Jon Spencer, CFO, COO & Principal at Solutions YES and Brandon Laws discuss the growth of Solutions YES, meeting the demands of the market, their hiring and recruiting strategy, and why they continue to grow the business with purpose in mind.
Brandon: Welcome to the HR for Small Business podcast, I’m your host, Brandon Laws. Today I have a returning guest with me, Jon Spencer. He is the CFO, COO, and Principal at Solutions Yes. He’s been with us before on the topic of managing HR success as a CFO, and today we’re going to talk about all the growth they’ve seen in the last few years, so I’ve invited Jon back. Jon, it’s good to have you back!
Jon: Good to be here, thanks for having me!
Brandon: So I want to first kind of pick your brain. When you first built a business plan, you got together with your partners, you opened the doors, what was the strategy like for hiring and meeting the demands or lack of demands of the service? Because at some point when people have awareness of what you’re doing out in the marketplace, and I’m sure that’s what you’re doing in the first few months, it’s really trying to create that demand and get awareness out there. How do you hire when there’s no demand, and what’s that process?
Jon: Well, I think when we first opened up it was really critical that we knew we were going to consider ourselves a service organization as opposed to most of our competitors who consider themselves sales organizations. So going out and grabbing service technicians was really critical, and the beauty we have for our opportunity was, even to this day, 90% of our employees came from a previous company that they all worked together at, so we had a pool of talent right down the street to pull from, and it was easy just go to back and say, Hey you guys, we’re starting something new and fresh, we’re really going to be service-oriented, you want to come join us? And so that was really easy to get them excited about that and to have them come and be a part of something that was new, but the focus was something that they were very interested in. And so, really, when we had our first 10 or so employees in the first 60-90 days, four of them were in sales, five were in service, and I was there to do the business side of the business.
Brandon: So it’s kind of interesting, because it sounded like you started with a foundation of people who are already seeing the vision for where you wanted to go. But at some point you grow to where you got to hire in some new people who maybe weren’t part of that original group from either other companies or different experiences or whatnot. So when you start hiring people, you start growing. What does that whole process feel like when you bring in new people into the organization and it can change the culture a little bit?
Image credit: Hans Splinter, Flickr
Jon: That’s a great question. And we decided very early on that, as a new company we could create a culture just the way we wanted it to be. And so we knew from the start we were going to be fiercely protective of that culture. As a matter of fact, when we hire people, we think of two scales: one is a culture scale and one is a productivity scale. And ideally we’re looking for people who are A+’s on both, but ultimately the culture scale is more critical. And we feel like if someone’s off the charts on the culture scale and on productivity they’re maybe not up to speed, we can get them there. But if they’re a super performer but kind of a bad apple, that’s going to mess up the whole thing. So we really look for the culture scale first and the productivity scale second; and the beauty, again, of people coming from the other company was it was bought out by a national or multinational company and their culture changed from being local, service-oriented, very family-oriented to now being just international seller of product. And so the people that were still there were yearning to get back into an environment that they had helped develop and loved being in. And so it was easy for us to kind of recreate that environment that they came from, and that was then very attractive for them to come on over and say, Wow, I can get back and do the things I wanted to do before that I can’t do now in the current environment, but you guys are recreating that, so it’s really exciting to be able to come back along and get into that environment where I’m really comfortable and I know we can all do a great job serving our customers.
Brandon: It’s interesting because the type of people you’re looking for, you sort of have that defined. So where do you find that in the process? Is it in the interviewing process, is it in the recruiting process, how you write a job description? How are you finding, or how are people finding you and vice versa, how are you finding them and kind of teasing out those things where they actually would be the culture fit that you’re looking for—that local service-oriented model?
Jon: Well, you know, most companies struggle to get quality people and what are they going to put together for their programs to attract and retain that top talent. And I was really one of the few people in the company even today who was not a 20-year industry veteran. My background as a CPA and kind of coming up on the business side is what brought me in to help run the business side of the business. But again, the luxury of having the old company, which most new companies starting up don’t have that luxury, they had like 200 employees at some point. And so, we basically said, and we kind of used the phrase, Let’s get the best of the best.
Brandon: You were cherry picking.
Jon: We went back and we kind of cherry picked the best people from there, particularly on the service side, because they did a great job of providing excellent customer service.
