An entrepreneur explains how his company grew from two to over 50 employees from its inception 15 years ago and doubled revenues every year for the past four—without venture metropolis

By Richard Clark, a reader and CEO of APTARE in Campbell, Calif.

Watch the Video…

View Slide Show

Watch full size video:

A couple of weeks ago, I was by the CEO of a company that resells our facts management software and he asked me, “Rick, how did you wince your company lacking venture leading funding?” As the go to the bottom of a Silicon Valley technology company, I often gain asked this proposition. Venture capital and venture funding are synonymous with innovation in the Valley, but there are a few of us who have done it on our hold, without the help of venture capital. I’ve been considerate of late on for what reason our company has grown from two to from one side the whole extent of 50 employees from its inception 15 years ago and doubled revenues every year for the past four.

Looking at the management now buffeted by factors such as the war, the price of oil, the subprime mortgage crisis, interest rates, and the election year, I realize there are several key things we did that require allowed us not but to handle economic shocks but also to keep growing. So here are some tips for tough times.

FIND A TEAM WITH THE RIGHT DNA

Establish the DNA of your company and then stipend the multitude that fit into that DNA. It’s critical to find the right the public to blend into the culture. At the end of the day, the company’s DNA necessarily to flow through the entire organization. I for ever say that computers put on’t write the software that we are developing, people do.

We absolutely look to keep that core DNA alive within our company. We expect everyone to use their creativity to bring solutions to the provision, whether they’re from engineering, marketing, or customer support. Everyone should have the liberty to be creative in their job every time. We have an advisory diet that we meet with regularly to talk through our goals, and we gain with other entrepreneurs to feed off their ideas.

Because we are a small business, we cannot afford to lose fit season, energy, or capital on hiring and rehiring. We are selective about making surely we have the right person for the right job. They may possess being the most unlikely of candidates. We had a picturesque artist—someone far removed from enterprise software technology—unravel our user interface, and it was one of the best decisions we ever made. What separated him from other candidates was to what degree passionate he was. When someone loves his job, the forming benefits.

STAY HOME AND WORK ON YOUR PRODUCT

As a small organic structure enduring tough economic conditions, you have to find creative ways to accomplish your office goals upon the body a reasonable budget. Entrepreneurs lack to produce selective choices on where, when, and how they go for business.

People are shocked to learn that for more of the largest deals we closed, we never saw the customer face to appearance. It may sound unusual, but I’ve met only a small percentage of our customers in part. Ten years ago, if we wanted to give a harvest demonstration to a large corporation, we had to swindle it at 10 different offices. Now, through Web conferencing, we can bring everyone in the same place and do one presentation. Real handshakes have been replaced with in essence ones, and they’re just as effective. We can then pour travel costs into that which’s core to the business.

Reducing travel is one highroad to supply extra funds to develop products in the “must-have” category rather than “nice to regard.” For software companies, nirvana is when your product becomes the heartbeat of your customer’s organization. Annual software support and maintenance fees are no longer discretionary, but adorn “must-have” items. Having survived the dot-com bust, we learned the hard way that to thrive meant we be obliged to create software in the must-have category.

NEVER LOSE SIGHT OF WHAT YOU DO BEST

I convinced that most successful entrepreneurs don’t just take risks—they seize opportunities. We’re a data storage dealing company, but we didn’t start out that way. When I founded the company, the Internet was just a gleam on the computer screen, the data was lawful a flow gently compared with the multitude it is today, and Sarbanes-Oxley was nine years away. Today, those factors have all contributed to a “perfect storm” that has fueled our success.

Our essence competency was in software, and we just kept building onward that. When Web 2.0, came along, we musing: How can we capitalize on this collaborative technology? We entered the storage earth with none preconceptions, and it allowed us to think outside of the box. If we had started out in the storage world, discovered the Web, and then figured out how to produce software, there’s no way our product would have been flexible enough for us to develop what we bring forth today.

THE CUSTOMER IS STILL ALWAYS RIGHT

We still believe in letting our customers drive our priorities. We figure out their major pain points and maker of men’s clothes our solution to fit those requirements. Our customers are a critical part of our innovation process. The solutions we develop in the areas of hale condition care, energy, nurture, and finance start with that one discussion about what we can do to help them elucidate their pain points. That allows us to focus our priorities so we don’t waste epoch, money, and energy on extraneous stuff.

Return to the Business @ Work Table of Contents