Should you hire a veteran or wean & train when building a growth-stage company?

[originally written for Mass High Tech]

In our role as executive search consultants for growth-stage companies, one of the questions that seems to continually vex the CEO is how best to build out their team.   This question often narrows to a discussion around whether it would be better to hire a senior level person first in each of the key functional roles in the organization chart, or rather to hire a more junior level person and hire at a higher level once the company has built up some “traction.” For our purposes, traction can be defined as any or all of a number of indicators, including revenue, funding, or product development milestones.

Short answer, “It depends…”

When asked this question, the CEOs and venture capitalists we talked to universally responded, “It depends….” So then the question became, “On what?”  The answers came back and included the following key variables to balance when trying to decide on whether to hire high or low when you first fill a key position in your early-stage venture—

• • Funding—Money is certainly a gaiting factor for most early-stage companies, and often the largest line item on the P&L is salaries & wages.  Putting in a leadership team too early all at cash compensation that runs north of $150,000 can certainly create a net-cash-burn that would rival the bubble days.   However, “talented people hire talented people,” says Lou Volpe, Managing General Partner of Kodiak Venture Partners.   And talent doesn’t necessarily mean ‘experienced.’ Talent alone is usually less expensive.”
• • Composition of the Incumbent Team— You need to have a balanced team.  Companies are often referred to as “engineering culture,” or sales, or finance-driven.  This speaks to an inherent imbalance in the leadership team.  Kodiak’s Volpe emphasized that, “you need to think of the entire picture, the entire team.  You need to have it balanced.  If you have too much strength in one function, you’ll be out-of balance and the company will suffer accordingly.”
• • Stage of Company— If too early-stage a company, it may be difficult to attract the world-class talent you need.   This conflicts to some extent with the current thinking today popularized by Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great.  In one of the areas Collins explored with the “great” companies he studied, he and his team learned that these companies focused on “getting the right people on the bus,” then deciding where they were going to drive it.  David Power, a Partner at Fidelity Ventures, qualified Collins’ observations, saying, “If you’re a charismatic enough leader, you might be able to get everyone on the bus BEFORE you start to drive, but every company doesn’t have that privilege, especially when young, and often capital-constrained/higher-risk.  You need to be able to give talented executives that you are seeking to attract some general direction, to be able to explain to a ‘hire-high’ A-player why the company and role should have great appeal to the candidate.”
• • Which Function It Is — There are certain functions in an early-stage company where hiring the best is critical early on.  One such critical area is hiring into the leadership roles responsible for the product development in the company—engineering in the case of technology product, or science in the case of biotechnology/life sciences.  CEO Tuan Ha-Ngoc  said that it was critical for Genpath’s success to get the best Chief Science Officer they could find, and they did.   One of the VC’s commented however that the finance function is a perfect example of where hiring low is often the right thing to do—the company only needs a part time finance person at its earliest stages, then a controller later on, and then if the company is looking to go public, a world class CFO.
• • Speed of Anticipated Growth— If the company is anticipated to grow slowly, it is possible that a person can grow in parallel with the company.  However, given the often-cannibalistic nature of technology and sciences companies, “slow” is often not an option due to fears of product obsolescence, time limits on patents, or pure competitive pressures.    Globespan’s David Fachetti put it clearly, saying, “Hire higher for fast growth companies.  The opportunity will grow into the people, rather than the people grow into the opportunity.  Talented and experienced executives will bring up the level of the opportunity to meet their needs, and in so doing will accelerate the company’s growth.”
• • Price point of Product /Service— Enterprise software or very expensive hardware sold into the C-levels within the Global 2000 may put pressure on the upside of the high/low spectrum.  Kodiak’s Lou Volpe feels that if price-points are high, it is likely the company will need more senior/experienced talent to get it to market.

Universal Truths

All those interviewed agreed on a number of best practices.  The one that stood out most is the need to hire what was referred to as “quality.” There are two primary axes on candidate qualifications briefly mentioned earlier—the first is quality or “talent,” and the second is experience.  If you hire someone with both, this defines the “hire high” approach.  If you hire someone with only quality, but less experience, it points to the “hire low” approach.