Remember, I was a customer of theirs for 10 years, I had a wonderful experience and wanted to be at a company that would provide the same high level of customer service. And so, again, we could cherry pick the best people, bring them in, help them see the vision, and for them, as you could imagine, it wasn’t so much about salary or comp or bennies as, Yeah I know you guys will take good care of me, we’ve been trusted coworkers for years. It’s a new company that will grow over time, but you’ll pay competitive wages at the start, you’ll build the benefits program over time as you can, but it’s most important to me to be in that environment where I’m being taken care of, I’m happy, I understand the vision, and we can all take that and impart it on providing great customer service to a customer base who really on day 1 was 0 and had to grow from scratch.
So they were really excited from day-one about building something from scratch and building something over time that they could themselves be proud of.
Brandon: For people listening who maybe haven’t listened to that first conversation we had about you building out the HR infrastructure, maybe give a quick synopsis of what you do at Solutions Yes. That might give some context, because I want to ask you some questions about your growth, and maybe just give some context of what you do. You said you’re a service organization versus some of your competitors don’t do that, so maybe talk about that a little bit.
Jon: Perfect. We are an independent dealer of office equipment. So copiers, printers, scanners, software that helps people go paperless; toner supplies for printers, even paper today. And this grew out of the former company we’ve been talking about called Associated Business Systems. It was around for 12 years before they sold to Rico, the big national manufacturer. And so several other people that started that company wanted to get back to a local company that was very service-oriented. And so we basically started from scratch Solutions Yes—the idea being that customers are looking for solutions today, if we had that in our name, that would be a focus for us. And if we said “yes”, our incentive all the time is to try to find the right solution for those customers. So again, most of our employees worked for Associated Business Systems, we picked from the best of the crop over there, started our company in June of 2011 and go up every day against more well-known competitors like Rico, like Copiers Northwest, Copytronics, or, certainly, Pacific Office Automation. So that’s the sandbox we play in and we started in the middle of a recession against some of these more well-known competitors and, again, the differentiator for us today is: everybody talks service, but who really provides it? And so we think that most of our competitors are really truly sales organizations and we want to come at the marketplace with a much more defined service orientation, and differentiate ourselves from our competitors in that way.
Brandon: When you look back when you started the business, I’m sure family, friends are probably looking at you like you’re crazy, starting a business in the middle of a recession, but in hindsight, you guys have experienced a ton of growth. I wrote some stats down here… so, you made the Portland Business Journal’s list for Fastest Growing Private Companies—in 2013 you were #4 overall, and there’s no category breakdown, so you were #4 Fastest Growing Private Company in Oregon.
Jon: Correct.
Brandon: And then in 2014, #26. And it gets harder as you mature. And also you made the list for the Oregon 100 Best Companies to Work For. So you’re obviously treating your employees right and they love working for you. You made the list twice there, too—2013 #20, 2014 #18.
Jon: Correct.
Brandon: Talk about that growth. You started in the middle of a recession, building the business from scratch. Granted, you had some employees come over from a previous business, they were already sort of acclimated to the model.
Jon: Correct.
Brandon: What’s been the growth? Why has it happened?
Jon: Well, you know, ultimately I think the bottom line is Portland is a small market at the end of the day, the Portland-Vancouver metro area, although we go all the way to the coast, we have employees in Bend serving several companies over there. We go as far north as Seattle, we go down as far south as Eugene and Roseburg. But the marketplace here is one that values being taken care of and not being a number in a big fishbowl. And so being smaller and more nimble gives us the flexibility to give those customers what they’re looking for, and as you can imagine, when you start a business from scratch, there’s really no new companies starting up that say, Gosh I need a printer! Gosh, I need a copier! Our really only option was to go after an existing customer based, which was being served by a Rico or a Pacific Office Automation. And if those companies are doing a great job taking care of their customers, we’re not going to be able to get a conversation with them.
But as you can imagine, and here we are starting year five and have well over 1,000 customers, all of whom came from the competition—
Brandon: Wow.
