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Articles with HMA Quotes 10 SECRETS TO SUCCESS Take It To Another Level
Investor Business Daily
Leaders and Success
10 June 2005
To grow your firm and bolster its staying power, take some tips from proven leaders.
** Decide -- then adjust. Entrepreneurs Victor and Janie Tsao grew Linksys, a leading maker of home networking gear, by spotting trends and being quick to act. Along the way, they trained 350-plus workers to do the same. As a result, products have jumped from the drawing board to production in Asia in as little as three weeks.
In 2003, Cisco bought the firm for $500 million. Victor Tsao is the unit's general manager, and smart decision-making remains one of his secrets.
"Decision-making isn't rocket science. Yet large firms often drag the process out," he said.
"We've all been in strategy sessions where the leader says, "OK, this has been interesting. Let's meet next week.' And nothing gets done," Tsao said. "Why not decide right now? I always say to my staff, "If we can solve a problem or make a decision, let's do it today. If we need to adjust later on, we'll adjust.' .
** Be a go-to source. In 1981, Chet Pipkin started a business on his parents' kitchen table. He was 21. Annual revenue is now $500 million-plus. Combined growth over the last five years? More than 150%.
Pipkin's privately held firm, Belkin Corp., makes everything from computer cables to surge protectors, LAN products and mobile-device accessories. He owns 80% of the cable market and a growing share of everything else in his niche.
His constant goal: "delivering extraordinary value both to end consumers and to the channels," Pipkin said.
Pipkin has made Belkin the go-to source for chains such as Staples. "We monitor customer sell-through and manage the space we sell in. They only need to figure out who they want to serve from a customer standpoint, and we'll take care of everything else," from product selection and design to training their staff, he said.
** Learn and profit from rivals' mistakes. Early on, applications-testing firm Mercury Interactive benefited from competitors, which overpromised and failed to deliver. Co-founder Amnon Landan trumped them by aiming for a superior product. He then made a quantum leap through service.
In applications testing, "customer problems take precedence over other activities. Engineers work overnight or over the weekend if need be," he said.
That means solving the problem whether it's Mercury's fault or not. "Since our software works in conjunction with other programs, many times an issue turns out to be not our problem," Landan said. "We do the postmortems and fix it anyway. And we get tremendous amounts of goodwill..
** To protect margins in a downturn, watch expenses when times are good. That's the approach of Hal Reiter, head of executive search firm Herbert Mines Associates.
During the 1990s, several top search firms had bloated budgets, large staffs and offices worldwide. "When the crash came, they got killed. We still had one office," he said. "We'd grown while keeping our overhead relatively low.
Mines remains a retail search-firm leader. Reiter's margins have topped 20% for more than five years.
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