Hire quality

Those we spoke with also included several other must-have characteristics further define “quality.”  Fidelity Ventures’ David Power ticked off the first four:

• • Motivation
• • Intelligence
• • Integrity
• • Ability to produce results

Joel Rosen, veteran CEO and former venture capitalist  at Charles River Ventures added two more:

• • Passion about the business
• • Cultural fit with the rest of the team

One other CEO punctuated the list:

• • Work ethic

Though no doubt there are many more, these rose to the top of the list when trying to describe what “quality” in a hire looks like.

Hire experience

The other half of our working definition of “hiring high” we’ve termed earlier as “experience.”  David Fachetti at Globespan Capital articulated four key areas he probes to determine whether candidates he interviews have what he defines as experience:

1. 1. Lifecycle experience: prior experience at a similar stage of company development
2. 2. Domain experience:  prior experience in the same industry sector as the current company
3. 3. Functional experience: prior experience playing a similar functional role (marketing, sales, technology, finance, etc.)
4. 4. Relationships experience:  has the individual worked with others on the team before?

Don’t skimp when it comes to Leadership experience

One more key experience criterion, especially when “hiring high,” is leadership experience.  One CEO emphasized that, “experience and skills aren’t a surrogate for leadership.  If you’re going to be growing a team, you’ll fail without it.”

Determine where you need your best gene pool

Another common refrain was that–in an early stage company–there are at least three key roles where you want to hire high, rather than low.  Dave Fachetti, Principal at Globespan Capital Partners, summed it up, saying, “For a company to have a solid foundation for growth, bench strength needs to exist at the highest functional levels in technology (VP Engineering/CTO), sales, and the senior P&L role of CEO.  Scott Griffith, Zipcar CEO emphasized that each company can differ, so “get the strategy right, and THEN hire high into the key stress points of that strategy.”

One qualifier made by Genpath CEO Tuan Ha-Ngoc was the impact of the differences between technology companies and life sciences companies.  In pure technology companies, there is an additional emphasis on the importance of hiring a high level of experience into the position where the technology meets the customer, someone who has the pulse and understanding of the market into which the technology will be selling.    In life sciences, the pain of disease is more often self-evident, where technology can sometimes mistakenly be developed for technology’s sake, a “build it and they will come” approach.

Make sure executives can “zoom out and zoom in”

The individual has to be able to both lead a function and do the function.  In other words, if the decision is made to hire a VP Sales, that VP Sales has to be able to “carry the bag” and actually do the selling, as well as hire, train, motivate, and manage a sales force when the time comes.    Similarly, an early-stage VP Engineering should be able to code as well as architect early on, until more hands can be hired.  Early on at Yahoo!, the company determined that one of the key hiring criteria for any employee was that they could “zoom in and zoom out.”   Every new hire had to be able to think strategically at the 50,000 foot level, but also be able to go back to ground-zero and execute the strategy.   Zipcar’s Griffith—a licensed airplane pilot—added, “You have to be a pilot, willing to get under the plane and check all the equipment yourself, take off, navigate, AND safely land in order to get successfully from point of origin to destination.”

Biases & Cautions

Not surprisingly there were biases that had formed from the individual operating experiences of each CEO or VC with whom we talked.   And interestingly, despite these biases, many gave examples of a hiring circumstance that ran counter to their bias that worked out particularly well, or a hire that fit their bias that failed.   Following are some of the biases and cautions that stood out.

If you’re the CEO, don’t hire low in an area just because it’s your functional strength

There was a great deal of alignment on this issue, and it’s a chronic mistake the venture capitalists we talked to saw in their portfolio companies.   David Power at Fidelity Ventures elaborated saying that “If a CEO hires a weaker player into a function where that CEO has expertise, say the marketing function, the CEO ends up still managing marketing instead of doing what the CEO should be doing—running the company.  You want to hire at equal levels across the functional spectrum.”  Joel Rosen at Charles River Ventures added, “younger companies don’t have a lot of training infrastructure.  The company is running too fast to have the leeway to train much.  Although this isn’t a law of nature, the biggest gaiting factor to growth is often bandwidth, particularly that of the CEO.”

Don’t hire talent too late

Genpath CEO Tuan Ha-Ngoc put it simply and elegantly—“It is rare that the company fails because you hired high-caliber talent too early.  It’s usually that the company hired too late.”

If you hire high, think about assigning multiple roles

One of the ways you can often get top talent in early-stage companies is to offer multiple roles that will allow the higher-level executive an opportunity to stretch their wings.  Lou Volpe at Kodiak added, “If hiring a senior engineering executive early-on, think about giving them QA, support, and/or manufacturing, even product management.”

The probability of a successful high/low hire is predicated on the clarity of the task

Put another way, the murkier the goals, strategies, and tactics of a particular functional area, the more you will bias your hiring toward the high side of the spectrum of experience.  Conversely, if the responsibilities of the position are well defined and clear, a lower-hire might be just the right fit.  As EquipNet CEO Roger Gallo put it, “Is the hire going to be focused on fulfilling known initiatives,

or rather creating and forging entirely new ones?”

Think about making a “high-low sandwich”

To this point, no mention has been made of the obvious question when talking about whether to hire high or hire low—what about “hiring in the middle”?  Kodiak’s Lou Volpe admits a bias to a combination approach of hiring a low with a high—“Hire high, and then do a step function, and hire low.  In sales for example, hire the VP, and then hire one or two lower-level individual contributors, one or more of which can be step-up candidates into the middle role of manager or director further down the company development cycle.”

What about hiring high/low when it comes to hiring the CEO?

This question is complex enough to support itself as a single topic of discussion with the venture capitalists and CEOs we consulted.  However, Fidelity Ventures’ David Power listed three circumstances where hiring a step-up/“low” candidate into the CEO position can work—

1. 1. When a particular functional area is important to the stage of company growth (hiring a VP Sales or VP Marketing into the CEO position when the company is just entering its revenue stage)
2. 2. When continual technological innovation/engineering is inherent to an industry sector (hiring a VP Engineering or CTO into the CEO position because of the pressures for recurring and sustainable technology innovation)
3. 3. When you can get someone who is traditionally “out of reach” (hiring a superstar VP level candidate into the CEO position because a step-up is the only way you can attract that particular talent)

With all of the above thoughts on best practices regarding hiring for early-stage companies, an image formed to sum up some of the wisdom of the CEOs and VCs we consulted.   Perhaps it’s not too different from how many parents buy clothes for their fast growing child—you pick the color and the style, and then have them walk up the rack trying on increasingly larger sizes until the piece of clothing actually falls right off.  You then step it back one size, and buy that one.   It’s just small enough that it can be worn now, but it leaves plenty of room for future growth.

The Leading Provider of Wealth Marketing Solutions

Based in New York City, our client provides strategic and interactive marketing solutions for wealth management firms and luxury brands. The company offers strategy planning and research services; online marketing and advertising programs; and e-marketing tools, which comprise a suite of software offering an e-marketing platform that allows communication with clients and prospects. It also provides marketing services, including print and online content publishing, brand and identity creative, creative strategy and planning, logo and mark creation, graphic design and layout, editorial design, copywriting, multimedia design, video and audio production, prepress and print, and collateral development services. In addition, the company offers interactive solutions, such as Web design, Web building and analytics, Internet and intranet/micro site development, information architecture, SEM/SEO, systematic design, content management, E-commerce, and Internet application development services,  and multichannel integrated marketing, rich and emerging media, media strategy, media planning and buying, and strategy and creative development services.

The company has become the pre-eminent provider of interactive agency expertise, accompanied by specific CRM oriented software tools to help their marquis clients, including Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab and Barclays.

The Position

The SVP Engineering’s role is to oversee day to day activities of the software product development and enterprise architecture integration teams for the company’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. The SVP will directly supervise a team of software developers, quality assurance, and business analysts; identify risk and opportunity areas; and coordinate all software development activities.

The head of engineering will also work closely with Product Strategy on the business side and manage the Lead Technical Architect to envision and define features in the product roadmap and be accountable for the features development, deployment and support.  In addition to the technical leadership of the team, this role has full management responsibility and oversight for a cross-functional group of engineering personnel.