Jon: We were able to get a conversation with organizations, churches, nonprofits, school districts, commercial companies, you name it, and the reason that they’re willing to talk to us is that they’re not having a good service experience, they’re experiencing some pain. And when they’re experiencing some pain, they’re willing to talk to somebody who’s new because they’ve got to say, Well, perhaps it can’t get any worse than I have it now, I’ll give you guys a shot. So early on we had to have some early adopters of course, we had to have some people step out in faith because gosh, a lot of people said, You might not be here tomorrow. So we really appreciate those people who took those early steps. We said we’d prove it to them from the start that they made a good choice.
The fact that our competitors, in many respects, were not doing a good job taking care of their customers kind of opened up the field for us to go in and say, We think we can do it different, we think we can do it better. And clearly it’s resonating in the marketplace because, again, we’re up to 36 employees starting year five, but two years ago we only had 12. It just took a while to really get started. We had past relationships we could tap into, we also had non-solicitation and non-compete agreements that we had to work with and treat those properly. So for us, everything was a brand new conversation. Everything was, we’re new, you don’t really know who we are or what we can do, but give us an opportunity to show we can do it better and different. And clearly it’s worked and the growth has just exploded for us.
Brandon: That’s exciting. But with growth comes a lot of headaches, I’m sure; there’s a lot of things probably on your mind especially as the COO/CFO. I’m curious, and this is an HR and leadership podcast so we’re going to talk about HR definitely, but the things on your mind are probably operational things—building efficiency and all those things. I’m sure you’re thinking about those. I’m curious from a people perspective, because you’re a service organization so it’s got to really be about the people you’re hiring fitting the mold. So as you’ve grown, how are you really defining who you want and what sort of things are you doing through the HR process to really find those people?
Jon: Finding Xenium early on when we were starting the company has just been a wonderful thing. If you heard the first podcast, we talked about the dilemma I was in and why I chose to outsource all HR, from a CPA or CFO standpoint. And really, Xenium’s been a great partner for us for all these years, and they’ve done a lot of the things that in an HR standpoint and being able to attract that top talent, that I didn’t know how to do very well and didn’t really want to do.
So when it’s come to helping build the benefits package or taking care of a lot of the policies, or even at the beginning helping us create and pass out our handbook, those are all really positive things. And so that partnership has really helped us bolster the position that we are in today, but I think it gets back into the culture scale, which is that we know the kind of people that are going to fit in our organization. I’d like to say we’ve been perfect at that, but we haven’t. We’ve brought some people in that ultimately concluded that they didn’t meet the culture scale the way we wanted them to after all, and we’ve had to get rid of them.
Brandon: That’s okay, that’s good, healthy turnover.
Jon: It’s a good thing, it is. And the people that are there who really fit the culture mold, they don’t want to see the bad apple stay around and create a problem.
Brandon: Absolutely, because it could taint the culture.
Jon: It could taint the culture. We’ve had to get rid of some apples here and there, but for the most part, we’ve taken kind of a slow to hire, quick to fire mentality, which takes us a whole long time to really vet people out.
Brandon: It’s easier said than done, also.
Jon: Easier said than done. We really vet people out, make sure we really believe that they are going to be a good fit. And frankly, even on the quick to fire side we probably take longer than we should because we feel we know these people, we’ve worked with these people in the past, we want to give them every opportunity to be successful. And yet, at some point you still get to the point where it’s not going to work and you have to face facts, and so we’ve done that here and there. But again, for the most part, we had the people
that work in the industry, that were former coworkers that are familiar with an organization that provided great customer service, so they really fit the culture so well before, and that cherry picking concept allowed us to go back. Believe me, there were some people at the other company really that never made the list, and we probably still have a couple dozen people on the list that if we get big enough over time, they’re still kind of saying, Pick me! Pick me! They’ve probably landed someplace else in the meantime, of course,because Rico, two years ago, decided to do some consolidation in other parts of the country and put about 80-100 people on the street here in Portland. And a lot of those people are going, I love that company, I love the industry, I love the people. Do you have a spot for me?
Brandon: That’s amazing.
Jon: And so we still have a deep bench to work with, in terms of people we know will fit the culture scale and will very likely do very well in the productivity scale, again, because we worked with them and we know who they are, we know what makes them tick. Now at some point, clearly, the pool’s going to run out and we’re going to have to then open up the doors and say, How are we going to find these people? And that’s what we’re going to need to work on over the next couple of years, is to make sure we’re in a good position working with our HR people here at Xenium to help us make sure that when the time comes, we’re in the best position to go out and recruit great talent and have them come to us even if they don’t know who we are or didn’t work with us before.
