On a recent cross-country flight, I noticed several remarkable things with interesting parallels. First, I was not overly bummed-out about the long flight from SFO to JFK, which in and of itself is remarkable. This is not one of my favorite flights, mainly because it’s a long flight in a small aircraft. My second observation was that the flight crew (including the very social cockpit crew) was happy, productive and genuinely seemed to be enjoying their jobs. Finally, I noticed that the passengers on the flight seemed orderly, professional and happy. Something is different here.

I think that we should take a long, hard look at what Sir Richard Branson, the famous English entrepreneur and inventor of the Virgin label, is doing to transform the US Airline industry with his Virgin America. In my last post, I spoke of change and being disruptive within your market.

How is Mr. Branson instigating change?

• Convenience
  
• Freedom
  
• Service
  

Convenience and Freedom. Virgin America Airlines has new aircraft with “Red In-Flight Entertainment” systems. Don’t let the words like “Red” or “In-Flight Entertainment" fool you. The entertainment system is really your personal portal. These seat back consoles unleash complete freedom for you, the flying public. You can literally order something to eat or drink whenever you’d like. Just swipe your credit card and within minutes, a flight attendant will have your order brought to your seat. You can also order as often as you’d like (as long as you’re willing to keep swiping your card). Additionally, you can listen to satellite radio, watch television, watch movies, play video games, instant chat with another passenger on the flight, track your flight progress with Google Maps and so much more. Mr. Branson has put you in charge of the flight. I just put on my headphones and start working. Everything that I need is right in front of me—I don’t feel dependent on anyone during the flight. What a refreshing change from the other major US carriers.

Service. Virgin America’s team is amazing. On my way back from New York, I asked a group of three flight attendants on the jet this question: “How does Virgin America instill such happiness and sense of ownership to all of its employees?” If you really think about it, these folks must have all worked for a previous airline, but how can you change their old attitudes and ways of thinking to the new, brash, customer-oriented culture that Mr. Branson envisions? They gave me some excellent insight. I also noticed similar personality traits amongst these three—they are competitive, enthusiastic and like being part of a team. They had to take a very long personality test as part of the application process. After they pass the test, they go through a series of interviews whereby the desired culture of the new company is discussed. There’s an air of camaraderie amongst the crew, even the pilots—they don’t look down upon the flight staff, they call them team members. They’re enthusiastic about this new company and really want to change the air travel experience. And they want to win.

It seems obvious now that you think about it. Why hasn’t anyone done this before? And more importantly, when will the major US carriers follow suit?

Service and Freedom. Now that’s old school thinking, but still extremely relevant today.

You can’t turn on the television, listen to the radio or even log-on to your favorite Internet news feed these days without hearing politicians speaking about our country’s need for change. Today’s various political camps have all latched onto a platform for change as the underpinning of their respective bid for the presidency.

That got me thinking about the parallels between running an intense political campaign and managing a fast-growing business. Personally, I find change appealing, especially in a nascent business like ours: If we don’t define the market and strategy for our customers, somebody else will. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do we.

Change is disruptive. The term disruptive, in this case, is good. Great companies are built on the backs of things like first-mover advantage (Microsoft, eBay, Starbucks), being disruptive to a certain category and moving quickly to fulfill the new found demand. A quickly growing company requires change to stay healthy and understand customer requirements.

Smart politicians know that simply promising change isn’t enough. The same goes for company leaders. Plans and actions are required to instill the culture of change and adaptability within your organization.

• Kill complacency in your organization.
  A good way to keep your best and brightest employees focused on moving your business forward is to modify organizational alignment, even if only for a set period of time. Just because the organizational chart from your college textbook states that it should be one way, feel free to experiment.

• Change things up.
  One thing that I like to do is to have smart team members take on additional responsibilities outside of their area of expertise for a set period of time (typically 90 – 120 days). This is a great grooming mechanism, with low down-side potential and huge up-side potential. Getting a new set of eyes on a functional area gives you two advantages: it offers the new manager additional experience in an area that’s important to your business, and it allows you to make something better than it was before.

• Get involved, Mr. CEO!
  You are ultimately responsible for making sure things work smoothly and efficiently so your team can grow the business. Change your areas of focus frequently. When you’re not meeting with prospects, customers, partners, sales reps or your engineering team, be sure to drill down into your functional areas and understand the issues, risks and plans. Ask tough questions. This is a good way to drive change.

Have you considered the consequences of an unhappy or unsuccessful customer? Think about it—just one unhappy customer can put a tremendous amount of strain on all parts of your organization—starting with your Customer Support team all the way to the CEO.

A number of our customers initially come to us because of a compelling event—ultimately, customer satisfaction is at stake. Not only are unhappy customers not fun to deal with, they also put an extraordinary drain on your team, including hidden costs (especially “Opportunity Costs”—wouldn’t you rather have your team focused on completing that new project instead of stopping production, taking a step backwards and trying to fix a problem that should have been caught somewhere well before this point?).

I recently spoke to a StrongMail prospect at a major brand who described a scenario that underscores this point. A customer orders something from your company’s web site, but doesn't receive the confirmation e-mail or the download link. At this point, the customer has invested considerable time searching your site, evaluating the right product, looking at alternatives, made a decision, chose your product, completed the pain-staking checkout process and hit the "Order Now" button. Now, she waits for the confirmation email that contains the download link for her software purchase. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. No confirmation email. Time to call a real person. This is not good for customer satisfaction.

Imagine the impact of this one customer (not to mention if things go really badly, a dozen or more unhappy customers):

• Confirmation email not received, but the customer entered credit card information to purchase product and wants to know the status of their purchase.

• The unhappy customer calls into your Call Center, which we all know is expensive. Service calls take time, resources and de-focus employees who could be moving your business forward, but must now stop what they’re doing (delaying the forward movement of your business), double-back to make sure that they address this customer’s concern.

• This requires time to chase down historical events (to make sense of what went wrong). Back-tracking stalls development of new products or even efforts to improve customer satisfaction.

• At some point, the issue is resolved, typically manually, and the customer is left with a bad taste from the overall experience, which may not bode well for your company in the future.

Do you realize how many millions of hours are wasted each year on correcting something that could have been designed into either the product or the deployment process?

One thing to strongly consider is putting the energy upfront to avoid this scenario at all costs. Understanding the underlying infrastructure of your business is key to building efficiency. Understanding your customer and customer threats upfront are key to building a long-term, viable and successful business. Build it into both the product and the culture of your company.

Athletes. Every start-up CEO in Silicon Valley wants to hire athletes. You know—the competitive, smart, team-playing professional that can lead, get the job done, and move the business forward. But with companies like Google, VMware and Yahoo hiring everyone under the sun, how does a small company attract the best talent possible in Silicon Valley?

I was asked by a reporter recently, “How do you attract quality employees and what do you do to motivate them?” First off, I speak to a lot of people. I’m always chasing down leads on talent. It’s hard and takes a lot of time. In fact, I just returned from a conference, where I spoke to a number of people - and I know that we will hire at least one person, and possibly two, because of the opportunity I had to share the StrongMail story. Not a bad investment at all.

The best way to attract quality employees is to:

• Talk to a lot of people for leads and networking, even your competitors. \
• Outline your company’s vision and why you will be a winner.
• Outline their potential role within that vision. \
• Outline what you, as the leader of the company, are doing to get the company there.

We have a unique culture here at StrongMail. Talk to anyone on my team and you’ll quickly find out that things change regularly. One reason that we’ve been so successful at hiring great talent here is because of our culture of allowing people to change things up. We like to get a fresh pair of eyes on old problems - and new challenges. In a start-up environment, it’s important to have your athletes stretch their comfort zones.

Think of it like this, if someone is usually a quarterback, either one of my executives or I would propose that this person play free safety for the next two quarters. This way, the person will get exposed to a new set of challenges (which incidentally, can solve many problems with a new pair of eyes), round out that person’s experience, and continue to be challenged. I’ve found this to be not only invigorating for the team as a whole, but very motivating for the athlete.

I feel very fortunate with the quality of my team here at StrongMail. On my management team alone, we have a handful of execs who could easily be CEO’s of their own start-up companies.

More later.