Reporting directly to the SVP of the software group, the SVP Engineering shall:

• • Manage software architecture, design, development, procurement, and integration. Also manage tier-2 and higher support once software has been placed into operations.
• • Achieve cost, schedule, technical and quality performance for delivered software. Compile, maintain, schedule, resource, execute prioritized lists of development projects, including planning and managing the budget and scheduling personnel and vendor contracts to meet project needs. Collect metrics on development performance and report on them.
• • Collaborate with other functional managers (customer facing business units, systems engineering, QA, and operations) to ensure architectural integrity, effective integration and test, and ongoing system stability.
• • Direct technical subcontractor management including contract negotiation, technical support, budgetary management and program management of various contracts and associated budgets.   Coordinate vendor contracts, deliveries and schedule with affected company parties.  Contract with vendors for services to support engineering while addressing Intellectual Property, Non-Disclosures and Statements of Work.
• • Manage short- and long-term staff planning, recruitment, performance management, work assignments, training, mentoring, career development, and recognition or disciplinary action.
• • Be responsible for business planning and proposals, operating budgets and financial terms / conditions of contracts for both internal and external customers.

The successful candidate must also have the ability and experience to lead a multi-disciplined organization in a multi-location environment.

Qualifications

• • Minimum of 10 years overall software development experience, with no less than 5 years in a SaaS environment as well as at least 5 years of management experience.
• • 2-3 years of senior-level or leadership experience in a software environment with 10 or more direct reports.
• • Experience working with product managers and other business stakeholders to set timeliness, budget resources, and manage expectations and quality of the development process
• • Advanced understanding of SaaS web application programming architectures, including standards for security, scalability and configurability
• • Expertise and experience in implementing and overseeing measures for data security, business continuity, disaster recovery
• • Deep understanding of load balancing and performance optimization  principals for high volume/transaction web applications
• • Strong skills in Java software development.
• • Experience with refactoring and eliminating legacy dependencies
• • Demonstrated substantial leadership in both technical and management areas
• • Experience leading development efforts using a variety of different SDLC approaches (waterfall, agile, etc.)
• • Knowledge of multi-threaded programming
• • Outstanding collaboration skills, excellent communication skills, an ability to look at the big picture

Essential Job Functions/Responsibilities

• • Lead software and front-end engineers in the specification, design and development and support of all our applications, including websites/products, our core services and our internal and external tools
• • Provide hands-on technical management leadership and support to software development team of 12 – 15 engineers
• • Identify skill and performance gaps in current organization and provide improvement plans
• • Improve existing processes and establish new processes for efficient development and high quality output
• • Evaluate and enhance overall development environment, release practices and Quality Assurance methodology
• • Instate and maintain development standards, code reviews, unit testing and integration testing frameworks
• • Maintain overall ownership / accountability for data security, business continuity, disaster recovery
• • Work in tandem with Technical architect and development team to identify and implement new measures for system performance optimization under high load
• • Lead, recruit, develop and supervise the development team members
• • Evaluate and take accountability for decisions on key technologies adopted
• • Ensure proper development of technical specifications and documentation.
• • Estimate resource usage and timeliness for development team
• • Review team members’ detailed design of components/modules/code
• • Provide a good balance of experience and skills in several front-end and/or back-end technologies
• • Strong relational database skills, preferably MY SQL Serve
• • Knowledge of latest web technologies with understanding of AJAX and RIA
• • Ability to translate technology choices into business implications

The diagram below illustrates the intersection of competencies critical in the SVP Engineering position:

Compensation

Compensation is competitive with the position’s requirements.  In a performance-based environment, this will include base salary, incentive bonus structure based on both individual, department, and corporate qualitative and quantitative MBOs, and a potential stakeholder position in the company.

One of the questions we as executive recruiters often get asked  is the trade-off between experience and aptitude.   Both sides of the equation are prone to asking it, clients and executive candidates alike.  Sometimes this teeter-totter is referred to as “domain expert versus best athlete.”