Brandon: In terms of growth of the revenue and the headcount, there’s definitely changes that happen in the life-cycle of the business. What sort of things have changed that you’ve noticed? Hopefully they haven’t kept you up at night, but I’m sure they have. What are those things?
Jon: They do. Well, again, when we started, it was everything was new and nobody knew who we were and every conversation was hard fought for.
Brandon: So it was marketing and sales that were the hard things.
Jon: Yeah, we said everyone in a small organization wears a sales hat.
Brandon: Absolutely, that’s so true.
Jon: Even though I’m here for the business side, I introduced lots of relationships and lots of people I’d worked with in the past to look for sales opportunities. But even in the first two years, Brandon, we were still struggling. I mean we started with about 10 employees, about 60 or 90 days into the origin of the company, and two years later we were still at 12. So it was a constant battle of where’s the next opportunity going to come from, and for us, another phrase that we use around the company a lot of the time is Failure is not an option. So we knew we weren’t going to fold like a lot of start-up companies do, but we were just waiting for that traction—where’s that kick in the rear that’s going to pop us to the next level? And it just happened about two years ago, September of 2013, and all of a sudden it was like somebody just hit the gas, and between September and December of that year we had to hire about six or seven people! And talk about keeping me up at night, watching the payroll go up by a big chunk like that and thinking How am I going to cover this?
Brandon: Yeah, the costs are rising.
Jon: The costs are rising, but you know, we knew we were doing the right thing. We have a tendency to hire in advance of the need as opposed to creating the need and then trying to go find the bodies. And again, as a service organization, you want to be able to respond to your customers sooner rather than later. So we’re hiring at a quicker pace than a lot of other companies might, but for all the right reasons, and the little bit of indigestion that comes with that, but it just began this traction and this kind of explosion. And really, again, two years ago in September, 2013, we had 12 people. We just hired #36.
Brandon: Wow, that’s unbelievable.
Jon: So it really kicked in. It’s been almost about a person a month the last two years and our revenue has tripled in the same time period as our revenues have tripled.
Brandon: Any listeners who are thinking, Oh, at a software company 36 is probably not big for them, for a service company that can be scary! We’ve experienced that at Xenium. When I first started about seven years ago, we had 25, 29 employees, something like that, and we’re at about 70 now.
Jon: Wow.
Brandon: So it’s over doubled in size. But I wanted to ask you this question, you alluded to it a second ago, but I want you to say it again—so when you’re in growth mode, you’re selling. Do you hire people after you’ve made a sale to sustain that business, or do you hire slightly in advance in a forecasting way, like I know we’re going to get here in sales, so we’re going to hire in conjunction with what we think we’re going to do? And it’s always a moving target, it’s not a perfect science at all.
Jon: It is, and companies struggle with that all the time.
Brandon: What we’ve typically done at Xenium is our sales have been crazy so we’ve typically hired maybe a little too late, but we’ve tried to get ahead of it at times, but it’s so hard. What have you done?
Jon: It is hard. And again, I think for the most part, we kind of break it down and we kind of do it a little bit differently on the service side versus the sales side. On our service side, it used to be some years ago that a piece of office equipment breaks down, you’d place a service call and you’d like to get somebody there in about four hours to get it back up to get your business back up. Over the last couple of years, that has kind of slid to, Well, if I can get there in a couple of days, that’s about the best I can do. And the marketplace has kind of settled into a couple day response time being the norm. And so we kind of came back in and said, That’s not the norm! That’s crazy. We’re going to go back to the way it used to be. And so here we are, even starting year five, our response time is 3.5 hours.
Brandon: That’s amazing!
Image credit: 드림포유, Flickr
Jon: So this is blowing people away. But you can do that if you have more service people to be able to respond quicker. So on the service side we have a tendency to hire in advance of the need to make sure we have that great response time for our customers. On the sales side, a mature company in our industry has really two types of sales people: they have hunters, people who will go out and snatch up brand new business, or they have what I would call an “order-taker,” which is basically work an existing base of business and again, in our business, most people lease their equipment and so when the lease comes up and you’re doing a good job, you go right back to them and it’s very likely they’re going to turn around and lease from you again. So to re-up that existing customer is a very easy turn. It’s great, there are some very talented people out there who are very good at establishing and turning over and keeping a base happy. And so that’s a sales group where you can get the business and you can bring someone in to handle that business. With a start-up like we were, everything is new. As a matter of fact, today, still, we’ve barely begun to turn over our existing customers, so everything is still new. So we really need hunters, people to go out and snatch up the business.
