Blog of Roger Greene, CEO

We are moving soon. In our current office, we probably have miles of Ethernet run through the ceilings to our offices and conference rooms. Our IT team did quite a nice job setting it all up years ago. It is flexible, convenient, reliable. We would like to leave all this behind for another tenant to take advantage of. But building code now requires that departing tenants rip out all network cables before they leave. So we will pay to have this massive amount of Ethernet removed. Then someone else will move in and pay to have more cables run. Seems like a waste of time and money. There ought to be a better way. How about making us leave a deposit until the next tenant moves in? If they want the existing cabling, they keep it, and everybody wins. If they don’t want it, we pay to have it removed.

For the past few months I have been thinking about floor plans and selecting colors and finishes for our new office. It is coming together – we move in next month. But is this a wise use of my time? Should a CEO be involved in decorating? I say yes. I think the look and feel of the workplace are some of the most neglected decisions a CEO makes. Too often companies opt for drab offices, thinking any space will do. Wrong! The environment matters – a lot. It isn’t the hours at work that count; it is how productive those hours are. The right environment has a huge impact on that productivity.

We design for good flow, natural light, and for colors that are comfortable and support our ambitious growth objectives. Also, as I wrote earlier, we are building a real kitchen in the hopes that people will gather around the preparation and sharing of food. For a traveling visitor, whether a customer, employee from another office or partner, a home-cooked meal might be a welcome change.

Making all of these design decisions is a big job, so I brought in some help. I had always been curious about Feng Shui, and thought this might be a good way to learn about it and apply some basic principles. Christine Wojnar did just that and gave us some excellent ideas about flow, layout and use of space. Kimberlee Bee came up with color and texture suggestions. I think that together we made some good decisions. We won’t know for sure until the work is done and we move in, but it is starting to look good. Fingers crossed.

I am hopeful our new office will stand out from the generic places that too many companies select, contribute to us exceeding our goals and be a space we truly enjoy.

Sometimes technology really does make life better. I was looking for a way to get to the office this morning. With all this snow, the roads are pretty questionable. How about the bus? If they were running at all I imagined they’d be safe. So I plugged in my home and the office into Google Maps, and selected public transportation. Walk to subway, take it one stop, transfer to a bus for most of the journey, then walk 15 minutes. Google shows the schedules, so I could time my arrival just before the bus left. All in all, the trip took only an hour – just double the door to door drive time.

There was a surprise bonus at after getting off the bus. The route led me through a cemetery I had not been familiar with. Such a lovely wintry landscape, all hushed with the snow.

Now that’s a commute!

I have always been surprised and somewhat bothered by people who ask, “What’s your exit strategy?”. Sometimes I feel like they are really asking, “Where does your ambition end?”.

Or maybe they are asking, “Wouldn’t you rather be doing something different?” Or, “Isn’t work hell?”

The question gets to the  root of why you started your business in the first place. As I have said elsewhere, I wanted to build a company where I could work with smart, motivated people to accomplish ambitious goals, and grow and have fun in the process. Making money was also important, but more a consequence of choosing the right business and managing well.

I have found along the way that when we succeed at creating this environment, there have always been new challenges that keep me engaged. When we lost focus, it was less fun. Several years ago, after rejecting a third path of continuing with sub-par results, I saw two possible paths – manage better, or get out. I selected the first path, because I concluded that it wasn’t that hard to figure out what we needed to do; it was more a question having the resolve to do something about it. Taking that path has transformed Ipswitch into a more vital company with broader and deeper expertise and accelerating revenue and profit. We have the extraordinary and very real prospect to build on our strong market positions to accomplish something big. I want to be part of that. I like my job. I haven’t thought of anything that I would rather do. So I plan to keep doing this as long as that continues, as long as I see opportunity, as long as I think I am  effective, and as long as I think we can compete.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t plan to be scared to walk out the open door when the time is right. This isn’t about eternity. There is always an exit, eventually. Exits can be the right path. But they should be chosen for the right reasons.

As much or more than other firms, software companies rely on people to grow. Finding good people takes time, though. One shortcut is to acquire or merge with other companies. Most of the attention surrounding M&A is on the technology, but to us, people are at least as much of the value. All companies need fresh ideas and perspectives in order to thrive. We believe a mix of ideas is ideal – some from current staff and some from new employees.

There is nothing quite like adding a team of people who have taken a different approach to making a company grow. They have technical and market knowledge. They have customer relationships. Many of them have experienced a company’s birth and growth – what it is like to work in a start-up. That is the environment we want to sustain, even as we approach our 20^th year. As we combine new teams with our employees who have made us successful, everyone benefits from the new mix of perspective and experience.

So where do we look? Typically not in our own backyard. In the past three years, we have acquired four companies. They are in four different cities. This is more than coincidence; it has become strategy. Yes, we would like it if all employees were in one location. But that isn’t practical.