What do they mean when they ask?  There’s actually a lot of nuance in the question-when are skills and experience most important to success in the role versus pure talent and aptitude?

• •    Just because a CEO is moving from one industry to another, does s/he lose his ability to successfully lead?
• •    If a VP Sales has been successful at one stage of company growth, can s/he take that same sales toolbox and be successful in another stage company, say either emerging-stage or mature-stage?
• •    Can a VP Engineering be equally effective managing in large companies and small?
• •    Do companies look for the same types of leadership in good economic cycles as well as bad?
• •    How does an executive’s move out of their wheelhouse of skills and experience impact their compensation and/or level in a new industry and company?

These questions are only a few of the factors that impact the answer.    The following discussion is aimed at trying to lend some clarity and context to question.

Let’s take a look at the hour-glass graph below to lay down some of these factors against our “expert or athlete” question:

1)     Level of management: The first factor is where an employee sits in the organizational chart.   In general, skills and experience are most critical at the “waist” of the hour-glass graph-mid-to-upper level management, starting at manager, through director- and VP-level.  At the top and bottom of the hour-glass, aptitude often ends up as the greater emphasis in “hireability.”  This may be fairly intuitive for many.

a.     Entry-level: When you first get out of school, employers often hire for a combination of attitude and intelligence and look for those who exhibit room to grow or “headroom.”   In fact, at entry-level, skills and experience for those roles are often a liability.  Employers may feel someone is overqualified, or a “flight risk” if that employee finds another better-paying and/or higher level position at another company.

b.     CEO-level: When you achieve P&L/CEO status, employers often will place more emphasis on the track record a CEO has in leading a company versus a tenured career history in a specific industry area.  Can a CEO move from rust-belt manufacturer to biotech?  Likely not.  However, there isn’t the same granularity of fit applied at the CEO-level as at the middle-management layer.  If a CEO has been broadly successful in in a number of software companies, it often becomes less important what type of software, or what industry vertical that software was developed for.  Certainly some screening is applied to industry, with some of the below more general industry characteristics takingi precedence-

i.      Experience in selling to similar customer base, B2B vs. B2C or government

ii.      Experience raising equity capital from venture capital or private equity

iii.      Experience creating exits for investors that have generated good returns for those investors

iv.      Experience taking a company from one industry into other industries, popularly referred to as “crossing the chasm”

c.     Mid-to-upper management:   Mid and upper management are where skills and experience over mere aptitude are often most sought after by employers.  Those who are hiring at this level will often even emphasize industry skills and experience above managerial experience, giving the edge to a candidate with industry-relevant background and a lesser degree of leadership experience, assuming that management is a learned skill and can be taught or picked up on the job.  Is this right?  That’s not the focus of our discussion here.  Rather, our goal here is to describe corporate hiring  norms from our observations.

[click more button below for rest of post]

More…

Our client is tearing down the walls of the pixel landscape.  The Company has developed proprietary breakthrough software that functions as a pixels operating system, moving video display from one source projecting one visual, to infinite sources projecting virtually unlimited visuals.  And all of this is at a pixel-density that can go beyond high-definition quality, at commodity projection device cost, with no manual calibration or image “stitching” required.  The Company’’s technology is used in various applications ranging from simulation and training to museum displays and digital signage.  The company serves corporate, government, and academic organizations.

Market Opportunity

Industry Outlook (software-enabled displays):

• •    Visual simulation and Large Venue Display – $1.4B and $22.2B
• •    Growing rapidly – 14.1% and 23.3% CAGR
• •    Incumbent companies expensive, inflexible, and manually aligned – the bottleneck to widespread use of advanced display
• •    Commercial public venue display increased from $16.5B to $22.2B from 2005-2007
• •    iSuppli (major research firm) predicts $51B by 2011
• •    Multiple options for use: API for large, seamless displays and computing clusters with over 6xHD resolutions displays; or seamless displays up to 6xHD with no application integration.

A single Company server can calibrate multiple displays and is not limited by projection hardware type or resolution.

The Position

The CEO’s core responsibilities will include:

Marketing direction:

Marketing strategy & product marketing– Establishing a short and long-term business direction the drives the company to become an industry leader and maximize the penetration of the markets served.

