy management." --Tom Shattan of the Shattan Group, explaining one of the differences between going for venture capital and seeking private equity

Return on doing good
In lean times, companies may be tempted to cut back in the area of social responsibility, but Richard Foos, cofounder of Rhino Entertainment, noted that the most important thing Rhino had done from that standpoint hadn't cost the company anything at all. Employees had been pushing Rhino to let them take off the week between Christmas and New Year's, something the rest of the industry was already doing. Finally, he said, "OK, but the deal is that everyone has to do 16 hours of community service a year, and we're going to monitor it." He said the policy turned out to be a major factor in attracting and retaining good people.

 1 | 2  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: