What I Learned This Year: Ted Page

Ted Page, Principal and Creative Director at Captains of Industry

The three most important things to know about growing a business: Culture, culture, and of course, culture.

A lot of things that I continue to learn about running an agency are right out of business 101 – the kind of things any decent MBA program would teach me, but here at Captains of Industry I’m learning on the fly in the real world, without a professor to guide or grade me. The beauty of learning this way is that I (and my business partner, Fred Surr) can take the most basic business principals and build upon them in our own way, non-theoretically, and begin to see the results relatively quickly.

One of the first things any business guru will tell you is to “get the right people in the right seats.” Sounds simple, right? Hire great people who are really good at what they do. In 2010, we took this premise and, as we say around here, we Captainized it. Yes, we hired great people – people who are talented, smart and entrepreneurial. Total team players. The extra ingredient was love. Any time we interviewed anyone, we asked ourselves, do we LOVE this person? We looked for that feeling of, “Oh my God, I can’t let this person out of the building, because they might take a job somewhere else!” We knew we could hang out with this person all day. We could enjoy a beer or two with them at the airport when our flights were cancelled. We would happily spend hours in the conference room brainstorming, or shooting the breeze. Once we had that feeling about a job candidate, then we had other employees interview them. If the other employees, unprompted, used the word “love” in their description of the candidate, then we’d make the hire.

Over time, we’ve gathered a whole group of people who really love working together. They love coming to work every day. They love working with our clients, and the clients love them right back, and hire us to do more and more work. Our attrition rate is near zero, and we’re getting better resumes sent to us for consideration. Our culture contributed a lot to the growth of the company in 2010. But the best thing about this culture is that it makes for a fun, creative, productive and profitable company that’s great at any size.