Business development, including channel sales, OEM & relationships, and all distribution agreements

Operations– Product delivery, deployment, fulfillment and post-sales customer relationship management.

Manufacturing & Operations:

Oversight of manufacturing and production teams responsible for commercializing the technology, establishing build/buy/outsource decisions, etcetera. Working with the rest of the team, oversight of quality assurance, working with the CTO to ensure that product development meets various international multi-regional market-driven specifications and is “rolled out” smoothly and on schedule.

Staff- team building, development, mentorship:  The CEO is responsible for human capital planning and hiring.  As important, the position will actively be responsible for developing new and existing staff to help prepare them for company growth and increased leadership responsibilities at all levels.  Finally, the new CEO will serve as leader and mentor to the founding team and as a complement to their existing skills.

Investors/shareholders & board - milestone management, follow-on fundraising, liquidity strategy: The new CEO is primary liaison to the board and will aggressively manage milestone deliverables, be a key contributor at board meetings and to board/investor communications.  The CEO will be responsible for developing and managing against an annual operating plan and in addition to possible follow-on fundraising, will be accountable for optimizing the harvest for all shareholders.

Ideal Candidate Profile

The diagram below illustrates the intersection of competencies critical in the new CEO:

Compensation

Compensation is competitive with the position’s requirements.  In a performance-based environment, this will include base salary, milestone/incentive bonus structure, and a stakeholder position in the company.

Location:         Mountain View, CA. USA.
Website:          www.google.com

Head of Product Management

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
In September of 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up their first workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Palo Alto, and over the last 10 years Google grew to being one of the world’s best known companies. Susan was employee number 18, and currently is responsible for managing Google’s monetization and measurement platform products including AdWords, AdSense and Google Analytics.

One of the most visible members of the senior management team is Marissa Mayer. Hired as employee number 20 and the first female engineer after receiving her Masters in Computer Science, Marissa is responsible for the consumer-facing (UI) side of Google, and has been called the Chief Experience Officer.
The opportunities for Directors of Product Management will report directly into Marissa Mayer or Susan Wojcicki , and will be responsible for working across Google in the innovation, creation, management, release, and lifecycle of new products that extend the improve the quality and measurability of search and advertisement monetization. They will establish short and long term product goals and strategies to build and manage a product roadmap to support Google’s goals and strategies. They will initiate and prioritize projects within engineering; track product development; develop product launch plan, and also engage closely with the engineering team to help determine the best technical implementation methods and reasonable execution schedules.

Product Management at Google is an engineering and deeply technically focused organization that is full of visionaries and entrepreneurs. They apply their core technical abilities to understand the capabilities and possibilities of computers, and then leverage insight and imagination to create new products that will allow users to gain better, faster, and more accurate access to information. They are fascinated with new products, and obsessed with making the best possible product for the largest possible audience serving the most important needs. They represent the visionary, the communicator, the leader, and the technologist all-in-one. Essentially, the Product Management team ensures that Google has the best worldwide product offerings by analyzing, positioning, packaging, and promoting their solutions
across a variety of countries and markets where Google does business.

Areas of core expertise for this PM role: More…

Untitled Document

Position: General Manager, Simbionix eLearning

Reports to: CEO, Simbionix USA

Location: Denver, CO

Website: www.simbionix.com

“Virtual reality simulation in surgical training has become more widely used and intensely investigated in an effort to develop safer, more efficient, measurable training processes…If executed properly, virtual reality offers inherent advantages over other training systems in creating a realistic surgical environment and facilitating measurement of surgeon performance.” – E. Seymour and J.S. Rotnes, Surgical Endoscopy (2007)

“If we’re going to make a mistake, let’s make it on the simulators first.” - Dr. Karl Illig, Chief of Vascular Surgery at Strong Medical Center, Rochester, NY, on why physicians are eager to start using the new Simbionix PROcedure Studio simulator

“If the learning actually matters, use simulations. If it doesn’t, don’t worry about it.” - Clark Aldrich, founder of SimuLearn, industry visionary, and author of numerous articles and books on simulations and e-learning

SIMBIONIX IN THE NEWS

http://www.simbionix.com/News.html

http://www.simbionix.com/PROcedure.html

THE COMPANY

Surgical simulators have been developed in the past few years to enhance the training of physicians, reduce the number of animals and cadavers, and provide flexible training scenarios and preoperative planning. Despite their potential benefits, and the fact that they have precedence in flight simulators, there are very few simulators in current use globally. Simbionix as a leadership company in this growing industry is changing the medical training landscape.

