Being the president of a small but growing company is strange.
The jobs that were once my daily duties are now things I don’t do at all any more. I remember when Rocky and I started SageRock. Her dad would say things like, “who are you using for your inside sales help?”
He came from a large company that had layers of infrastructure. I didn’t have anybody to do anything. If we wanted it done, Rocky and I did it.
Now, it’s different. I am continually questioning what I’m doing. I constantly ask myself what my highest and best use is at SageRock.
That highest and best use feels less crucial than when if I didn’t pick up that phone and call back that prospect I was seriously risking running out of money. Now I have people doing that much better than I ever did.
When I ask people what they look for in a leader, they often say they look for someone to set the vision and goals of the organization. So, those are things I work on.
Then I work on things I love doing. Things like writing in this blog, doing videos and writing a private client newsletter bring me a tremendous amount of joy. I also like speaking to groups. The downside to that is that it often requires me to be away from my family. That tends to taint the experience somewhat.
I thought of all these things yesterday, as I sat in on a production meeting. Not only do I do little to no production anymore, I don’t typically even go to the overview meetings. I often am out of town or involved in organizational activities.
I was so impressed by everyone at the meeting. All people where engaged, thinking creatively for each particular client and talking about how we could be increasing the success of the campaigns we were creating.
The big ideas weren’t just coming from one or two people. They were coming from a wide swath of people.
I don’t know if you are familiar with the hurdles of a service-based business. One big one is that “service is hard to scale.”
That is code for “we can’t get enough smart, innovative people to understand what we do well enough to grow.”
That is not the case at SageRock.
The people we hire at SageRock are all independent thinkers, creative and have an eye for proactivity.
Those kind of people don’t always look like your stereotypical “ideal” candidate. Picking these kind of people requires an open mind.
I wouldn’t say we’ve hired perfectly everytime. But I would say that everyone that has ever worked at SageRock has been smart and independently-minded.
As a client of any service business, you can’t know all that goes on in an organization in regard to your account. Often, if you don’t hear anything you think nothing must be going on.
We talk endlessly about the need to communicate, communicate, communicate.
I think we, as a whole, communicate well. But I feel we still have room to grow. I think we are better than most of our peers. But we don’t measure ourselves against them. Our industry standards are poor.
I wanted to share my experiences of this production meeting with you because these are some inside views you might not be aware of. If you are a SageRock client, you should know that, if nothing else, everyone at SageRock truly cares about your business. There wasn’t a single client that came up that someone didn’t have something proactive and innovative to offer about that business.
We always talk about things like:
- Communication is the cause of and solution to all our problems.
- We only do what is best for the client.
- We are a small team of elite professionals.
- Innovation, creativity and strategy are the values that lead our organization.
I truly saw all of those aspects built deeply into that production meeting and all the people involved.
It was impressive and I thought you might like to know.
Nice work Team Awesome!
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