Brandon: Where’s the marketing department?
Jon: Yeah, well maybe we need to tap into Xenium a little bit more! And it’s scratch-and-claw every day when you’re new, so for us on the sales side we really need to bring in people, again, who fit the culture but who have that hunter mentality who are able to go out, meet new customers, create opportunities, put business together, and eventually we’ll get to the point where maybe they can work on their book of business as well. On the sales side we have a tendency to kind of hire a little on the back side to make sure that all of our territories are covered, and on the service side we have a little bit of a tendency to hire up front, maybe a little too quickly, to make sure we have the level of customer service we can provide.
Brandon: You alluded to the fact that your industry has a lot of big players, there’s big companies that you’re going against and their turnaround times are a lot less. They have an established book of business so they can probably pay people a little bit more for recruiting.
Jon: Correct.
Brandon: What has been your compensation philosophy or creativity in terms of building out a benefits or total compensation package to entice people to come work for you instead of a big player? I mean, if you’ve got to find talent, there’s got to be a unique way to go about it.
Jon: A great question. You know, we can’t pay what the big companies can pay, obviously; they have deep pockets.
Brandon: You could, but your margins would be probably a lot slimmer.
Jon: We could, but they can even go back to the manufacturer sometimes and create some extra incentives to say, hey, if I brought in this super producer, could you throw some extra money my way to help pay for these big producers because in the long run, you’re going to sell a lot more equipment? So they have those relationships with the manufacturers where maybe they can generate a little bit more cash for that. So we pay, certainly, a competitive wage. I think a lot of people, again, they come to work for us because they don’t want to work for a big company where they’re just a number in a machine. A lot of the customers feel the same way. They might make more money, but they’re not happy, they don’t like the culture. Some of the cultures of some of our competitors have been described to me by people who know are that they’re very inconsistent with ours—not family-oriented, not let’s work hard but have fun, it’s really very different. So I think they come for a culture and an opportunity to put the company on the map, help the company grow. We like to provide opportunities for those people, because at some point, unlike Associated Business Systems, where most of the people came from, their goal when they started the company was to grow it fast and sell it. Ours is the opposite, ours is to kind of grow at a decent pace and have something that perpetuates, which means ultimately at some point we’re going to need to have a new level of leadership come up through the ranks and have opportunities to run departments or be an owner or something like that. And so some of these people are willing to come on today looking, for an opportunity to grow, to help put a company on the map, and know that if they work hard, we’ll find ways to compensate them adequately. But the money’s not the most important thing for them today.
On the benefits side, this is something I’ve been working on with the hats I’ve been wearing for the past five years and so we understand how critical it is to provide for our employees as best as we can and to have a full comprehensive package. So our first year we knew that medical insurance was the most important, so we went out and got that and worked with Xenium to get that. And then we’ve just built on that over time. So after that we set up a 401(k) plan, after that we went back and added vision and dental, we’ve had a section 125 plan from the start. Our next thing that we’re going to do is add life insurance and long term disability. So we recognize what those things are relative to a good compensation package, and we are just honest with our employees that we’re a new company, we’re kind of getting our feet underneath us, we have every intention of growing and having a more comprehensive package over time. Work with us on this, help us to grow the company, and as we grow, the benefits can come to everybody. And so people have a great buy-in on that, they understand that we’re taking care of the core things that they need to have.
Brandon: Their basic needs.
Jon: Their basic needs, and we’re going to supplement those, again, with other things that they may have had other companies. For a lot of companies, life and disability are kind of givens, so we’re getting there. But we’re going to continue to just look for ways to keep ourselves focused on what we consider to be a very employee-centric organization, take care of our people, compensate them appropriately, provide a great benefits package, and when they’re happy, like working with their coworkers, feel really good about the environment and what’s going on, then they’re going to be able to take great care of our customers and that’s what’s most important to us. So taking care of our employees, take care of our customers, and good things will happen.