As a world leader in the field of medical education and simulation technology, Simbionix offers the most comprehensive medical training experience available, using the latest software and hardware technology. The company’s state-of-the-art technology provides surgeons, interventionists, nurses, and technicians with a robust platform to learn and master critical skills to ensure procedural efficiency and promote quality patient outcomes. The systems offer a range of basic and highly advanced procedures, and incorporate detailed and complete metrics for skill assessment.

The user is free to practice skills and perform procedures until the required proficiency is attained. In addition, difficult and uncommon procedures may be practiced at any time. This maximizes consistency to optimize learning, providing a clear advantage over relying solely on previous ly available patient training methods. More…

Position: Vice President of Marketing and Enrollment

Management

Reports to: President

Location: Manchester, NH

“Southern New Hampshire University trains intellectually and culturally enriched individuals to be successful in their careers and contribute to their communities.
SNHU’s educational philosophy challenges students’ intellectual potential and prepares them for professional lives in an ever-changing and increasingly interconnected world. It provides a supportive and close-knit learning community, delivering engaging instruction in a flexible variety of formats. Students develop the knowledge to understand a complex world, the skills to act effectively within that world and the wisdom to make good choices. They do so within a community of teachers, staff and peers that is encouraged to add its scholarly, creative and pedagogical contributions to the larger social good.”

THE COLLEGE

Founded in 1932 as the New Hampshire School of Accounting and Secretarial Science, Southern New Hampshire University was granted its degree-granting charter in 1963 and conferred its first bachelor’s degrees three years later. The college became a nonprofit institution under a board of trustees in September 1968; in 1969 its name was shortened to New Hampshire College.
Throughout the next three decades the college continued to grow through the addition of its Schools of Business, Community Economic Development, Education, Liberal Arts, and Professional and Continuing Education. During the ‘90s the college opened off-campus centers to better serve adult learners. Programs now are offered in Laconia, Manchester, Nashua, Portsmouth and Salem, N.H., and in Brunswick, Maine, as well as internationally through such schools as SIT in Malaysia.
A recent article in the Boston Globe describes SNHU’s efforts to lower the cost of high-quality education by offering a “low-frills”’ alternative to the campus-based experience.
SNHU Students Forgo Frills to Save Thousands
Today SNHU boasts a full- and part-time student enrollment of more than 6000 and a full-time faculty of 130; 40 degree-granting programs; a 300-acre campus on the Merrimack River; one of the largest and most dynamic online offerings in New England; and programs as diverse as culinary arts, public economic development, and language education. Students come from more than 23 states and 35 countries, with 80 percent of undergraduates living on campus. More…

Vice President of Sales

The Company

World Leader in Eye-Tracking and Eye-Control

Our client is the founding pioneer in the field of assistive technology.  Being able to speak is something that most people take for granted. However, some are born with Cerebral Palsy, have ALS/MND or may have acquired a disability through an injury or a stroke — all of which can impair their ability to speak. Our client has released a range of new alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) solutions that help individuals with speech impairments communicate. The company develops both communication hardware and software solutions for people with physical, cognitive, and speech disabilities. The company was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Dedham, Massachusetts. Our client  has just launched nine new AAC products that give individuals with communication disabilities a voice and a way to live more fulfilled, integrated and independent lives.

The Position

Reporting to the President outside of Boston, Massachusetts, the Vice President of Sales will be responsible for the planning and execution of sales activities for the U.S. The VP will organize and lead a team of sales professionals divided into three regions, East, Central, and West.  Each of these regions is led by a Regional Sales Manager, focused on direct sales of the company’s products and services to end-user customers located primarily in the USA and Canada.  The current sales and marketing organization is comprised of a sales team of 20 spread across these regions.