To find companies in our industry with a compatible culture and complementary technology/products, we have to go where they are. That is usually somewhere else. We could ask them to move. Many companies have tried. From the stories I hear, though, it doesn’t work because 90% of people like to stay where they are, and those that do move can end up regretting it. So we haven’t asked. By default, people stay where they are. (If someone does want to move to another office, we see if it makes sense.) We work hard at distributed management. We use premium quality teleconferencing. We travel between offices.

In short, we make it work.

Happy New Year!

It has always bugged me when someone thinks a person is smart because of where they live (Silicon Valley, Boston, North Carolina), where they went to school (MIT, Harvard, Stanford), or where they work (Apple, Microsoft, Google). It is even worse when people believe that of themselves. I first noticed this after high school. Some kids thought they had it made as soon as they got into a good school. Then after college, I saw the same thing in the jobs that people got after college and graduate school. It was almost as though their lives had been leading up to college or getting their first job, and after that, they felt they could relax. I was surprised at how motivated some people were to get good grades to get into a top school or get a job at a prestigious company, and how little motivation they showed once they got there. I guess there is something different about motivation in the workplace; there is a different measuring system that is much less clear-cut than an academic grade point average. Thriving in the workplace requires a different set of skills and motivations.

The quality of your school and the reputation of your company matter, because at the best schools and companies there are extraordinary opportunities to learn. Grades, diplomas and titles mean something. But what matter most are your curiosity, your ambition, knowing how to think, and always looking for ways to improve.

That is my favorite Ipswitch value, which includes but goes way beyond our ethnic and religious mix. We want to relentlessly seek out different perspectives, have vigorous, healthy debate, and aspire to accomplish more. Having talented employees and partners with many different backgrounds greatly enhances that.

Most companies define values that matter to them. Some post their values prominently and refer to them often. For many years I was against writing ours down, or going out of our way to mention them, because I think values are expressed in what we do, not what we put on the wall or our web site. I want our values to reflect who we are.

As time passed, though, I realized that articulating our values would help us in several ways. First, with recruiting – we want to attract the kind of people who will enjoy and enhance the environment we have already created. Second, with managing – we use our values to explain how we expect all employees to work with each other, customers, partners, vendors and our communities. Third, with customers. We want all customers, current and prospective, to understand the people who are Ipswitch.

So we spent quite a bit of time discussing our values and writing them down. Our values are posted here. From your cumulative interactions with us, I hope you recognize us in these values, for they only matter if we use them as a guide and hold ourselves accountable to them. Please let us know how we are doing.

I have a certain respect for people who start businesses with the intent to flip them in a year or two. It shows a clarity of purpose and requires a well thought-out product and operating strategy with excellent marketing and sales. It’s not me, though. It always seemed too risky. We would be betting too much on getting our product right the first time, we would be subject to market timing (IPO or M&A windows) and forces (bubbles, recessions) beyond our control, and we would need more money to meet a market window. Even in the midst of the dot-com mania I had no desire to bet on it continuing. What happens if our product were a flop, or took a long time to take off, or the bubble burst? We would pretty much have to fold the company and start over.

I wanted to create one company and get it right. I knew that might take some experimenting and iterating, with mistakes to overcome along the way. I also knew I had a lot to learn about management. I had worked in a small Internet start-up prior to Ipswitch, but I had never started a company. It felt like then or never, though, so I decided to go for it. No capital, no business plan. Just something to do with IT, the Internet and software. Some might call that a risky path, but I look at it as being more conservative, with more control over one’s destiny. It would take more time, but I would be in a better position to navigate the shoals on which so many start-ups perish.

As it turned out, it took much longer than I had expected – about six years to get to a point where I felt like we had established ourselves as a real company with a real future. When we got there, though, we were stronger, more resilient, and retained control of our destiny. If I had it to do over again, I would take the same approach.

I am listening to Rework, the new book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals. I agree with much of what they say about startups: focus on the idea and the product, not marketing or building an infrastructure; don’t write a long business plan, or even one at all; avoid expensive consultants – do the PR yourself; minimize hiring and other expenses and try to not take financing early on; don’t chase an image of what you think a successful company should be like; no matter how different it seems, figure out what you really need and focus on just that. A friend of mine started what eventually became a large company. His customers were large enterprises, where image can seem important. In the early years, though, he didn’t even print business cards. He just said he didn’t have any on him whenever he made a sales call. Didn’t hurt in the slightest. What mattered was he had a compelling message about his service and team and then followed through and provided value at a reasonable price.

I am still in the early part of the book, but one thing that bothers me is the bias towards small, private, bootstrapped companies. Because 37 Signals’ approach is similar to ours in many ways, I found much to identify with. But I don’t think there is anything inherently superior about such companies. I congratulate Jason and David for figuring out what they wanted and finding a narrow path to get there. For others, a very different kind of company will be appropriate. My advice for starting a company is first figure out your life goals and think about how your company can support them. Then decide what business you want to be in. Then find a path to get there. If you want to build a new car company, or a new type of computer hardware, or start a biotech to cure a disease, or come up with a better CRM package, the models will be very, very different than for many software companies. Virtual or not, capital or not and many other questions can only be answered once you understand your goals, your market and your product.

I’ll write more later about how this relates to starting Ipswitch.