Brandon: When you look at the time, the scale of day one to where you sit today, what are some of the biggest “aha!” moments that you’ve had in running the business?
Jon: Well a couple come to mind, I guess. The stark reality that the day we opened the doors there was two of us with nothing to sell, no employees, no customers, and probably both wives going, What are we doing? But at the same time it was so exciting and we funded the operation from day one with our own capital, so we had our own skin in the game, so it was kind of push hard, work hard all of the time.
The first time our first huge load of equipment that we bought was delivered on a truck and then loaded into our warehouse, that was very exciting. I mean, yeah, we spent $150,000 six weeks into the business, and here comes all of this equipment we can now sell, though we’re still looking for customers. So that was kind of a big deal.
A couple of months later we had a big open house, we thought, let’s just open up and see what the marketplace can do for us and what we can do for them. We just invited a bunch of people, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We probably had about 150 people show up to this thing over like a 4-hour open house, it just blew us away. Great event.
Image credit: BCcampus_News, Flickr
But I think the biggest one, and I alluded to it a little bit earlier, was, we were kind of struggling, we’re working hard, we feel like we’re going to make it, but we’re just not getting any traction. And all of a sudden one day it just pops, about two years ago. And again, in the first 2 years we got to a certain level, 12 employees, and in the last two years we’ve gotten to 36 and our revenue has tripled. So far this year we’re up by 30% over last year yet. Something just clicked, we knew what we were doing was right, and it just took off. And it had to do with new customers willing to come on board and we started seeing happy customers referring us to people they knew, we started to see networking opportunities that we’ve invested in begin to bear fruit, and ever since then it’s just really taken off. And so I think those are some of the “aha!” moments that come to mind, but that one from two years ago really kind of validated that we think we can make this, we’re getting from surviving to thriving, we’re actually going to be a force to be reckoned with in the marketplace even though we’re kind of small and growing. And it’s just a big kick start to say, Okay, let’s take off and make this thing really sing! And that’s really what’s happened ever since.
Brandon: I love hearing that, because, as you say, one day it just really popped and it just exploded. But I listen to you, and that’s like a culmination and result of all the little decisions you made along the way. And it’s actually proof that what you were doing before was right.
Jon: Yes, I agree.
Brandon: And that’s exciting because now it actually puts you on that path of the growth you want. So, with that, the next couple years you said slow growth is your anticipated target. How many employees do you want? You can talk about revenue if you want. Do you want to go to a different building? What sorts of things are you thinking about?
Jon: Yeah, it’s hard to think forward a lot when we’ve been working so hard, keeping our heads down, getting to where we are today, but we’re to the point now where it’s time to do this. So we have some thoughts about that. We’re beginning to think, you know, where are we going to be five years from now? We think our revenues will probably be at least double where we are today. We think our employee count will probably be doubled as well, because revenues and employee count in our industry kind of go hand-in-hand, so as revenues double employee count will probably too, 75 or 80 people.
Brandon: Wow!
Jon: And we believe that an opportunity for us as the owners is to invest in our own building and lease it back to the company. A lot of companies do this, there’s great tax advantages for doing that. So our current lease runs for another 2.5 years, but we’ll begin the process shortly of exploring the marketplace and seeing if we could possibly pull something like this off in year five and year six, looking ahead to where we might be at about year eight. So what size would the company be at that time? What’s the appropriate sized facility? Where should it be located? These are some of the things you have to begin to think about. Xenium’s obviously been there, now you’re about 15 years old, you’ve kind of gone through some of those things back in the day, but we are beginning to look at that.
All along the way, though, it has to be not forced growth. A lot of it is organic growth, a lot of it is, again, being able to start to kind of serve our customers again on a second lease and third lease option. Two years ago, school districts wouldn’t even talk to us because we hadn’t been around long enough, and today we serve about 15 of the top 100 districts in the state and other opportunities are lining up. So it’ll be some time before we can approach the Beavertons and the Portland school districts.
Brandon: I hope you get there!