Key deliverables include responsibility to create growth strategies and successful business solutions for branding and positioning of the product line as well as organize, develop, and grow the sales organization. Critical to success will be the ability to work closely with Technology business managers and R&D resources around the globe. More…

Below is the final tally on top metrics for measuring executive success in the C-level and VP level team CEOs bring on board to help them executive on their businesses.  Thanks to the CEO input of more than 60 poll responses to this latest venture-backed company CEO survey.

The question we framed was phrased as follows:

“In evaluating the success of an executive hire after 12 months, what would be the top 3 criteria that you would use?”

The first choice from the poll results is somewhat self-evident– that the executive has exceeded performance expectations (goals, milestones, objectives, etc.) for the specific role from the CEO’s perspective.

However, the second most popular metric was “established internal and external reputation as functional expert.”   Essentially, this means that the executive has built his or her own political/social capital with internal peers and external influencers, customers, vendors, or other external relationships key to the success of the company.

The third most important metric was “culture fit.”   This was selected over the other 4 remaining metrics offered by a more than 2 -to-1 margin.

The question that pops up is how a CEO might best measure the  #2 and #3 metrics.  For both of these metrics perhaps a 360-degree review at the end of 12 months would be beneficial.  There are tools offered by the likes of the Hay Group and others that do an online version of this contextual employee review that can be quite useful to determine an objective read (see http://www.haygroup.com/tl/Questionnaires_Workbooks/Emotional_Competency_Inventory.aspx ).

Perhaps it would also be interesting if an executive search firm who brought a candidate to an organization also made this part of their fee structure.  And facilitated the process/offered the tools to make it happen.  Food for thought.  The goal of the executive recruiter would be to serve as that often mythical “trusted adviser” of executive talent, facilitating as much objectivity around executive team-building and talent assessment as possible.

Worthy of note is the fact that “integrity” ranked near the bottom of the list of success criteria.  No doubt CEOs assume perhaps that this is a given in any candidate.

We get hired to build early-stage executive teams by our clients every day. So we’ve seen our fair share of “team-building,” and much of what follows is likely intuitive to many.  It is a combination of our experience and the collective wisdom of more than two dozen early-stage venture capitalists in the North East who we asked the question, “What does a ‘bankable executive team’ mean to you?”

Consider these criteria common denominators, or universal norms for investability. They are by no means exhaustive or complete, as each investor has his or her own individual criteria he or she leverages in selecting portfolio companies.

First, some qualifiers.

¨      Different stages require bankable teams with different profiles: angel versus early stage versus later stage mezzanine/pre-IPO.

¨      Different value kernels drive greater emphasis on one part of the executive team or another.  For a deep science company in biotech, the chief scientist is going to carry greater scrutiny by investors.  This also holds true for a software or hardware company where the technology leader will carry a greater weight.

¨      Investors tend to look at where the risks lie-technology risk or market risk for example.  Something referred to as “execution risk” is all about the team being able to execute on the plan.

¨      Almost all VCs want to see a strong core team consisting of a serially successful CEO, a chief technologist with domain expertise in the area of the company’s product focus, and a veteran sales leader with a relevant rolodex and experience building a team that can score early customer wins.

¨      A strong board of directors, advisors, or scientific advisory board can help immeasurably, although won’t make up for significant lack of experience among the rest of the team.

However, the above is like describing human anatomy as two arms and legs, a head and a torso.  To drill down to more specific details, the grid below outlines the bankable team by function, team, and other characteristics.

The overwhelming preference by investors regarding “bankability” is an “experienced team.”  The majority of VCs we talked to cited their number one concern as experience; those deals that get a ‘hard look’ have this fact in common.  When asked what percentage of all business plans they receive have requisite experience on the team however, the number is well under half.   And we all know that deals get done with first-time teams, even in this difficult financing environment.

Some of the other characteristics-when combined in the right amount and order-that are considered important criteria when an investor looks at financing a start-up team are listed below.

One VC actually tried to capture the essence of a bankable team with a mnemonic-FIRVOC: More…