This link has been bookmarked by 36 people . It was first bookmarked on 01 Aug 2008, by Joel Liu.
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02 Aug 08
Brent SordylAnd really I was pretty damned honored having someone with his experience -- a friggin VP of a $100 million company -- working for me, and for free! Wow!
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01 Aug 08
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David NaughtonBill talks about his experience hiring the former "VP of a $10 million company" who turned out to be a complete fucking moron: 2008-07-31: Building a Software Company
hiring business startup software sales for:gormsby for:greevar for:jtrammell for:libsys for:saritabenson
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Joel LiuWow, I remember how idealistic I was when I was about to bring on my first
employee! After dealing with bad bosses over my career, after doing a whole lot
of thinking about how I was going to be a great boss, and after doing a whole
lot of reading about how to hire effective people, I was really looking forward
to it. I was going to:-
Only problem was, I couldn't quite afford an employee yet. By then I had been working a couple years by myself, earning good profits in the $200K range but it was based on just one or two sales a year, and each sale took 6-12 months to finalize. With so few customers I could easily go a year without sales, I feared, so had to set aside my profits to cover that. And if I were going to hire someone, I'd really want six months or a year's payroll set aside for them as well. I just couldn't afford that yet.
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Serendipitously, I was approached a little while later by a former VP of my big competitor, at my industry's main exhibition where I had a small booth. He was a friggin' VP of a $100 million a year company! Well, their former VP, he said. Wow though, I was flattered. I demoed my product to him, explained my company, and his mouth dropped open. He started gushing about how incredible my product was (well, it was, I guess) and asked why the "fuck" wasn't I selling $100 million a year?! I said well, I'm sort of at capacity... and... errrr... I'm more of an engineer, and, uh.... I don't know why. I didn't want to tell him what I feared, that it was just this thing I made on my own, some of the code was crap, and things like that just don't sell for millions.
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We talked a little more and I couldn't believe when he asked to work for me for free! Well, on commission. But hey, that's money I wouldn't have made anyway. If he brings in a million bucks a year in profit, he's worth 10% of that, certainly!
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I mentioned to my uncle (an experienced big-ticket salesperson) about this new guy I was bringing on board, and he told me to be careful because "guys like that will do anything to make the sale and don't care if they leave you high and dry. I've seen it LOTS."
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So I set off on my promises of being a great boss. I let my new sales guy do his thing, trusted his judgement, didn't ask to be CC'd on things, gave him the resources he needed, just set him loose. $25K in stuff he said we absolutely needed -- slick brochures, sponsor some conference, ads in the trade journal, coffee mugs, pens with our logo -- I readily paid for. I wanted him and us of course to succeed.
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