Jon: But we’ve hit several others, and they talk to each other. So as you do a good job for a Lake Oswego school district or for an Albany, Oregon school district, which are some more sizable ones, they’re going to talk to their neighbors and the people they see at conventions and seminars, and when that question comes up, they’re going to go, You need to talk to these guys! We’ve worked with these guys for a couple years now and they do a fantastic job! And so those types of things will help that growth over time.
We’ll continue to work hard, we’ll bring on more sales people, we’ll continue to look for new opportunities all the time, we might have to consider what geographic expansion might call for, but at the end of the day, we kind of want to be a Portland-based hub, and kind of spread our tentacles out from that direction, just have great employees who believe in what we’re trying to do, take care of them as best as we can with programs and packages, and continue to do the things we’ve done so far. We think that success breeds success. We’ve had some validation that so far what we’re doing is working—if it’s working, keep doing it. But keep looking for ways to provide better opportunities for our employees and our customers.
One of the things that we’re really picking up on now is this concept of software that’s out in the industry that works with the hardware that helps organizations kind of create efficiencies in their paper flow or their record keeping and/or I want to be a paperless environment. A lot of the competitors are still very hardware-focused on what they’re doing, and we’re trying to come in with a Let us explore how your environment works, let us see your processes, let us see if we can find software solutions that might help with those processes, or optimize them or create them if you don’t have them already. Kind of bring that approach. And very likely, that approach requires certain hardware to make them work. But we’re trying to come in solution-based first, backfill with hardware, and be a partner to our customers, not just a vendor as opposed to come in once in a while, sell a piece of equipment, not really sure I care about how well your organization is operating or how I can help you operate it better, and then be back in a couple years when the lease is up and we’ll just do it again. Again, more differentiators, but these are the things we’re looking for maybe five years out in terms of, you know, we’re going to be more of a player than we are today and we think our message and the way we operate will continue to resonate with the marketplace and that will just continue to help us do what we need to do for more and more people.
Image credit: dhendrix73, Flickr
Brandon: I’ve got one more question for you before we wrap up. If you had the ability to talk to yourself five years ago, or even talk to somebody in your same position five years ago, what kind of advice would you give them about starting up and growing a business? I know it’s kind of a hard question! Maybe you wouldn’t say anything, because maybe you would be afraid that things wouldn’t be the same?
Jon: No, that’s very fair. And I try to spend most of my time looking forward, but you can’t help but look back because the things you did in the past helped you get where you are today.
Brandon: And I’m mostly saying this because for folks listening, they may be in a position where they’re helping grow a company and this advice could be helpful.
Jon: Happy to share! I think, for me, I always had a bit of an entrepreneurial side in me, and it was kind of like, how am I going to be able to express that at some point in my career? And it took me 2/3rds into my career to finally find the right opportunity to spread those wings a little bit. And it had to be the right one, and so I didn’t want to just buy a company and buy a job, I wanted to find myself in a situation where we could do great things for our employees, where we could build something that would last into perpetuity, and something I could look back and be proud of. And so I guess the advice I would give is, it’s almost cliché, but anybody can do anything. Put your mind to it, you have to prepare. We did a lot of planning and a lot of preparation before we kind of jumped off the end of the board. But again, all of that, there were still things that happened
that we couldn’t foresee coming. So be as prepared as you can be, be willing to take a risk, and be willing to stay up a little at night if you have to, and you have to have the mindset that failure is not an option, and you just keep at that. We love to tell our story every day, because people love to hear it. We’re kind of an underdog story, so people love to hear that and say, Wow, look at what you guys were, look at the kind of environment you started in, the recessionary kind of situation, and then look at what hard work and a passion for what you do has done! So if you have a sense of wanting to start a business or grow a business, you’ve got to be prepared to work hard. You’ve got to be prepared to plan endlessly, but you’ve got to be very flexible to move with things that happen along the way, it’s not always going to be exactly as you thought it was going to be. And you just have to believe that it’s going to work, that what you’re bringing to the marketplace is valued, and that at the end of the day you’re doing something that you feel good about and that you can be proud of and you can look at yourself in the mirror and say, I’m doing this with honesty and integrity, and that’s what’s really important to me.Brandon: Jon, thanks for being part of the podcast! We’ll definitely put a link up to the website, Solutions Yes is the business, so people can learn more about your company there.
Jon: My pleasure, Brandon, thanks for having me!
Top image credit: BCcampus_News – Flickr